Just Getting By Bye: How to Kill Limiting Beliefs and Be Brilliant

Just Getting By

There’s nothing that gives me the heebie-frikken-jeebies more than the thought of ‘just getting by’.

‘Just getting by’ – A numb way of life in which just enough is done to maintain a fragile reality of perceived limitation and ‘get by’, in which a person tells their dreams to stop dreaming and convinces themselves that they are fine with settling for boring mediocrity whilst secretly wishing that their life was more magic but too afraid to become a magician, accompanied by a belief that life is limited and that they cannot be rich or smart or free or happy or brilliant, and characterised by a greasy sheen of dullness in the eyes and a slight dragging of the feet.

It’s a way of life that many people have convinced themselves is perfectly acceptable.

And it is. ‘Just getting by’ is completely fine.

There’s nothing wrong with living a life that doesn’t read like the synopsis of a James Bond flick, lacking the perfume and purr of Aston Martinis and curvy creatures of love, no cartoon fireworks lighting up another adventure-soaked day in the life of a dream hero.

It’s fine. It’s fine to live a boring ‘normal’ life and go to dull work every day and ‘just get by’ as long as you choose that life because it’s what you want and not just because deep down you don’t think you can do any better and are hiding from your dreams for fear that you can’t wrangle them.

But if even the slightest part of you feels a tingly urge to live more and unleash!,
if you sense an urge to tickle life and make it scream in sweat-soaked ecstasy,
if you want to make your life better and more interesting and richer and more yum,
well then, pilgrim, buckle down and listen up…

Sneaky Little Bastards

Limiting beliefs are sneaky little bastards.

They lick their oily fur flat and tuck in their tails so that they can squeeze into shiny neon pixie costumes, sparkly glitter makeup and fairydust perfume hiding their noxious nature, and they fly and flitter their sneakily disguised asses around your shoulder like the fairies in Peter Pan, appearing very tame and well-intentioned and fairy-godmother-like, whispering sugarfrosted lies in your hoodwinked ear about how you can’t be brilliant and how the world is out to get you and there’s nothing you can do about it but settle for what you can get and play it safe and try to get by.

Meanwhile, back on Reality Ranch, the air was obliviously perky and crisp…

Limiting beliefs are just illusions that we’ve manufactured and collected from society’s nervous ramblings, the media and those around us who tell us that we can’t be great as a way of justifying their own bleh lives.

Beliefs such as ‘I’m not clever or handsome or sexy or fortunate or good enough to be great, I don’t have this or that special quality so I can’t make money and be happy and awesome.’

Icky beliefs that tinge the way you process reality such as ‘I suck and I have to fight and get angry and resist and close myself off and be tense and judge other people and myself – because I suck, remember – and I have to protect myself from the big bad world that’s out to get me!’

Resistance. Procrastination. Taming your dreams. Settling for what you can get. Trapped in insecurities. Talking to yourself like you’re a peasant. Fighting life. Accepting yuck. Ack!

Limiting beliefs are the walls that dam the flow of life. Pardon the punks.

They suck the oozingly delicious flavour out of life and throw you the bones to gnash your teeth on.

They’re the sand and dirt that gets stuck in the SillyPutty of your life,
they’re society’s greasy smudged fingerprints on the window of your consciousness,
they’re the filters through which you live and decide what’s possible,
and they’re the reason you’re not limitless, free, happy, at peace, and giddily successful.

So let’s rip off their disguises and get ready to kick some limiting belief ass.

Real Reasons About Fake Feelings

The first thing to know about limiting beliefs is that they’re disguised to make you think that they’re a normal part of reality. We’ll get to killing them in a second, but let’s bleed ‘em out a lil first.

You don’t procrastinate because you really think that you need to do a million little random tasks and make a cup of tea and browse the internet instead of writing or studying or getting work done, you procrastinate because you don’t think that you can do the work well or handle your success.

