فصل 5

PART II

LIMITLESS MINDSET

THE WHAT

mind·set (noun)

The deeply held beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions we create about who we are, how the world works, what we are capable of and deserve, and what is possible.

The first element of the three-part Limitless Model is Mindset, which is the mental attitude or disposition that predetermines a person’s responses to and interpretations of situations. Mindset is made up of beliefs, assumptions, and attitudes we hold about ourselves and the world around us. All behavior is driven by belief, so before we address how to learn, we must first address the underlying beliefs we hold about what is possible.

We’re not born with pre-installed mindsets about what we’re capable of achieving—we learn these fixed and limited ways of thinking from the people in our lives and the culture we experience growing up.

Think of a young elephant tied to a stake in the ground. When it’s a baby, the elephant isn’t strong enough to pull the stake up, so it eventually stops trying because it learns the effort is futile. As the elephant grows, it gains more than enough power and strength to pull out the stake, but it remains tied up by something as inconsequential as a rope and a flimsy piece of metal because of what it learned as a baby. In psychology, it’s called learned helplessness.

Most of us behave like that elephant. At some point, we had an experience that gave us an impression of what we’re capable of, and our belief about our potential has been set ever since. But just as helplessness is learned, it’s just as possible to learn to be limitless. In this section, you’re going to learn about the seven lies we’ve been taught about our potential and how to replace them with new beliefs.

I use the term LIE intentionally. In this case, LIE is an acronym for Limited Idea Entertained. If you are like the vast majority of people out there, you are entertaining ideas about yourself that define you as something less than what you truly have the potential to achieve. You’re giving these ideas energy and allowing them to take residence in your mind, but they’re really nothing but BS (in this case, an abbreviation for Belief Systems). Over the coming chapters, you will discover where these lies come from, how they imprison you, and what you can do about it. And keep asking yourself this question: How many of my perceived constraints are nothing more than LIEs and BS? I think you’re going to be stunned with the answers, and that these answers are going to be liberating.

A quick story before we get going. One of the most cherished friendships of my life was the one I shared with Stan Lee. As you know, Stan’s Marvel creations helped me through some of the biggest challenges of my life when I was younger, and they continue to be a nonstop source of inspiration to this day. My conversations with Stan were always engaging and very often illuminating.

I remember one such conversation when we were in a car together on our way to a dinner. Stan looked resplendent in his suit with a bold Spiderman tie, and I was inspired to ask him something I’d always wanted to ask.

“Stan, you’ve created so many great characters over the years, like the Avengers and X-Men,” I said. “Who’s your favorite character?”

He didn’t even hesitate a second.

“Iron Man,” he said. “And who’s yours?”

I pointed to his tie. “That would be Spiderman.”

Stan nodded and said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” “That’s so true, Stan. And the opposite is also true: with great responsibility comes great power.”

He seemed to like that, which tickled me to no end. But while I’d never phrased it that way before, I realized that I was voicing one of the key tenets of the limitless mindset. When we take responsibility for something, we are imbued with great power to make things better.

That’s what a limitless mindset is all about. Our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are, but we must be accountable for who we become. It’s about understanding that we are responsible for our assumptions and attitudes. And when you accept that all of your potential is entirely within your control, then the power of that potential grows dramatically.

So, superhero, let’s get started on unlimiting your mindset. As Stan would say, “Excelsior!”

Chapter 5

THE SPELL OF BELIEF SYSTEMS

Why do your beliefs have such an effect on your life?

Why do limiting beliefs keep you from your goals?

How do you reject limiting beliefs?

Grab some imaginary popcorn, because we’re going to take a quick side trip to the movies. The scene goes like this:

A bridge is about to collapse because a supervillain has weakened the supports to the point where the entire thing is going to go crumbling into the river. As the bridge creaks and teeters, our superhero learns about the crisis and races to the scene. She’s the only person with the strength to avert catastrophe and save hundreds of lives.

Our superhero is less than 10 seconds from the bridge now. But as she gets closer, a voice in her head reminds her of the time she face-planted while doing a somersault in elementary school. A couple of seconds later, she recalls her father telling her that it would be best if she set her sights low for her future. With the bridge in sight, another vision emerges in front of her: her former best friend ridiculing her for her delusions of grandeur.

Rubble from the bridge topples into the water. The creaking gets louder.

The screams of dozens and dozens fill the air.

And our superhero, overwhelmed with doubt, sits down by the side of the road, covers her face with her hands, and drowns in self-pity.

