foreign it's about being able to integrate new knowledge and if you can't integrate new knowledge because you think you have the whole story then you're limited period welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease I'm Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson [Music] ah good afternoon Joe how are you I'm doing pretty good man I've It's been a it's been a a week of strange correspondence from the from The Ether you know my work used to be so much so that I knew every person in it and now I I like I don't know people in it and um and so I've been getting all these correspondence recently and it's been it's been it's been cool to feel the difference between being personally involved in somebody's life and their transformation and not being personally involved so that's been cool yeah fascinating tell me what's an example of that uh that's most alive for you right now what happened recently was that somebody was on the forum for the connection course and they had had a session with me and like I I didn't have a strong memory of them because it was like a six minute session or something like that and and apparently I said something that really that really like challenged them they got they got them quite upset for a bit and um and later there was this huge Epiphany that came with it and but what I said to them apparently and you know the way that I can be a dick sometimes is that I I basically said I don't buy your story just like I dismissed what what for them was like a defining feature of them apparently and and I was just like I just don't buy it I don't buy that that story or in my world it would have been limiting belief like I had just didn't buy The Limited belief and it really I think pissed her off it it's hard to describe but I I wasn't there for her experience of it but I think she was definitely challenged by it I think definitely angry um and then it led to like this huge unfolding for her as challenging any limiting belief does yeah yeah it seems like that's really one of the common things that I see when you're when you're doing sessions with people it's it's challenging those beliefs and often I see people coming to you with sort of uh how how do I approach this challenge in my life but within my belief system adding them aside and people are like no no no no no yeah that'd be a cool topic let's try to discuss it let's let's discuss uh limiting beliefs how does that sound to you yeah let's let's do this so let's start by defining it what what are limiting beliefs uh simply put it's an idea that limits Your Capacity to be yourself or or limits Your Capacity to get what you want it limits Your Capacity to be effective to change your habits to be happy it also like it not only just affects the way that you like what you want or your ability to get what you want but it also affects the way that like how big your wants are or if you want things that are good for you limiting beliefs affect I think everything that we do beliefs affect everything that we do in limiting beliefs absolutely do and they and by definition they limit us so an example of this would be like let's say you wanted to lose weight you might have a limiting belief that says um it's hard to lose weight or I can't lose weight I've tried before those are two limiting beliefs that one might have and if you were to bet like if you were to bet on two people who are going to lose weight and one of them was like yes I can do it and the other one was like no I don't think I can I've tried before it doesn't work like who would you bet on just on if that's the only data you had so so that's what limiting beliefs are so it seems like there are many different kinds of them and a lot of them people are aware of and a lot of them people are maybe less aware of individually or even less aware of as a society uh or like large groups of us are bought into them which makes them a little bit harder to see this this water that we're swimming in so what are what are some of the different kinds of limiting beliefs that you've come across yeah so that's interesting you could categorize in the way that you do like there's the personal limiting beliefs in the societal limiting beliefs that most people fall into I haven't thought about it that way when I think about limiting beliefs I think about it as um the ones that like all of those all of those are in the same category but then I Define them by the way that the Mind plays a trick on you and so the first way the Mind plays a trick on you is that you just believe a false thought and the second way is that your mind misinterprets an experience so it's not particularly false as in like the way you can prove something to be false it's a the story that you hold about an experience uh the third one is thinking that you know the whole story thinking that you have the complete truth and and those are the three ways that I see the mind really there's there's other ways but those are the three main categories I think about when I think about limiting beliefs okay let's start with that first one tell me tell me more about the false thoughts yeah let's see uh a good story on this one is is a story about my dad my dad was when he was and about my age maybe a little younger he was the CEO of a company and he um and he got fired about two years into it and he thought that he had failed and he thought that he had like irreconciliably failed like it was just uh and his system and he started to Define himself as a failure he hated the feeling of it he avoided it he started to drink more to avoid it his his his life literally