“I’m Never Going to Put Boundaries On Myself” said Nadiya Hussain the winner of #GBBO British Bake Off. If you followed GBBO from the first episode, you would have seen her going from having a lack of confidence in the earlier rounds, to defying her own limiting beliefs and then going on to win the finals of 2015.

What are limiting beliefs?

Have you ever caught yourself saying “I can’t…” or “that’s not something I can do because it’s not me” or “I’m scared”. These are examples of limiting beliefs which act like brakes and stop you dead in your tracks no matter how hard you want to move forward.

What happens when we have limiting beliefs?

There are a number of downsides of limiting beliefs.

  • Your comfort zones expands
  • You stop growing and developing to your full potential
  • You fuel fear by adding more to the “fire” so it becomes a catch 22 situation.
  • You play small
  • You use your comfort zone as a false sense of security
  • You shy away from reaching out for challenging goals and project
  • You end up chasing mediocrity instead of WOW greatness.

Fear not, you can overcome limiting beliefs.

How can you overcome limiting beliefs?

“I know I can do it” As the competition progressed, we saw Nadiya becoming more confident and won she starting coming first in technical challenges and generally started believing in herself more. She started being more creative and ambitious with her designs and experimented with different ingredients.

When you believe in yourself, you can achieve so much. Nadiya went from potentially playing “safe” and a bit of a wallflower blending in the background to being more visible in the way she spoke to the judges. She was beginning to be taken as a serious contender by her fellow participants as the competition progressed.

To overcome limiting beliefs, firstly you need to identify them. Once you identify them, have a think of the way they impact your life. The behaviours and outcomes can be subtle or be very noticeable. Each one of us reacts very different, but awareness is very important. The more aware you are, the greater the ability to change your behaviour.

Once you’ve figured out how these behaviours impacts you, you will look out for them in the future and you can start replacing them with empowering words or behaviours. Going from “I can’t… to I can…” is a great starting point. You will notice you can sometimes slip back into old behaviours really quickly. Why? This is because of conditioning, which has been repeated so many times, that it more or less feels automatic or on autopilot.

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