Wait . . . what?

You’ve never seen that scene in a superhero movie, right? There are some reasons for that. One is that it would be a terrible story. Another is that, regardless of the darkness in their pasts or the moral conflicts they might be facing, superheroes don’t become true superheroes by giving in to limiting beliefs. Superman doesn’t think that, maybe on a good day, he might be able to leap a tall building or, maybe, you know, a couple of stories at least.

Tony Stark doesn’t think, “This Iron Man suit is probably going to fail me at the worst possible time because I’m inherently a screw-up.” Captain Marvel doesn’t break through our atmosphere and suddenly start thinking, “I’m not sure I have the emotional capacity to fly solo through space.” They have superpowers, and any sense of restriction be damned.

And you know what? You have superpowers too. How do you realize them? You begin with your mindset.

FINDING MY ROGER BANNISTER

When I was a kid, maybe 9 or 10 years old, we had a big family reunion.

There were a couple dozen of us around a huge table in a big, busy restaurant. It was a Saturday night, so the place was packed, with the waitstaff ping-ponging from table to table as quickly as they could.

A few minutes after we all gathered, our waitress came over to take our order. As you can imagine, this was a lengthy process. About halfway through, the waitress came around to ask me what I wanted to eat and drink.

It was then that I realized that she hadn’t been writing down anything my relatives had ordered. I found this extremely curious. There was something like 25 of us, and I’d seen her serving other customers, so I knew we weren’t her only table. How was she possibly going to remember everything we’d ordered? I told her what I wanted and then watched her carefully as she made her way around the rest of the table.

I did not have a high level of confidence that my meal was going to remotely resemble what I’d requested. Even at that age, I had a healthy amount of skepticism. Not because I was a negative person or because I didn’t have faith in people, but rather that I needed to see anything out of the ordinary before I believed it was possible. In this case, I figured that, at best, the waitress would get most of our orders correct, but she’d wind up putting them down in the wrong places, and we’d find ourselves trading plates all across the table.

Well, first our drinks came, and everyone got exactly what they wanted, even the cousin who wanted no ice in her Coke and another who’d requested that her drink come with a twist of lemon, a twist of lime, and two cherries. Okay, I thought, that was pretty good. But there’s a lot more to come. A few minutes later, the salads came out, and again everything was perfect. The people who wanted their dressing on the side got it that way, the people who wanted their dressing tossed with their salads got that, and everyone got the dressing they’d asked to get. My skepticism was being tested. And then the main courses were delivered. Not one mistake—and there were some crazy special requests. Everything was cooked the way we wanted, and all of the side dishes were the right ones.

I dove into my meal at that point, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what the waitress had accomplished. At this age, I’d only just begun to read competently, and my brain injury had caused me all kinds of learning challenges. And yet here was someone who had shown me that our brains are capable of far more than I would have imagined.

That waitress was my Roger Bannister. Bannister was a track star in the 1950s. In the early years of Bannister’s career, it was widely assumed that it was physically impossible for an athlete to run a mile in less than 4 minutes.

The feeling was that our bodies would break down from the effort before the time could be achieved. Then, on May 6, 1954, Bannister ran a mile in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds, proving that the 4-minute barrier was indeed breakable. What is most interesting to me is that less than two months later someone broke Bannister’s record, and then that record was broken, and then that one. The times have been dropping ever since.

What Bannister did was show that this barrier wasn’t in fact a barrier at all. That was what this waitress showed me. Through her, I saw that what I’d perceived my brain’s capacity to be was so much less than what it really was. As you know, I continued to struggle with learning for many years, but from the moment of that dinner I had a model for what was possible.

The waitress in this way was limitless. She demonstrated something in front of me that I would never in a million years have thought was possible.

I never got to know her, but I’m forever grateful because what she did for me personally was to permanently change my perceptions of my own restrictions. She altered my mindset. It was impossible for me to buy into the notion that I could expect to accomplish only a modest amount with my brain when I knew that others could achieve so much more. I just needed to find a method.

I’m going to share much of that method with you in this book. At its core is one fundamental concept: unlimiting. The key to making yourself limitless is unlearning false assumptions. So often, we don’t accomplish something because we’ve convinced ourselves that we can’t do it. Let’s go back to Roger Bannister for a moment. Every day before May 6, 1954, people were absolutely certain that a sub-four-minute mile was beyond the range of human capabilities. Forty-six days after Bannister did it, someone else beat his time, and more than 1,400 racers have followed them. Running a mile in less than four minutes is still an extraordinary feat—but it is not an impossible feat. Once that “barrier” was broken, many achieved it.