started like grinding to a halt because he was this person who failed and then he was avoiding that sense of failure and he was the guy who failed at the company and failed to provide for his wife and kids and and so you know I just watched my dad when I was you know in my you know 18 to 20 stuff is just his life just grind to a halt and then some years later I'm hanging out in um I'm a venture capitalist at the time and I'm hanging out at one of those conferences where you can you know meet companies and there's this company there with a really similar name to my father's company's name his the company I think was like Lumen Optics and it was Loom energy or something like that I can't remember in I went and talked to them I'm like hey man like what my dad had a you know was the CEO of a company and they're like that's our company I was like what and they were like yeah your dad had um you know was the CEO and he was really successful over a two-year period of time he had cut the burn rate to almost nothing from like hundreds of thousands of dollars a month he had gotten us more customers he had uh refined the product line so that there was a focus of the company and he was so successful in fact that the company that owned us shuddered us because we challenged their their product their main product their main Revenue Source this parent company was challenged by our products so they shut us down and and we sued him and because of what your father had done we sued them so successfully uh that we won you know whatever some hundreds of millions of dollars or 100 million dollars something like that and we rebooted the company we had the right for the tech and we've rebooted the company wow so I went back to my dad and I was like Dad you know you didn't fail you know as a venture capitalist I can say that the results you you gave were good I wouldn't have fired you and and and this is the story and and to watch him consider the fact that everything he was was based on a lie was based on a limiting belief was based on a concept that was inherently not true and like that that recognition and what it meant for whatever 15 to 20 years of his existence um that's what I mean by a false thought so there's a lot to unpack there that's a fascinating story right yeah so so in this case you find out years later that he didn't actually fail in the ways that he thought that he did he didn't fail the company but there is still a way that he lost his job and was not feeling unable to provide for his family he didn't even share in the the benefit that the company then later had from there from their lawsuit so like what if you know in some way he really did fail from some perspective yeah in this case it's sort of mixed it's like he didn't fail at the things he thought he failed at uh but what if he did what if that it had had been what happened is that he drove the company into the ground yeah you're right so let's say he did fail he did drive the company to the ground so one person would believe that's a failure and one person would believe that's a learning experience one person would believe oh now I'm more equipped to do it one person would be a would believe I'm I'm not equipped to do it right one believes that there is such a thing as a failure and one believes that there's only learning experiences that you have so that's another way that the brain teaches like gives us false thoughts is that we buy into a thought process and and we don't see the falseness of the thought process or the other perspective of the thought process so so even if if you say oh it's like so clear that he failed you have to agree on the definition of failure and then you have to think that that's you it's not circumstantial so all of those are potential limiting beliefs right does that make sense what yeah yeah okay so you you had mentioned you know in this list of three things there's the false thoughts and there's the misinterpretation of events how it how would misinterpreting the events be distinct from false thoughts in this case or another it's more misinterpreting the experience it's not the events it's the experience so let me give you a story about this one I'm with my cousin and some friends and we're at some Boardwalk I don't know it's like 30s or something and they had this ride and it's the ride was so big and so scary that it was like at the time a lot of money like fifty dollars to get in and do this ride and it was uh think of a ferris wheel but only one arm and only four seats two at the top two at the bottom and the seat spun around and they went at high speed so it didn't only like go in a big gigantic Circle the little thing you sat in went in many circles right scary as hell and my cousin's like come on do it I was like all right yeah let's let's try this thing out so I get into the thing and we go around and I'm just like frozen my body is shaking I'm like oh like all tension all tension and I heard somebody on the other the one on the bottom which occasionally went to the top to the bottom but the other car of two people laughing and I started laughing and all of a sudden it was exhilarating it was it was like the most fun experience I I had had um as far as like that kind of adrenaline experience and when I got off I was telling one of my friends about it I was like hey you know I was having this experience and the experience didn't change but I went from complete hatred resistance to this experience to Absolute like enlivenment exuberance to to Joy of this experience and he said to me yeah it's it's really fascinating in your body when you're resisting