You don’t really believe the excuses you feed yourself about why you can’t go and talk to an attractive girl, you don’t really think that ‘she’s busy or might have a boyfriend’ are valid excuses to not talk to her, you’re actually shit scared that she might reject you or that she’d find out that you’re an insecure loser.

You don’t decide to sit around and watch T.V. and blob out because you’re ‘tired and need to relax’, you do it because deep down, you’re worried that you won’t be able to get up and make yourself successful and you’re scared you might fail so it’s easier to distract yourself and blur out.

These real reasons – the real reasons that you don’t live better and aren’t wildly successful – beneath the excuses and distractions, these are your limiting beliefs.

Limiting beliefs make you think that you’re not good enough and there isn’t enough and it’s not possible – and they breed internal conflict and make you numb and resist life because beneath the limiting beliefs, you know that you could do better.

Successful people don’t have these limiting beliefs. They either didn’t collect them growing up or proved to themselves that it is possible for them to be brilliant and showed themselves that the limiting beliefs aren’t real.

The reason why most people can’t write well, in my opinion, is that they’re too insecure about their ideas to be real and express their creativity and so they wind up reverting to robot speak and repackaged content. Similar thing applies to doing other things well too.

So the solution? Kill your limiting beliefs.

How to Kill Your Limiting Beliefs

Limiting beliefs are boundaries on your reality, they limit what you perceive as possible so killing them means destroying these boundaries.

You have to prove to yourself that the limiting beliefs that wall in your reality aren’t real.

Prove to yourself that it IS possible to be brilliant, it IS possible to do well in your studies and work, it IS possible to speak to a sexy girl and make her your girlfriend, it IS possible to be rich and brilliant and the BEST.

Some of you might know my background but a quick version is that I used to fail school, I was fat, useless, no girlfriend, no friends and no money. I really thought that I was stupid and couldn’t excel at school and sport and be successful. I thought that people who did well were different to me. “It’s not me to be smart, they have something that I don’t.” I was under pressure from my mom to get better grades at school so I started working. I started getting slightly better grades and that fuelled me to work harder. Soon I was getting As and I realised that I didn’t even need to work, it was KNOWING that I could do well that was making me dominate academically. I graduated with straight As when a year prior I was almost failing. Then I figured, “well, before, I thought I couldn’t do well at school, maybe there are other things that I thought I couldn’t do but actually I can like get a girlfriend and make money and be successful.”

You have to show yourself that your limiting beliefs are empty and pointless.

That’s the only way to kill limiting beliefs.

And yeah, it is really obvious. Obviously if you don’t think that you can do something then you should show yourself that you can do it and then you’re sorted. Yeah, but most of the problem is not being aware of the limiting beliefs to begin with.

When you catch your limiting beliefs kicking in, take action that’s gonna show you how stupid they are and that it’s possible for you to be brilliant.

It’s usually a ‘baby steps’ thing but doesn’t have to be. Work harder that you ever have just to prove to yourself that you can be more successful and get better grades or get more clients or a better response. Slug through the limiting belief’s seductive commentary about how you should just do nothing and ‘get by’ and get up and talk to that sexy girl or make a start on your project.

It’s a process where you slightly push past the boundary of what you deem possible. Then a little more. And a little more. Until you realise that the world of possibility is infinite and the walls that previously kept you in were illusions.

You start out and you have to take action and do things but once you’ve made a little progress and pushed past your initial perceptions of limitation, you start to become a person who naturally makes things happen because you love that feeling of expanding your reality and living life.

Magic begins to rush back into your life and a sparkle is reignited in your previously glazed eyes. No more ‘just getting by’. No more numb yuck bleh.

Kill your limiting beliefs and drag them bleeding through the streets.

That’s how you show yourself that life can be amazing and stop limiting yourself.
That’s how you cultivate a feeling that ‘it’s impossible for me to not do well at this.’
That’s how you become brilliant.

Unleash Reality
Alex

P.S. What would happen if a zen monk turned cartoonist read my mind