So, how do you face down limiting beliefs?

WHAT LIMITING BELIEFS DO TO US

Limiting beliefs are often revealed in our self-talk, that inner conversation that focuses on what you’re convinced you can’t do rather than what you already excel at and what you’re going to continue to achieve today and into the future. How often do you stop yourself from attempting to do something or from pursuing a dream because that voice convinces you that it is beyond your reach? If this sounds like you, you are very far from alone, but you’re also not doing yourself any favors.

“We come into this world not knowing if life is hard or easy, if money is scarce or abundant, if we’re important or unimportant. We look at two people who know everything: our parents,”1 said belief change expert Shelly Lefkoe in our podcast interview. Parents are our first teachers, and although they probably meant us no harm, we still come away from our childhoods with the limiting beliefs they unconsciously instilled in us.

Limiting beliefs can stop you in your tracks even when you’re doing something at which you normally excel. Have you ever had the experience of being in a pressure situation where you need to do something that typically comes easily to you—writing a memo or doing a quick calculation, for example—but the intensity causes you to doubt yourself so much that you fail at this task? That’s a limiting belief setting you back. If you could just get out of your head, you’d have no trouble getting the job done, but your inner voice confounds you.

Now, take that situation and extend it to an entire segment of your life.

Your career aspirations, perhaps, or your ability to make friends. If your limiting beliefs are in control, you could find yourself mired in underachievement, either wondering why you never really get ahead or convinced that you don’t deserve it.

Alexis, who cofounded Kwik Learning with me, struggled with learning as a child much like I did, but for very different reasons. She was born in South Korea to entrepreneurial parents who struggled in business. They didn’t have a lot of money, but always worked hard to make ends meet.

While she had a roof over her head, her family of four lived in a one-room basement in Korea. Their second business had just failed when they received a letter from the United States saying their visa application had been approved—they had filed seven years earlier. On the verge of desperation, her family thought this was a new chance, so they borrowed the equivalent of $2,000 and left for America.

Alexis didn’t know a word of English when she arrived. It was total culture shock—she didn’t know what was being said around her, and the cultural norms were entirely different. Her parents didn’t speak English either, so they were all struggling to understand their new world.

Alexis enrolled in school near her new home. She was a shy and introverted student, and, because she didn’t know the language, she often sat alone at the lunch table or ate in a bathroom stall just to avoid feeling like an outcast.

It took Alexis six years to be able to truly understand English, and both the kids and the teachers in her school didn’t understand why she struggled for so long. After a couple of years, classmates started to criticize her for being a slow learner. “What’s wrong with you?” “Are you stupid? “You’re weird,” were phrases she heard frequently as a child.

Her difficulties in school even extended to physical education, the one area where she ostensibly didn’t need to use many words. She remembers sitting on the bleachers repeatedly copying out the words, “I will bring my gym clothes to class.” But she had no idea what she was writing, and no one managed to communicate to her that she needed to bring a change of clothing.

By the time she was in her early twenties, Alexis had a hard time reading a book from front to back. She battled with her internal voices whenever she attempted to learn. One overarching voice constantly criticized and doubted her abilities, while another small voice questioned that critic.

Something inside her couldn’t fully accept the notion that she was “dumb.” Her parents worked hard to give her a second chance, and she couldn’t let them down. While there were moments where she felt she wasn’t good enough to do anything special in her life, there were also moments where she was sure there had to be more to life than merely accepting her circumstances.

If Alexis allowed those external voices to shape her reality, then it would’ve stopped her in her tracks. She wouldn’t have searched for solutions to her problems. Instead, she looked for answers by observing and learning from others. She started wondering what they were doing differently to find success and happiness. She wanted to know if it was sheer luck and genius, or if there was a method behind it. In her quest to learn how to be successful, she ended up in one of my early classes. She wasn’t sure what she was getting into, but knew she wanted something different for herself—she needed to feel a sense of hope.

On day one, we covered memory. It was eight hours of intense training, but at the end of the session, Alexis felt refreshed and even excited about what she was learning. “How else can I use my brain?” she wondered. For the first time in her life, she didn’t feel slow and she felt excited about learning.