it you're releasing chemicals that are carcinogenic that create cancer in your body and when you're exhilarated your body is creating chemicals that are anti-carcinogenic and you're having a less toxic neurochemical reactions and that really hit me right the only difference between it was this is fun or this is terrifying same experience same person having the same experience and one was an interpretation of the experience that was Terror and one was an interpretation of the experience which was this is exhilarating yeah it sounds like another way to to slice those interpretations is that one was an interpretation that this is an experience to be resisted and the other was interpretation that this is an experience to be welcomed yeah it's interesting because it's it can be it can be both it so for instance you can have it be this is a good experience instead of this is a bad experience some version of that this can be resistant but it can also be the opposite a limiting belief can also be I'll be happy when blank right it's the setup of future happiness instead of the recognition that the happiness is available to you right now that you don't have to be different you don't have to grow you don't have to transform you can do all those things in fact you will but you get to be you get to love yourself and be happy right now as you are okay so let's apply this to some other to some other beliefs some other interpretations that people have yeah so exercise is difficult I won't be consistent in my exercise money comes from hard work I'll be happy once I learn to speak up and tell my truth all of those are this idea that I will have a certain experience when X Y and Z happens or if X Y and Z is happening and all of those can be very limiting to your Your Capacity to get things done to your happiness to your joy no one wants my anger yeah no one wants my anger yeah that's right that's right yeah so that's the distinction and I make that distinction there's obviously similarities between a false thought and this the distinction is that one is an interpretation of experience and one is just you know it's more logical and the misinterpretation of experience is more of an emotional live at you tell yourself got it that makes sense the one's more of a head lie one's more of an emotional lie and that's why I make the distinction okay all right so then getting on to that third one thinking you know the whole story you know I remember the story that stuck this in my system so I'm just going to use it there was a Kobe there's a yeah he was um I got I think he was Mormon self-help guy um back in the 80s he had like a Franklin planner all all sorts of things anyways um this is the story he told his story he was stories on the subway there's a guy there's a dad he's got three kids and the three kids are acting out and Kobe is getting agitated and pissed like man control your kids right you're like you're bothering everybody and like you're a bad parent all these ideas and at some point the dad looks over and says I'm so sorry they lost their mom just the other day and Kobe describes this as like instantaneous shift in his attitude as one might imagine I would obviously feel like oh all of a sudden there's deeper understanding all of a sudden there's more compassion same series of events totally different understanding because he went from thinking he knew what was up to realizing that he did not have the whole story and it's like the the difference is kind of what I know what I know I don't know what I don't know I don't know and that's what it is like this one it's very much about just thinking that you you understand it when you don't seems like there would always be some other angle on on any story that we have or any any level of understanding that we think we have about any situation that's right that's absolutely that you got it that's exactly what so so for instance let's say you're trying to understand the Chrysler Building and this is neurologically you know neurologically if you look at some of the neural research they ask about like how do we know what reality is and there's all these all these ways of seeing the fact that we don't know what reality is just as an example um if we listen to tones and we hear one tone we can identify that's a c another tone that's a g and together they we can we can feel the two different tones and they make a chord or a three make a quarter what not but we can have distinguished we can distinguish them and if we're looking at color we can see two different colors but we blend them together there's a third we can't get the distinction between the two colors that made the Third so it just tells you that our sense organs can't see reality the same way even from sound to to color so similarly if you're looking at the Chrysler Building and and you're an architect you see it one way and if you are an atomic scientist you see it another way and if you are taking a picture of it from one angle you see it one way and another angle you see it another way and all all that's happening in society is that we keep on seeing things from new angles different understandings and it's the integration of those understandings that create more solutions better Solutions better um iterations sometimes worse iterations but it it's that putting those that information together that gives us a more coherent thought process so you could say I've made my iPhone 1.0 I'm done it was good or you could say yeah and now I'm gonna make an iPhone 2.0 and a 3.0 and then you can say which one of those is Right which one of those was good which one of