Remember that you don’t have to know the answers to all of these questions just yet, but seeing the various angles in black and white should instill an appreciation for just how complex our programming truly is. When I started to do this work on myself, I realized how little awareness I’d had around the experiences that had formed me. They were just my experiences; I hadn’t ascribed any particular meaning or weight to them. One of the benefits of this exercise is that it gives you the opportunity to think about who you are through a layered approach that will hopefully show you how awesome you are to have come through what you have.
If you’re tempted to dismiss the exercise because your life was “easy” and privileged, don’t. Our programming in and of itself isn’t good or bad—it just is. Its impact on you is the real point of digging into it. You’re reading these words because you believe your life can be better. Remain open and don’t close the door on any element of examination based on preconceived notions.
My own programming played a huge role in where I was when I began this process. For me, the question “What do you want?” couldn’t effectively be answered until I understood why I was so far removed from where I wanted to be in the first place. I had to look at the influences and expectations that had shaped my life, and that was no straightforward task. As the child of immigrants, my early life included a hodge-podge of influences. We lived in student housing; my parents were closely tied in with their cultural group but also had many American friends. We didn’t have much money, but I always received the best educationally because we lived in a college town where the learning standards were high. My own parents came from a culture that valued higher education, so I learned early on that being a good student and eventually going to college and beyond was the righteous path. We had very little extended family around. I only ever met one of my grandparents and didn’t really get to know her because the visits were brief. Naturally, most of my friends were in the same lower-middle-class bracket, which made it easy for us to understand one another and relate to each other’s experiences, especially in elementary school. As our world became larger in middle and high school, the influencing factors and the lens through which we viewed the world began to shift. There was a whole other place outside the little neighborhood where we could walk to one another’s front doors, school, or the pool in the summer. We experienced everything within a mile of where we slept until it was time to get on the bus for middle school, where we finally met and interacted with kids from all over town, no longer limited to our little bubble. But even as those influences within our microcosm grew, some things remained constant. We grew up in an agricultural state in a college town, surrounded by rural farmland. A border state that was on the side of the north in the Civil War, there were vast differences in culture between our state and the one next door that we would sometimes drive to for camping excursions. There were and are a lot of misconceptions about my state, Kansas, and to this day, when people ask where I’m from and I answer “Manhattan,” they assume I’m talking about New York. It blows their minds that someone like me could have grown up in a small town in Kansas, and it’s even more confusing to many how on earth my parents ended up there as immigrants from Iran, of all places. I grew up without religion; my parents were open to letting me attend church with my friends if I asked, but there was no particular reinforcement of any one belief system. Politically, they were liberal and highly engaged in politics, as they and their families had been greatly impacted by the internal and global politics that shaped the conflict and regime change in Iran.
My early experiences formed the backdrop and led to the formation of the limiting beliefs that came to shape my standard mode of operation. Limiting beliefs are the thoughts that keep you from moving forward by diminishing your belief in yourself and what you’re capable of. There are a couple of lenses through which limiting beliefs affect you. The first lens is that through which you view yourself and whether your capabilities are enough. The second lens is that through which you view the world and how you see its limitations, and what impact those limitations have on your own life.
The following represent common limiting beliefs with regard to the self:
•I can’t pull that off.
•This is all I know.
•I’ll never be able to [fill in the blank].
•I never say the right thing.
•This always happens to me.
•I don’t have what it takes.
•I didn’t finish school, so I’m not smart enough to [fill in the blank].
Add these up, and what you end up with is “I am not enough.”
This next list details some thoughts that represent limiting beliefs with respect to the external world:
•The world is a terrible place.
•It’s scary to go out in public not knowing what may happen.
•The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
•It’s all falling apart, and it gets worse every day.
•There’s not enough [fill in the blank] to go around.
The general theme with limiting beliefs regarding the external world is “There is not enough,” whether it be enough money, food, compassion, sense, etc. It paints a picture of an unfriendly place, one that is against you, so what’s the point of trying anyway? In the extreme, thoughts like this can lead to defeatism, in which you being the loser is a foregone conclusion, or extremism, in which you view yourself as a lone crusader, constantly fighting and thrashing against the status quo. A healthy balance between practicality and optimism is the best way to move forward, and we’ll talk more about that later in the book.
My personal limiting beliefs were not completely unknown to me, but going through the exercise of contemplating and writing them down was eye-opening. I’d been walking around with some serious BS in my head about what I was capable of and what options were open to me. Here is a sampling of my own limiting beliefs that may help as you begin considering your own:
•This is all I know. I’m limited to this field.
•I don’t have what it takes to work for myself.
•People will see through me.
•No one wants what I have to offer.
•If I don’t have status, I’ll become insignificant.
•I can’t make the kind of money I want if I leave.
I could go on, but you get the gist. These are all of the “I am not enough” variety. When I dug into these beliefs and really thought about them, I realized how strangely basic they were: egocentric and concerned with being small, unseen, and unheard. Thoughts of this nature had been such an integral part of my thinking, embedded in my mind as if they were factual, that I didn’t have any reason to take a hard look at them and see them for the weirdly insignificant thoughts they were. You will have the same realizations, and you will be freed from the limiting beliefs that bind you if you have the courage to face them head-on. After going through the identification process, my response to my own beliefs was some variation of “That’s dumb!” or “So what?” or “That’s not even true.” People don’t like the real me? So what? I don’t have what it takes? That’s not even true. I don’t know enough to work in a different field? That’s dumb. And not true. Think of what you’d say to a friend who was confessing their own limiting beliefs to you. How would you respond? Chances are, it would not be with “You’re right. You totally suck. That will never work. Don’t even try.” We are much more generous and compassionate when talking with others. Act as your own friend when you become aware of your limiting beliefs, and defuse their power over you.
Because you’ve been programmed, the key to unlocking your