Day two was all about speed reading. She wasn’t initially excited about this because of her previous challenges. But when Alexis learned the smart reading habits and went through the speed-reading exercises, a lightbulb turned on. She suddenly saw the potential—and even the fun—of reading.

She realized she was not too slow or stupid to understand; she was just never shown how to learn and use the super-computer between her ears. As she experienced the power of learning, the years of negative self-talk and limiting beliefs took a backseat in her mind.

After that class, Alexis read a complete book for the first time and was blown away by how much she understood, how much she remembered, and how much she liked the experience.

It was a huge turning point in her life. She went from a limited mindset, believing that “things are the way they are,” to knowing that she could change and shape her mind to reach her goals. For the first time in her life, she began to believe in herself and imagine what might be possible.

Today, Alexis doesn’t shy away from learning something new. She doesn’t feel inadequate if she doesn’t know something. She goes out to find answers and applies them. Out of her passion for learning, she also started Kwik Learning Online with me to share the transformation she experienced with others in every country in the world.

In their book Mequilibrium, authors Jan Bruce, Dr. Andrew Shatté, and Dr. Adam Perlman call these kinds of beliefs “iceberg beliefs” because of how many of them lie beneath the surface of our subconscious. “Iceberg beliefs are deeply rooted and powerful, and they fuel our emotions,” they say in the book. “The more entrenched an iceberg is, the more havoc it wreaks on your life. . . creating your schedule chaos, getting in the way of successfully sticking to a diet, or holding you back from seizing opportunities.”

And, perhaps most significantly, they say, “If we get a handle on our icebergs, we gain an enormous amount of control over our feelings and our lives. Melt an iceberg and all the downstream events it causes get washed away as well.”2

Dr. Jennice Vilhauer, director of Emory University’s Adult Outpatient Psychotherapy Program in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science in the School of Medicine, implores us to come face-to-face with our inner critic, “the voice in your head that judges you, doubts you, belittles you, and constantly tells you that you are not good enough. It says negative hurtful things to you—things that you would never even dream of saying to anyone else. I am such an idiot; I am a phony; I never do anything right; I will never succeed.”

She adds: “The inner critic isn’t harmless. It inhibits you, limits you, and stops you from pursuing the life you truly want to live. It robs you of peace of mind and emotional well-being and, if left unchecked long enough, it can even lead to serious mental health problems like depression or anxiety.”3 Let’s revisit our failed superhero from the beginning of this chapter. She certainly had the motivation to save the day. And she certainly had the methods to save the day. But what she didn’t have was the mindset. Her inner critic convinced her that she wasn’t good enough, so she sat on the sidelines feeling sorry for herself instead of taking care of business.

Certainly, one takeaway from this story is that our failed superhero blew it.

She flopped at a critical time because she couldn’t get out of her own head.

But there’s another hugely important component to this story: our superhero had everything inside of her to succeed. If only she’d been able to prevail over the beliefs that were holding her back, her extraordinary talents would have shone through.

That’s how important it is to conquer your limiting beliefs.

WHAT IF I TOLD YOU THAT YOU WERE A GENIUS?

When you think of geniuses, who are the first people that come to mind?

I’m guessing Einstein and Shakespeare are on your shortlist. Others might include Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Marie Curie, or Ruth Bader Ginsburg. These names pop into many people’s heads because each of them was extraordinary in the kinds of intelligence we tend to equate with genius.

But was LeBron James on your list? How about Beyoncé? Or Oprah? Or you?

It wouldn’t be surprising if you didn’t include the latter names on your list. Most of us tend to equate genius with one particular measurement of intelligence: IQ. People with outsize IQs are geniuses, and people with lesser IQs can be good or even great at something, but they aren’t considered geniuses.

If this sounds like your kind of thinking, you’re far from alone in defining genius far, far too narrowly. I would even take this to the point of suggesting that most people define genius in this way. But there are two problems with that. One is that it prevents you from appreciating the genius a wide variety of people hold. The other is that it might prevent you from identifying the genius in yourself.

There are multiple forms of genius. Various experts differ on the number, but it is commonly agreed that genius expresses itself in one of four manners. Here’s a way of looking at it that has been around for thousands of years:

Dynamo genius: Those who express their genius through creativity and ideas. Shakespeare was a dynamo genius because of his brilliance at inventing stories that told us so much about ourselves. Galileo was a dynamo genius because of the way he could see things that others couldn’t see when he looked up at the skies. Dynamo geniuses are those we most commonly think of when we think of geniuses.

