What will people think of me?

“Limiting Beliefs” are beliefs we have about ourselves, other people or the world in general that dictate how we approach things.

For most of us in addition to our Limiting Beliefs we also have one of them that dominates our thoughts, not usually in the form of the belief but more in the form of what the belief means to our lifes.

You need to uncover your dominant thought, you’ll probably realise it before the end of this article, or you’ll notice it in the next day or two.

It’s the thought that occurs most of the time, most often in the form of a question we keep asking ourselves over and over, trying to get an answer or some internal assurance that everything will be OK.

If you’ve not yet realised what yours is, here are some of the ones my clients have shared with me over the years:

When will I have enough money?
How am I going to meet all the bills this month?
What will they think?
What will people think of me?
Am I going to be ok?
What else is going to go wrong?

and so many others.

What we need to understand firstly is what is our dominant thought? Once we know that we need to ask ourselves what the Belief is behind that, quite simply by asking ourselves:

“What must I believe in order to keep thinking this?”

Ideas will come up and one will feel more true than the others.

For example a client who recently had the dominant thought of “What will people think of me?” realised they must believe they are not good enough. This in turn obviously leads us to the realisation that it’s not really about what other people think, but this statement comes to mind because we ourselves are afraid we might not be good enough.

Once you get to what you believe or “must believe” in order to have that thought you need to realise firstly it is not reality it is just a belief or way of thinking.

The next step is to start to breakdown this belief and that can be done in many ways two of which are:

(1) Make a list of all the reasons why this belief is not true, write down all the arguments, reasons and evidence in your life that actually disprove the belief.  So often our beliefs are generalised statements that get out of hand over time and affect what we notice in the world.
(2) Another way is to use the “I can’t Virus” questions from the free eBook available on this site here

Once we have started to break down the belief come up with a new dominating thought that aknowledges the old one but is an empowering thought that you can start to think of instead, one that points you in the right direction.

You need the persistance and discipline that everytime you notice the old thought coming up you say the new one 5 times or more.

Mark Rhodes