Hidden, limiting beliefs are merely something agreed to long ago that has generally been forgotten about. They hold us back from becoming who we want to be. And it’s rare that we remember we made an agreement about something in our past that blocks our current manifestation efforts.

But these types of beliefs can sabotage our efforts towards our desires because the mind will always drive us towards what it believes to be true (even those things that align with limiting beliefs). And our beliefs are the lens through which we experience the world.

Louise Hay stated it like this: "We learn our belief systems as very little children, and then we move through life creating experiences to match our beliefs. Look back in your own life and notice how often you have gone through the same experience."

With a limiting belief in place regarding a goal we would like to achieve, that limiting belief will almost always stop any progress being made towards that goal. The mind looks for proof that these past truths are accurate. In fact, you can most likely come up with a ton of evidence to support any belief you have, including the ones that block your success. The mind does this automatically, seeking validation for its truth. And it will often even exaggerate things to make them fit within belief systems.

These types of beliefs are often right in front of us, but we’ve learned to ignore them. In the same way you might not pay attention to a sliding glass door because you’ve trained yourself to look through it, it would be irrelevant unless you ignored it to the point that you ran right into it! Limiting beliefs are the same way. To eliminate them, we retrain our mind to see the what is right in front of us.

Here’s how to do it:

The goal is to become aware of these types of hidden beliefs. The easiest way to do this is by realizing that anything you say to yourself to justify why something isn’t working out for you is a limiting belief. These types of beliefs often come with a large amount of reasoning that points to outer circumstances and people. However, that is just the mind avoiding the fact that it is an internal limitation as a means of protection.

So, choose a problem or an area of your life where you feel like you are stuck regarding something you would like to achieve. And then attempt to look at yourself and this situation from the viewpoint of someone you love, such as a friend or family member. In other words, observe you from another viewpoint rather than being the person who is experiencing this. Because it is often easier for us to recognize limiting beliefs in others than it is for ourselves, this exercise is extremely powerful.

Ask yourself, why would this person be stuck in this situation? Are they worried about what others might think of them? Do they think life is unfair? Do they believe they aren’t strong or smart enough to accomplish their goals? What do they say to themselves about why their manifestation isn’t coming into fruition? What emotions do they have about this subject and what might those emotions indicate?

This process greatly assists in solving the mystery of what a limiting belief might actually be. Awareness in itself has the ability to release things that are stuck. When you do this, you use the light of your awareness to illuminate the limiting belief, bring it to the surface and help it dissolve. This gives you the opportunity to expose an old agreement in your belief system that you no longer want to give truth to. The old belief will probably even start to seem unbelievable to you, breaking down the foundation it once had! And just by identifying your limiting beliefs, you begin to change any uncomfortable and sabotaging emotions and behavior without a ton of effort.

Think of each limiting belief like a link in a chain. By breaking just one link, the entire chain loses its power. When you become aware that YOU are not the mental concept and that it is separate from you, that it is something agreed to long ago that you have now outgrown, any other limiting beliefs that are associated start to fall apart as well because you deprive them of the power they once had. And these shifts can happen just through the use of your expanded awareness!