Blaze genius: Those whose genius becomes clear through their interaction with others. Oprah Winfrey is a blaze genius because of her extraordinary ability to connect with the hearts, minds, and souls of a wide range of individuals. Malala Yousafzai’s blaze genius expresses itself through her ability to make her story relatable to people all around the globe. Blaze geniuses tend to be master communicators.

Tempo genius: Those whose genius expresses itself through their ability to see the big picture and stay the course. Nelson Mandela was a tempo genius because he was capable of seeing the wisdom of his vision even in the face of overwhelming odds. Mother Teresa’s tempo genius allowed her to imagine better circumstances for those around her even at the darkest times. Tempo geniuses tend to understand the long view in ways that most of those around them cannot.

Steel genius: Those who are brilliant at sweating the small stuff and doing something with the details that others missed or couldn’t envision. Sergey Brin used his genius at seeing the potential of large amounts of data to co-found Google. If you read the book Moneyball, then you know that Billy Beane and his staff redefined baseball through their genius at crunching data. Steel geniuses love getting all the information they can get and have a vision for doing something with that information that most others miss.

KWIK START

What would you say is your genius? Write it down.

There’s a very good chance that your own genius is a combination of two or more of these. Very few of us are only data people or are only adept at being empathetic. But what’s important for you to understand here is that genius extends far beyond your ability to excel at academics or recite the periodic table on command—and that you have genius inside of you.

If you find that last statement surprising, you might want to go back and reread some of the earlier chapters in this book. Making yourself limitless is all about unleashing your innate genius. Maybe you aren’t the dynamo of Shakespeare or the blaze of Oprah, but there is some combination of genius inside of you that is either waiting to express itself or waiting to express itself more. The key is letting it free.

IT ISN’T ONLY IN YOUR HEAD

Before I give you some tools to help you shift toward a more positive mindset, let’s just talk for a minute about how important positive thinking is. There are clear connections between positive thinking and physical health. In a Johns Hopkins study, Dr. Lisa Yanek found that “positive people from the general population were 13 percent less likely than their negative counterparts to have a heart attack or other coronary event.”4 Meanwhile, the Mayo Clinic notes that “The positive thinking that usually comes with optimism is a key part of effective stress management.

And effective stress management is associated with many health benefits.” They note that these benefits include:

Increased life span

Lower rates of depression

Lower levels of distress

Greater resistance to the common cold

Better psychological and physical well-being

Better cardiovascular health and reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease

Better coping skills during hardships and times of stress5

REFRAMING LIMITING BELIEFS

There’s a metaphor I’ve always found useful when helping people to move away from limiting beliefs. I tell them that the difference between limiting beliefs and a limitless mindset is like the difference between a thermometer and a thermostat. A thermometer has only one function: to react to the environment. It reads the temperature and nothing more. This is similar to how people commonly react to limiting beliefs. They read their sense of restriction, react in a constrained way to that, and conduct their lives in a limited way.

On the other hand, a thermostat gauges the environment and makes the environment react to it. If a thermostat notices that a room is too cold or too hot, it changes the environment to fit the ideal for which it is set. Similarly, if you encounter external or internal attempts to put constraints on you, you can act like a thermostat to reject those limiting beliefs and create an environment that aligns with your most ambitious goals.

So, how do you minimize limiting beliefs and develop a superhero

mindset? To me, there are three keys.

Key 1: Name Your Limiting Beliefs

You’ve seen some examples here of limiting beliefs, but there are many more where those came from (and we’ll go over the seven most prevalent limiting beliefs on learning in a moment). They might have to do with your talents, your character, your relationships, your education, or anything else that leads to internal whispers that you can’t be what you want to be. Start paying attention right now to every time you tell yourself that you’re incapable, even if you think that this particular thing might not be consequential in your life.

For example, maybe you tell yourself that you’re terrible at telling jokes.

Perhaps this isn’t a big deal to you, because being a good joke-teller isn’t a personal aspiration. But you might also be telling yourself that you don’t think you’re entertaining, or good company, or an enjoyable companion; and that kind of self-talk can ultimately cause you to double-clutch when you’re in an important social situation or when you need to speak in front of a group. So, listen carefully every time you find yourself using phrases like “I can’t,” “I’m not,” or “I don’t.” You’re sending messages to yourself that are affecting how you think about your life in general, even if what you’re beating yourself up over is something specific and seemingly not important to how you define yourself.

