Are your past experiences creating self limiting beliefs that affect your present?
If they are then it could be holding you back from connecting with your higher self, otherwise known as your true self or your highest potential.

What happens when you connect to your higher-self? You’ll find that everything flows, the sky becomes the limit and you’ve got a brand new pair of rocket shoes! This connection will allow you to live in a beautiful state of mind.

When you align with your higher self and remove these self limiting beliefs, you’ll find there’s an unstoppable flow of energy and positive emotions – joy, excitement, gratefulness will come easily to you and your capacity to both give and receive kindness will be limitless!

OK! I’m sold. So, how do I do it?

There are several ways to connect to your higher self, but here I’d like to talk to you about 1 in particular and that is breaking your own self limiting belief systems. Don’t worry, it sounds tricker than it actually is, and I’ll help you!

Remember, as Tony Robbins says: ‘your past doesn’t equal your future’. Phew, isn’t that a relief? 🙂

Here’s an example from my own experience of breaking an old belief system, and I’ve created an action sheet for you to work with, to allow you to do the same!

If I can remove a self limiting belief, so can you

I’ll let you into a little secret, I can’t swim (well, not properly anyway). But you know what? I love to dive! I know, kinda strange right? It hasn’t always been this way. Diving as a none swimmer was utterly out of my reach for a long time. From Childhood I was terrified of deep water and because of this self limiting belief, I never learned to swim. When I became an adult I found that because I couldn’t swim I missed out on a lot of fun activities such as snorkeling.

I needed to find a way around this problem, so instead of missing out entirely, I snorkelled with a life jacket. There are times that I still use one even today, if the water isn’t calm.

But to be honest, even with that life jacket I was very afraid to snorkel in waters from 15 meters deep, or whenever there were strong currents.

So how does a person afraid of deep waters and without the ability to swim enjoy diving?

Sounds like entirely the wrong hobby for a person like me, I know! But there are 2 things that made this possible.

Meditation and masters of self improvement

Just like we talked about, my first step was working on my belief systems using the seminars of Tony Robbins (such as UPW London) and from working with the philosophies from Marie Forleo’s book ‘Everything Is Figureoutable’.

A lot of my motivation came from going to diving sessions with my wife, Ania. We’d go off in the boat together, she’d be excited about the experience she was about to have, and me? I’d be left sitting on the boat, holding the sandwiches and feeling stupid.

Missing out sucks, doesn’t it?

This was happening too often, I had to figure a way out. During these moments, all dry up on the boat, I’d give so much thought to Marie Forleo’s book. If everything is ‘figureoutable’, then how can I join in?

Something clicked. As Tony Robbins says ‘if you want to master a skill, you must do total immersion’ or… in my case? Total submersion! So with this in my mind, I used every single day during my one month trip in the Philippines to snorkel.

The waters there are so beautiful and calm, I found no problem doing this for hours every single day – even longer than every body else.

Why? I needed to break my fear of water, and especially deep water.

Your comfort zone can hold you back!

Next step? No life jacket! I really had to come out of my comfort zone, but I was determined. Off it went!
This was a huge step forward. Now.. how to float and not drown?

I’ve been practising meditation over the last 20 years but for the last 3 years, I’ve been trying different techniques. I found that because of this I could focus on my breath during my practise sessions and keep floating.

Thanks to meditation I’ve been able to overcome many difficulties in life and this was one of them!
During my total immersion in snorkelling I’d built a huge confidence in myself to try and dive.

Fear = Excitement

Yep, the non-swimmer was going diving!

On the day I was fearful – in the Philippines you don’t practise in a pool first, you go straight to the ocean.
The idea of being able to touch the seabed was scary, and without a life jacket! But ‘everything is figureoutable’ after all!
Marie’s book tells you to replace the sensation of fear with excitement, so aware of my fear, I did my best to follow her advice.

I kept reminding myself ‘ all I need to do is focus on my breath and I have mastered it!’ I repeated ‘yes I can dive’, ‘yes I can dive’, ‘yes I can dive’.

So in I went, and in the first attempt I had a little leak in my goggles, I panicked and came up. This little set back could have stopped me, but I didn’t let it. And reminding myself – fear = excitement!

The next time I tried I was able to just focus on my breath. It was getting better! So maybe the dive master held me steady in the water from time to time, but that didn’t matter, I was doing it!

Finding freedom from fear

On my next dive we were practising buoyancy, I had to control my depth in the water on the sea bed using just my breath.

Thank you meditation! I couldn’t believe how much control I had on my own breath. Now I really was excited! Having total control over my breath meant I had total control over my depth in the water! This made me so happy.

And my reward? I looked around and… I’d found Nemo! (and all of his friends, too). There, in the turquoise light of the ocean there were pops of bright orange and white clownfish, the glint of long, silver barracudas and huge sea turtles gliding peacfully by in the near distance. There was a whole underwater garden just blooming with coral and a full rainbow of different fish enjoying their day in the tall sea grass.

I was here, in this magical world that merely my own limiting belief systems had stopped me from accessing, all this time I’d been holding myself back. I’d broken this self limiting belief. I was diving!

In that moment I really did feel connected with my higher self.

That’s how I made it possible, I learned how to dive without knowing how to swim. That fact still blows me away…

Through this process I connected in some way to my higher self, as you can guess even carrying on a few months later there was a huge flow of positive emotions.

Now can you feel that you can absolutely break your old beliefs that hold you back?

Trust me – if a person like me with a huge fear of deep water can do this, you can do it for sure!

 Today’s Challenge for you

Do you want to stop holding yourself back, too? Are you tired of being left ‘holding the sandwiches’ in your own life? Well, I’ve created an action sheet for you! You can download here. Use this action sheet to find your personal self limiting beliefs – once you’ve found them, you’ll be more empowered to let them go from your life.

Just give yourself 7 -8 minutes to write these down on the action sheet, once you start writing them down it starts the process! By writing them down, you acknowledge them and you start accepting them. Do this so that when you start working on them it’ll be much easier to break them.

I’m excited for you! Do you have friends or colleagues who you think could benefit from this challenge, too? I invite you to share this with them, perhaps you can see what you can achieve together!

Until next time my friend 🙂

 PS.   Want to take this one step further? Join my inner circle LinkedIn & FaceBook Group! Here I would send you a meditation session to support this challenge, it uses ancient Buddhist and Vedic techniques alongside modern NLP to really break those self limitating beliefs, making you more empowered in the process!

Shubho Dutta: Founder of BoostCamp.Live, a travel concept focusing on changing people’s mindset.