002 Limiting Belief Coloured Glasses

Limiting Beliefs start to form quite early in life. You may never actually consciously think ,”I am not good enough” but you may feel that all the time. Limiting Beliefs are often experienced as a feeling rather than an actual thought. We often say that they are not rational. There may be overwhelming evidence that you are not what you are thinking but if emotionally or unconsciously you feel this way then it becomes the dominant cognition. One of the reasons Limiting Beliefs are so hard to change is due to cognitive dissonance. It’s easier for us to change how we interpret information so our beliefs stay intact than to change our entire belief structure when new or contradictory information is presented to us.

Zac mentions that he was recently reading, “The Wizard of Oz” to his daughter and compares Oz mandating that everybody in the Emerald City wear green glasses to the way cognitive dissonance works with limiting beliefs.

"Dorothy was shocked to learn the truth from the Wizard of Oz: "But isn’t everything here green?", asked Dorothy. No more than in any other city, replied Oz; but when you wear green spectacles, why of course everything you see looks green to you. The Emerald City was built a great many years ago, for I was a young man when the balloon brought me here, and I am a very old man now. But my people have worn green glasses on their eyes so long that most of them think it really is an Emerald City"

Limiting Beliefs are similar in the sense that they will completely change or distort the way we interpret information and therefore changes the way we interpret reality.