At the same time, try also to identify the origin of this sort of self-talk.

Limiting beliefs often start in childhood. That doesn’t automatically mean that your family is their only source. Early social settings can cause limiting beliefs, as can early experiences with education. Some might take hold simply because something didn’t go well for you the first few times you tried it as a kid.

Being aware of how you’re holding yourself back with your self-talk and spending some time to get to the source of these beliefs is extremely liberating, because once you’re aware, you can begin to realize that these aren’t facts about you, but rather opinions. And there’s a very good chance that those opinions are wrong.

Once you identify the voices in your head that are focusing on what you can’t do, start talking back to them. When you find yourself thinking, “I always screw up this sort of thing,” counter with, “Just because I haven’t always been good at this in the past doesn’t mean that I can’t be great at it now. Keep your opinions to yourself.”

Key 2: Get to the Facts

One of the fundamental tyrannies of limiting beliefs is that, in so many cases, they’re just plain wrong. Are you really terrible at speaking in public? Are you really bad at leading a group? Are you really the least interesting person in the room wherever you are? What’s the evidence to support that? How many times have you actually been in these situations, and what have the results been?

One of the most pernicious things about limiting beliefs is that they play so heavily on our emotions. When you come up against a limiting belief, you’re likely to find those beliefs warring—and usually winning—against your rational self. But how much of this self-talk has a basis in reality?

Think about your experiences speaking in public (an extraordinarily common fear, by the way). Rather than focusing on how you felt in these instances, consider how things went. Were you booed off the stage? Did people come up to you afterward to laugh at you and tell you how awful you were? Did your boss sit you down the next day to say that you might want to consider a career where you never had to utter a word?

I’m guessing none of these things happened. Instead, it’s likely that your audience felt connected to what you were saying. If it was in a professional setting, maybe they were taking notes, and you almost certainly taught them something. Does this mean that your next speech should be at TED? Of course not. But it definitely means that you’re likely much better at conveying information to a group than that voice in your head is telling you that you are.

And then there’s this question to ask: How much of my perceived poor performance was because my self-talk just wouldn’t leave me alone? This is a real issue for many people. They’ll be in the middle of doing something in which they lack confidence, and the inner critic will become so distracting that they can’t focus on what they are doing . . . and therefore don’t do it very well. This is one of the reasons why it’s so important to learn to face down and quiet your limiting beliefs. The better you are at this, the better you’ll be at keeping down distractions during your biggest growth challenges.

So, when you’re examining the facts behind your limiting beliefs, be sure to consider two things: whether there is in reality any evidence to prove that you are truly hampered in this area and whether even that evidence was tainted by the noise in your head.

Key 3: Create a New Belief

Now that you’ve given your limiting beliefs a name and now that you’ve carefully examined the reality of those beliefs, it’s time to take the most essential step—to generate a new belief that is both truer than the LIEs you’ve been accepting and beneficial to the limitless you that you are creating.

You’re going to see this process at work in the next chapter, but let’s take it for a spin right now. Let’s say that one of your limiting beliefs is that you always come up short at the most important moments in your life. Having identified that as a limiting belief, you’ve then taken the step of examining the facts. What you realize is that, while you have occasionally succumbed to nervousness in pressure-packed moments, very few of these instances have been disastrous for you and, upon examination, you can think of several times when you “came through in the clutch.” In fact, now that you really think about it, you’ve succeeded way more often than you’ve faltered.

So, now it’s time to create a new belief. In this case, your new belief would be that no one triumphs at the most critical juncture 100 percent of the time, but that you should be proud of yourself for how many times you’ve performed at your best when the pressure was highest. This new belief completely supplants the old belief, is fully supported by the facts, and gives you a much healthier mindset the next time a critical situation comes along.

I have one more tool for you to use here. I’ve spoken to many experts over the years, and the conversation often comes back to the same thing: as long as you believe that your inner critic is the voice of the true you, the wisest you, it’s always going to guide you. Many of us even use phrases like, “I know myself, and . . .” before announcing a limiting belief.

But if you can create a separate persona for your inner critic—one that is different from the true you—you’ll be considerably more successful at quieting it. This can be enormously helpful and you can have fun with it at the same time. Give your inner critic a preposterous name and outrageous physical attributes. Make it cartoonish and unworthy of even a B-grade movie. Mock it for its rigid dedication to negativity. Roll your eyes when it pops into your head. The better you become at distinguishing this voice from the real you, the better you’ll be at preventing limiting beliefs from getting in your way.

