Allowing Yourself to Be Successful

Even without your conscious awareness, your current beliefs may be holding you back. Whether you struggle to believe in yourself, your capabilities, or the vast array of limitless possibilities for your life, you may be shutting out the very thoughts that can propel you to the success you desire.
Pause for a moment and answer this question: Can you really “see” yourself as a confident, successful person? If you close your eyes and call up an image of yourself, what does that self look like? Is he or she enthusiastic about life, willing to take risks, eager to grasp the joy and abundance he/she deserves? Can you imagine this person with endless opportunities for growth and advancement in life?
If you can’t quite “see” yourself as being successful (or at least having the potential to be successful), it is likely that your own beliefs are creating an inner blockage.
Unless you turn this around and open your mind to what is possible, you will continue to sabotage your own efforts.
Dissolving inner blockages is not as difficult as it may seem. The two main things you need to have are: 1) the willingness to believe something different, and 2) the courage to take action on your new beliefs.
The first step requires a large dose of faith when you first begin to shift your beliefs. All of the “evidence” in your life seems to reinforce your current beliefs, right?
You believe you are not successful, not confident, not courageous enough to take risks, and perhaps not the “lucky” type of person that finds great opportunities to move forward.
If these are your beliefs, your outer life probably “proves” them to be accurate. You may struggle with lack, fear, procrastination, confusion and frustration on a daily basis. Therefore you know your beliefs are “true”.
What many people fail to understand is that their beliefs are what create the “evidence” in their lives.
Here is how it usually happens:
As a child, you are naturally confident, optimistic, open-minded and ready to tackle challenges. You’ve got all the potential in the world at this point, and your life is a blank slate, waiting for you to turn it into a masterpiece. Then the negative conditioning begins. You are given conditions and limitations by the adults in your life (whether your parents, teachers, pastor, or other authority figures).
My mother said to me, “ If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general, if you become a monk you’ll end up as the pope.” Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
– Pablo Picasso
These conditions and limitations begin to alter your belief in what is possible for your life. Rather than encouraging your dream of becoming an astronaut (or whatever your personal dream is), you are scolded into being more “practical”.
You start to believe that your dream is foolish, and you are foolish for believing in useless fantasies.
Even worse, the adults in your life start attaching limiting labels to you: learning disabled, dumb, unlucky, accident prone, head in the clouds, challenged, sensitive, weak-willed, irresponsible (and sometimes much more damaging ones).
Eventually, after you begin to believe these things, your actions are affected by them. Instead of choosing Path A, you move toward Path B because you just don’t have what it takes to be one of the “elite” in life.
Throughout your lifetime, every decision you make is based on the beliefs you formed as a child and young adult.
Beliefs prompt specific  actions
which create specific results
which reinforce the beliefs.
Changing your limiting beliefs requires a willingness to have faith that you are NOT dumb, challenged, irresponsible, weak-willed, or unlucky – even though your experiences thus far seem to have “proven” those things as being true.
But here’s the good news: if you suspend your beliefs and dare to hope that maybe your impressions are false, and once you start taking actions that correspond with more positive beliefs, your results will change!