How To Deal With Limiting Beliefs in Your Career

Hi! I am The Purpose Doctor, and my name is Ayobami Olugbenga-Wyse. I am a purpose-driven peak performance and career clarity coach. I help people map out their career paths with ease and to help them operate in the ideal career they are best built and designed for. Thanks for subscribing to my “Wyse Career Nuggets”, it’s my way to help you create a productive and highly rewarding career.

In the last career nugget, I shared how your career success starts with your mind. Today, I will be sharing how to deal with limiting beliefs in your career.

Henry Ford once said that “whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you are right”. It all depends on what you choose to believe. Belief is a fundamental part of your success or your failure. A classic story to best understand this is the interesting story of some elephants found at a circus ground when a man took a walk around. He noticed some elephants who weighed between 5000pounds to 14,000 pounds were not caged but had tiny chains around their feet. The man then asked the trainer why the elephants didn’t break free.

He revealed a very interesting fact, that the same size of chains was used to tie the elephant when they were much smaller. They definitely tried to break free at that young age but they couldn’t and realized they were helpless because the chains were at that time strong enough to restrict them. So they are eventually conditioned to break free from the chains, and even though they are much stronger and bigger now, they still feel they can be restricted by those tiny chains and wonder if it’s really worth fighting it. The moral of this story is that the elephants had experienced what we call “learned helplessness”, a state of the mind where we are conditioned to accept limitations are real and can’t be broken simply because they have become a part of our lives.

I know this sounds familiar to you, right? Yes, just like those elephants, there are many of such strong mindsets and beliefs that have limited us for many years and subconsciously serve as barriers to our career success. The sad truth about limiting beliefs is that even when a way of escape or solution presents itself, our minds have become too conditioned that we become blind to the opportunity or we resist it in self-defense and develop a coping strategy to adapt to it.

This is how we gradually develop fixed mindsets about our career and life, rather than being open to having a growth mindset that accepts we are bound and allowed to make mistakes and learn from them no matter how long it takes. Many career professionals go through life feeling they can’t go beyond a level just because they have made an error in that area before. Forgive yourself, be easy on yourself and cut yourself some slack, my friend.

You feel you aren’t good or smart enough be3cause you failed many exams in the past, you feel you don’t deserve some pay because you have never earned, seen, or experienced it before, you feel you aren’t worth it simply because you finished from a certain caliber of the institution, you feel your gender, age, background, the degree to some extent, should dictate or define your outcome in life. Why don’t you try to flip the coin the other way fam! Aren’t there people who were born into rich homes, had amazing backgrounds, attended great institutions, or finished with the best of grades still end up nowhere? That tells you one thing my friend, that life happens to everyone, but life bends and gives way to people who take charge and do not sulk about it. One example of a fixed and limited mindset is that when life throws a curveball, they say “why me?” rather than “why not me?”.

Here are 5 amazing tips I would like to share with you if you desire to experience a rewarding and successful career.

1.    Appreciate your awesomeness, my friend. Learn the art of praising yourself rather than bel