those right so as we see New Perspectives we can iterate and we can create new things and the old things always have some limits and and if we believe that the old things are the way to go and we're not integrating the New Perspectives then we are limited in our belief systems it seems like maybe a a risk that can happen here is that we can fall into the habit of seeing seeing some gratuitous other perspective that also then like flies in the face of our own experience like I could say I could walk down the street and somebody could be you know being an and I can tell myself oh you know they must have had a really hard day so I'm just gonna give them a pass and then we just walk through life giving everybody sort of a free pass on you know not and we lose our boundaries because we are in just you know it seems like this is a similar limiting belief of rather than having the belief of that dude's a dick to oh this person must just be coming from a lot of trauma and there's a reason for it and uh that could also like as true as that is can also be limiting if it doesn't integrate other perspectives including our own needs correct that absolutely that's right so the limiting belief is stopping yourself because you think you know the truth is there's always something you don't understand there's always a justification to be gentle about it or to be mean about it there's all those things are always there the difference is are you in an awareness of that are you making Choice around that there's more freedom to that there's less limit to that than if you are unaware of it and you think you're right and you think that the other people are wrong then you're limited then you cannot see Solutions Your solution sets are limited and more importantly great Solutions come because I have one perspective you have another perspective and we find a solution that meets both of our perspectives without you know limiting them so and how you see this happen all the time in business one person's like oh it's got to be technology forward company and the other is like no we have to be marketing forward company and one thinks they're right one thinks the the other one thinks they're right and there's just a lockhorn situation instead of oh there's something I don't understand what is it that I don't understand oh okay I don't understand that marketing needs x y and z Oh I don't understand that the tech side of the company needs a b and c oh how do we have a solution that gets them both and then you get a better solution than a tech forward company or a marketing for a company what I'm hearing here is that to to integrate multiple perspectives which gives you a better more nuanced perspective with which to make better decisions in order to do that each of the perspectives has to give a little and recognize where where it's wrong where it's incomplete where the narrative glossed over some detail and that requires you know both sides or if from what you can control in yourself you're recognizing that your story is not the whole story and being open and ready for information that feels like it conflicts with that story yeah without dodging Your Truth meaning if it still doesn't feel right for you you don't go okay yes because there's another side right you still you still have to be in Integrity with yourself and and you see me do this like you you've been in rooms with me where someone's like you're full of and I'll be like yeah yes yeah I'm I can't say that what I'm saying is the absolute truth I'm not I'm not going to say that that's that's true I'm gonna say that this is a helpful perspective and it might not be helpful to you you know it might be only helpful at a certain time in a certain place for certain people and if the perspective gives you Freedom fantastic and if it doesn't fantastic yeah otherwise I'd be like oh no this is the right way and I would be right it is the right way for certain people at a certain time and you know what I mean so it's about being able to integrate new knowledge and if you can't integrate new knowledge because you think you have the whole story then you're limited period okay so to summarize what we just went through there's these three General categories of limiting beliefs one of them you described as having false thoughts and that's that's sort of the cognitive one and there's misinterpretation of an experience which can be a lot more somatic uh just misinterpreting what your what your body's telling you about about an experience that you're in and then the other one thinking that you know the whole story which basically stops new information from coming in stops you from receiving uh sort of feeding those first two categories so now that we have this sort of a framework here how does someone go about transforming their perspective to be less limiting yeah yeah how do you how do you how do you uh how do you uh solve the quantum mechanical you know how do you solve for the boson Hicks particle uh it's it's I'm not going to be able to say all of that information in a podcast and nor could a podcast you know fully Encompass that because it's it's a little bit like listening to a podcast to learn how to paint or to learn how to look at paintings if you don't have that painting to look at and to understand because doing this is not just an intellectual exercise it's there's a body an emotional uh component to it and it's also so it's better done in pairs it's better done um through experimentation and exercises with all that said happy to go into the basics of it so the basics are there's two things you have to be able to see