How to Overcome Insurmountable Obstacles
By Dr. Annette Colby, RDAnnette@AnnetteColby.com or www.AnnetteColby.com
Years ago, I realized that our personal challenges offer a special opportunity to understand ourselves, our capabilities, and the meaning of life. Personal challenges are a way of working things out for ourselves, and discovering new solutions within our creative selves for old problems.
We often view personal challenges as shameful, a curse, or an inner enemy that needs to be conquered. It’s tempting to consider frustrating challenges such as emotional or compulsive eating, weight issues, panic and anxiety, obsessive thoughts, and depression as beyond our control.
However, personal challenge offers a unique opportunity to grow, learn, and love. Your challenges ask more of you than you have ever experienced. They take you into new territory and greater possibilities. They ask you to dig deep and discover confidence, self-esteem, and unexplored reservoirs of self-love.
Facing a Dead-EndIf you have an unachievable challenge or a goal, chances are you will find yourself facing a wall. You will feel worn out and discouraged. It’s been a long and difficult journey and now you find yourself staring at a dead-end. All the doubts and negative beliefs you hold about your ability to achieve success rise up from within and swarm into your conscious awareness.
Feelings of hopelessness, ineptitude, unworthiness, or even shame swarm through your mind and body. You want to turn and run away from this wall and your terrible feelings as fast as you can. However, this dead-end is exactly the place you need to be right now, and facing your feelings is the way out.
Limiting Beliefs
That wall represents your limiting beliefs. It’s not there because the universe is teaching you one big lesson. It’s not there because you’re a bad person, because you’re being punished, or because you are not worthy or capable. Instead, that wall is there because it symbolizes the things you believe about yourself that place limitations on your abilities. Limiting beliefs are ideas that hold you back and keep you from becoming the person you want to be. Most times limiting beliefs are not true, but because you believe them to be true they act like brakes on your progress. Limiting beliefs are ideas that some there is some character trait about you that is inescapable or unchangeable.
If you feel that some area of your life isn’t the way you want it be, yet you feel hopeless, helpless, or worthless to change it, then you probably have limiting beliefs.
Here are a few examples of limiting beliefs:
I can’t.
I am bad.
I won’t succeed, so there’s no point in trying.
I lack the ability to achieve my goal.
I can’t have what I want.
I’m not good enough.
I don’t deserve anything.
I’m afraid of success.
I Can’t Have What I Want
If you are facing a wall, congratulations are in order! We are generally not consciously aware of our limiting beliefs. But because of your personal challenge you took risks and tried new actions that allowed you to consciously wander through your inner landscape to discover what you are currently capable of achieving. Your goal actually did what it was supposed to do. It brought you face-to-face with your limiting beliefs, emotional resistance, and all the reasons why you believe you can’t have what you most want. Your goal showed you the difference between the current reality that you live in and the reality that you want to live in.
Feelings Tell the Truth
You may not recognize your exact limiting belief, but when you are facing an obstacle you almost always can feel the energy that goes with your belief. Sometimes a limiting belief will make you feel anxious or angry. Other times you may feel overwhelmed, irritated, lethargic, or even depressed. If you’re feeling hopeless, helpless, or like you are about to collapse in front of your goal, chances are you are in direct contact with a limiting belief. What’s the solution? Say hello, don’t run, and be willing to admit consciously what you believe to be true about you or your ability to navigate through this situation.
A New Potential Reality
There is the potential of a happier, brighter, more expansive reality on the other side of your wall. Yet, there’s a catch. That reality doesn’t exist yet. It has to be imagined, created, and allowed first – by you. To get to the other side of the wall requires envisioning yourself living the type of life you want to be living, and gaining new beliefs that will support you living that life. That’s the purpose of your challenge. You’re not fighting against what you don’t want, you are in the process of choosing the life you want to live, and then building the self-supportive beliefs necessary to allow you to live that life. If you are facing a wall, back up and examine your challenge. Why you want what you want, and what strengths you will gain by creating that success in your life?
How To Overcome Limiting Beliefs
Many of our limiting beliefs are stubborn, deeply entrenched, and feel unbearable. Yet to get beyond the wall requires facing your current beliefs about life, others, and yourself, and seeing where those beliefs limit and hold you back. Instead of turning back in defeat or pushing relentlessly against an unmovable wall, decide to get acquainted with your beliefs.
Becoming aware of limiting beliefs is typically challenging, since beliefs tend to remain hidden in our subconscious. But if you are attempting to overcome a personal challenge, then you are in luck! With every new action you take, your fears and limiting beliefs are bound to rise up out of hiding. When they do, you can calmly ask yourself these questions:
What exactly are you telling yourself when the situation seems unachievable?
What do you feel to be true about yourself when you are facing a dead-end?
Why is your goal unattainable?
What skills do you lack to attain it?
Why don’t you deserve to achieve your goal?
How does this belief keep you safe?
What benefit do you get from holding this belief?
Although overcoming a personal challenge is frightening and uncomfortable, instead of treating it like an enemy, embrace it like a friend. It’s a golden opportunity to uncover deep, self-limiting beliefs and replace them with new self-empowering beliefs. To overcome your self-limiting beliefs, examine the beliefs you hold. Question their validity. Journal about them. Take a conscious look at them, and decide if those beliefs are really the ones you want to hold in your future. And then take action to replace them with better ones.
(c) 2009 Dr. Annette Colby, RD
About The AuthorDr. Annette Colby, RD can help you take the pain out of life, turn difficult emotions into joy, release stress, end emotional eating, and move beyond depression into an extraordinary life! Annette is the author of Your Highest Potential and has the unique ability to show you how to spark an amazing relationship with your life! Visit www.AnnetteColby.comto access hundreds of content filled articles and sign up for a Fr’ee subscription to Loving Mriacles newsletter.
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