THE POSSIBILITIES BECOME LIMITLESS

Now that you know how to conquer your limiting beliefs, you can start to bring your positive mindset to bear on your quest to become limitless. That might sound like an audacious plan, but there’s lots of evidence to support the connection between mindset and accomplishment.

One of my podcast guests, James Clear, the New York Times best-selling author of Atomic Habits who you will meet again later in this book, wrote about a study performed by Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, a positive psychology researcher at the University of North Carolina. He prefaced their conversation by underscoring what negative emotions do to us, using the example of encountering a tiger in the forest. “Researchers have long known that negative emotions program your brain to do a specific action,” he noted. “When that tiger crosses your path, for example, you run. The rest of the world doesn’t matter. You are focused entirely on the tiger, the fear it creates, and how you can get away from it.”6 The point that Clear is making is that negative emotions drive us to narrow the range of what we are capable of doing. It’s all about getting away from the (metaphorical) tiger, and nothing else matters. If we let negative emotions (such as limiting beliefs) control us, we’re regularly operating in survival mode and therefore confined to a reduced range of possibilities.

What Dr. Fredrickson discovered is that a positive mindset leads to precisely the opposite result. She created an experiment where participants were divided into five groups and presented with film clips. The first group saw clips that elicited joy. The second saw clips that elicited contentment.

The third saw clips that generated fear and the fourth clips that generated anger. The fifth group was the control group.

After they’d seen the clips, the participants were asked to imagine similar situations to what they just saw and how they would react to these situations. They were then asked to fill out a form that had 20 prompts that began with, “I would like to.” The people who experienced fear and anger wrote the fewest responses, while those who experienced joy and contentment listed far more than even the control group. “In other words,” Clear noted, “when you are experiencing positive emotions like joy, contentment, and love, you will see more possibilities in your life.”7 What’s also essential to note is that the benefits of a positive mindset extend well beyond the experience of a positive emotion. Clear offers this example:

A child who runs around outside, swinging on branches and playing with friends, develops the ability to move athletically (physical skills), the ability to play with others and communicate with a team (social skills), and the ability to explore and examine the world around them (creative skills). In this way, the positive emotions of play and joy prompt the child to build skills that are useful and valuable in everyday life. . . . The happiness that promoted the exploration and creation of new skills has long since ended, but the skills themselves live on.8 Fredrickson refers to this as the “broaden and build” theory because positive emotions broaden your sense of possibilities and open your mind, which in turn allows you to build new skills and resources that can provide value in other areas of your life.

The theory, together with the research reviewed here, suggests that positive emotions: (i) broaden people’s attention and thinking; (ii) undo lingering negative emotional arousal; (iii) fuel psychological resilience; (iv) build consequential personal resources; (v) trigger upward spirals towards greater well-being in the future; and (vi) seed human flourishing. The theory also carries an important prescriptive message. People should cultivate positive emotions in their own lives and in the lives of those around them, not just because doing so makes them feel good in the moment, but also because doing so transforms people for the better and sets them on paths toward flourishing and healthy longevity.9

The new mindset that comes from silencing your inner critic presents you with a world of possibility. When you’re surging with positive emotions, you’re seeing—and seizing on—opportunities you might never have noticed before. And with a high sense of motivation (and, really, how could you not be motivated by this?) and the right methods, you’re well on the road to becoming virtually limitless.

BEFORE WE MOVE ON

To learn faster, we must transcend the narrow definition of what we believe is possible for ourselves. In the following pages, you’ll learn about the seven learning lies that are the most common limiting beliefs that hold people back. I’ve seen students and clients cling to these beliefs throughout my decades of teaching people how to learn. These restrictions are the only real barrier you face. After all, people can’t learn to read faster if they believe it isn’t possible. They can’t learn to memorize things more efficiently if they keep telling themselves they have a bad memory.

Everything else falls into place once you snap out of the trance of these socalled “limitations.” By tackling these lies, you’ll be tackling the core blocks that keep you from being limitless. Here are a few things to try before going on to the next chapter.

Think of a time when you saw someone accomplish something that truly impressed you. Now think about what personal inspiration you can draw from that.

Reimagine your inner critic. Change the attributes of this voice in your head so you begin to give it less credence.

Face down one limiting belief right now. What do you regularly tell yourself you can’t do? Find the evidence that shows you that this belief isn’t true.