through the limiting perspective and you have to be able to find the limiting perspective in reverse order so you have to be able to say oh that's a limiting perspective and then you have to have the tools to be able to see through it and at some point along the journey you kind of every perspective you can see through and that's that there's a tremendous amount of freedom in that sometimes a little confusion for a while too but when it settles and integrates there's a huge amount of freedom in this and so the first step is pretty easy uh if you can put your attention in the right place so um the first is a felt sense if you feel constricted if you feel the places where you're uncomfortable in life where there's tension that isn't good tension uh that's where the limiting beliefs LIE there's like binary thought is where the limiting beliefs lie if you want to like look at intellectual an intellectual way to identify it binary thoughts which indicates fear which indicates that your thinking is limited but mostly physical constriction tension uh stress those are all really really good signals places where you're triggered all really really good signals that you're in a limiting belief pattern then there's another way to do it too which is just in general if you are feeling trapped that's where you have a false belief and and the places where um life it feels like a chore and that a future life feels like uh the key to your happiness that's the misinterpreting of experiences generally or like like waiting for the World to Change and be in alignment with what you think you want or what you think you need to be happy or what you think the world should be yeah exactly um and then places where you stagnate not stuck but just like oh like you just kind of are in something is usually where you don't have the whole story you know so you see people be like it's really typical for example well that's not the way that we used to do it you know that's not that it's been done a different way for years I don't see any reason to change it that is often like a stagnation and it also shows like someone doesn't have the whole story so it this goes deeper there's more Nuance to finding it but generally that's enough to be able to uncover probably a hundred so start there easily a hundred lemony beliefs Okay so so let's say we start by we start by exploring where we feel where we feel tension that doesn't feel like good tension as you said uh where we feel stagnation uh when we start to find what these limiting beliefs might be we start to develop the practice of seeing through them maybe we've got partner work maybe we've got some exercises uh how do you how do you get rid of it is it how do you free yourself of the pattern because a lot of times you can see that there's a pattern uh you know like for much of my life I've believed that I have attention deficit disorder right and it doesn't mean that I'm actually any different now that I see through many ways that that story has limited me uh I also still have certain personality traits that people could still point to and be like add right there I see you and yet you know how do you how do you see through and then behave differently and show up outside of that belief system so there's a couple of things oftentimes so someone identifies this is the area where I have a limiting belief system the next thing is um figuring out what belief system is the one that's actually creating the tension and that that can be a little trickier um so it's usually the one that they absolutely believe so if you want to trick to that like in a situation that's creating tension go to the things that you absolutely believe to be true those are probably your culprits um they're they're the water that you swim in so look for the context that you're not questioning so that's one thing as far as getting rid of the behavior entirely it's it doesn't work like that it's not like oh I have an eliminating belief system that exercises hard and so once I think that exercise is easy I'm gonna want to exercise it might be that you just want to exercise more or it might be that you find a way to exercise it takes so little time that it doesn't bother you to do it like you don't know how the behavior is going to change so all you know is that oh I feel more free oh I'm more in alignment with who I want to be or who I actually am and and the second more than the first it's like I'm more in line with my authenticity and so it's not so much about it's this isn't like a behavior control methodology this is a realization methodology so once you get it if you get it in your whole body not just your brain if you get it and if you grock the whole thing then things are going to change but you don't get to decide what changes all you get to decide all you get to really control is the outcome which is more freedom and more happiness more joy wait I'm not used to you saying you get to control the outcome yeah all right yeah the outcome of more joy not the outcome of my company gets bought not the outcome of I become skinnier right all you get to control is if you go see through your limiting beliefs you get more freedom more joy so not the concrete outcome but the the experiential outcome will it'll start happening it's as it's as is predictable as um dropping an apple it's going to go to the ground or go lower if it at all if it can and so now I'm like dropping an apple on Earth or on a planet with gravity where everything's going there's more to the storage there's more of the story exactly right uh so you don't get to control the specifics of the outcome like I said and you do get to see that this practice creates more freedom and more joy the other step that we're not really talking about is how do you get from okay that's a limited belief to not believing it and when I say not believing it the brain is the first thing to stop believing it but the body and the and the nervousness and the emotions also have to stop believing it and so that's where the tools come in handy and it's why that they're hard to describe it's better to experience them it's better to do them with somebody and there's Tools in so many of the things especially the master class where we're really looking at limiting beliefs the whole time in general categories of them and everything like that but some some of the tools are inquiry basically questioning kind of the devil's advocate of anything that's a tool that allows you to see through things um emotional fluidity is a large structure of a tool there's lots of forms of those tools but where you have the emotion move allows you to see through things on an emotional level and allowing pleasure love safety those feelings into your system is the other Suite of tools that's kind of more of the nervous system tool so those are the the broad broad categories of those tools examples of the tools would be things like argue the counter case in writing like write down everything that you think you know about it and question it or or write down everything you don't know about it is another really strong way to do it [Music] um if you are caught in a belief system where somebody else is at fault Byron Katie's work on blame is fantastic you could do that form of inquiry it's really nice it has a good emotional component those are some examples of ways to do it that like I said the emotional components the nervous system components um shifting that is is something that you really just have to practice you have to and and you have to do it in experimental form yeah not not through reading a book or or listening to a podcast yeah that piece that you mentioned on if you find yourself blaming others I think that that can become sort of a meta trap here as well where you you come to understand these this this framework on limiting beliefs and you see this in kind of what people describe as woke culture a lot where somebody will see somebody having some unwanted consequence in their life and be like ah look they just have a bunch of limiting beliefs and then there's this kind of this way to be above them or better than them or to try to fix them or basically you know in some sense sometimes just gaslighting people into believing that they are at like fault for everything that happens rather than they're responsible for their experience and if a person is saying that oh look they're not as good as me they are having a physical constriction most likely and that physical constriction is causing them pain which is a sign of another limiting belief the Tibetan Buddhists have a great saying around this um comparative mind they say they talk about if I think I'm better than you that's comparative mind and that's misery if I think I'm worse than you that's comparative mind that's misery if I think I'm equal to you that's comparative mind and that's misery so no matter what it is you will feel it in your body you'll feel that constriction you'll feel the the limitation of it your mind will be the last to see it um and the first to unsee it and then your body is the last to unseal it's really fascinating how that works typically yeah okay so to one a final question sort of close this out is if if somebody's listened to this episode and they've just started now developing the new limiting belief that I must be the kind of person who sees through my limiting beliefs all the time then I'll be happy then I'll be happy yeah what do you have to say for them notice how that creates tension in your system and see through that belief or don't choice is yours you get you get to do what you like that there's not like a wrong or a right in it there's just oh this is a cool Avenue if you want to do it what it's just fascinating to me how that setup happens all the time and it's I think it's the most common when you talked in the beginning you said there was kind of societal belief systems that are unquestioned and personal belief systems that are unquestioned and I think that's one of the biggest societal beliefs is is that if I do X then I'll be happy if I do X then I'll be good enough then I'll then I'll be worthy of love and that is I think one of the belief systems that are most limited and cause us the most misery I think it can also be helpful to explore what we get out of our beliefs for example working out is hard we may actually enjoy having that belief because we enjoy being the kind of person who does hard things and get something out of them and so maybe maybe also exploring what it is that we enjoy about our limiting beliefs and really just relishing and enjoying that might be part of getting out of that Chinese finger trap sometimes absolutely yes yes yes like one of the biggest questions that I'll ask people when they're in a living belief system is what do you get out of it what's the benefit to you what would be scary to let go of it yeah those are all great questions yeah beautiful awesome yeah all right thank you Joe yeah man thank you talk to you soon thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US on your podcast app we'd love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach out to us join our newsletter or check out our courses at Art of accomplishment.com thank you foreign