What Your Beliefs Are Actually Protecting
(If you'd rather take this in at your own pace, keep reading. If you want it less tidy, the version where I think out loud, go off script, and probably contradict myself more often — that's the audio above).
A couple of years ago, I wrote an article about limiting beliefs.
Reading it earlier this week was an interesting experience.
I don’t think I disagree with it, per se. I don’t think it was misguided in any way either.
I’m even told it helped people.
But I couldn’t help but notice how the writing did reflect the exact position of my understanding at the time.
And as I read back, I could see exactly where my understanding ended.
The original piece was built around a familiar idea: how we tend to hold beliefs about ourselves, our work, and the worth that shapes what we consider possible in our lives.
Beliefs about potential
Beliefs about talent.
Money, success.
About whether or not we belong in certain rooms.
I still think that the overall anatomy of what the article pointed to at the time was in the right direction.
What’s changed for me since though, is not the observation in itself, but the questions I find myself asking.
What Are Limiting Beliefs, Anyway?
The term limiting belief became popular through coaching, personal development, and psychology circles.
At its simplest, it’s an assumption we hold about ourselves, other people, or the world that influences our behaviour in ways we may not fully recognise.
Some are obvious.
- "I'm not talented enough."
- "I'm too old."
- "Nobody cares about my work."
Others are more subtle.
- "Real artists shouldn't care about money."
- "If I promote myself, people will think I'm arrogant."
- "I need to suffer for my art."
- "If my music is good enough, someone will discover me."
- "A real artist shouldn't need marketing."
Many of these beliefs can feel like facts because we've ended up repeating them long enough (often unwittingly so), to a point where they’ve embedded themselves within through sheer practice and added to the very noise that threw them in our way in the first place.
That’s when we stop discerning them as interpretations, and begin experiencing them as a reality instead–individual and/or shared.
It’s probably why the concept of a limiting belief (as opposed to an empowering one) probably became so useful to start off with.
It encouraged us to question the assumptions we had never realised were assumptions.
In many cases, that alone can be a lightbulb moment.
An artist who recognises that "I'm bad at business" was just a story rather than an objective truth, might start behaving differently.
A creative who thought they need to be ‘talented’ for meaningful output may re-examine the proposition.
The framework has indeed, helped countless people.
I know it helped me.
But what I've become less convinced about since, is whether the belief was where the story began.
The Question That Changed Things
For years, much of my practice revolved around identifying beliefs and challenging them.
If an artist was struggling with the regular professional hazards (releasing music, connecting with their audience, understanding finances, market their work, or build/pursue opportunities), the obvious question seemed to be:
What belief is creating this experience?
It's a useful question.
But once the skill of identifying the belief is mastered, what we’re left with is a list–of all the beliefs that might be standing in our way.
They don’t necessarily free us.
That was the observation that resulted in my increasing interest in a different question altogether over the last few years:
Why does this belief exist in the first place?
The shift may sound subtle, but in practice, it changed almost everything.
Where the older question assumed the belief as a source, the newer one revealed it as a consequence instead.
My older article essentially said:
Artists struggle because they believe things they are limited by.
Today, I’m saying:
Artists often believe things that aren't accurate because a part of them thought those beliefs were necessary.
That is a very different conversation.
When Understanding Isn't Enough
One of the more uncomfortable discoveries of the past few years has been realizing that understanding a pattern and being free of it are not the same thing.
I’ve learnt the hard way in my own patterns, and the people I work with.
Most creatives I know are already highly self-aware.
They know why they procrastinate.
They know why visibility feels uncomfortable.
They know why money feels complicated.
They know why consistency can be confusing.
The question then is if the insight alone can create change.
When I look back, some of the most significant shifts in my own life haven't come from just changing what I think, but from recognising patterns that no amount of intellectualising seemed capable of reaching.
I could explain them.
I could analyse them.
I could even teach them.
What I couldn't always do was to stop repeating them.
A particular example that’s easy for me to cite would be confusing the freedom to allow others to misunderstand us, with actually thinking of ourselves in the same way.
This started getting costly, somewhere along the way, and for the longest time, I might have just described it through the language of beliefs.
- Me believing my needs didn't matter.
- Me believing harmony was more important than honesty.
- Me believing that being understanding was always virtuous.
There may have been elements of truth in those explanations, but what became increasingly difficult to ignore was the fact that understanding it all changed very little.
The pattern remained. And what finally began creating movement wasn't a better argument, but becoming curious about what the pattern was covering up.
Protecting.
And then the epiphanies started.
How accommodating others had once preserved connection.
How understanding someone else's perspective had once felt wiser than risking disapproval.
How blending in felt safer than sticking out with a thought that might challenge it.
How so much of the behaviour that kept confusing me was not evidence of weakness, but adaptation.
When I stopped treating the pattern as an enemy, I began learning from it.
Protective Intelligence
One of the most significant changes in my work has come with the integration of what has established itself as ‘somatic’ approaches in facilitation, practice and coaching.
Approaches that my background in Yoga since I was a child has always included but now have a name in more mainstream circles.
The inter-connections between the musculoskeletal and nervous system, how it affects the quality of our life, research and study in ‘parts’ work (best known from the way Internal Family systems broke it down).
All of these combined well with other teachers I have studied with like Kenny Werner, Ryan Hurst and Peter Crone.
What they all share is a growing appreciation of how human behaviour is far more intelligent than it appears–and in ways we don’t always see.
Many of the things we label as self-sabotage start to look very different when viewed through this lens.
We're no longer dealing with faulty thinking that needs to be ‘corrected’.
We're dealing with the realization that we’re not ‘damaged’ or ‘silly’, but way more intelligent than we’d realized.
And it’s a different kind of intelligence altogether.
A protective one.
An intelligence that taught us that:
- Visibility could be dangerous.
- Wealth came with conflict.
- Success meant abandonment.
- Remaining talented and undiscovered was safer than truly being seen.
- Belonging could result in self-abandonment.
From this perspective, the belief is not a ‘cause’, but just the story attached to an adaptation meant to protect us.
Way back in the day, something happened, the system adapted and a belief emerged to make sense of the entire process. It filed it away as a system that kept us safe, and kept repeating itself.
This, in my experience, is the reason many creatives find themselves eluded of the elixir they thought was at the end of the journey, even after years of ‘mindset’ work.
They can identify the belief, they can explain it, they can even replace it with an ‘empowering’ one.
And yet the behaviour often remains. Because the body does not necessarily change just because the story did.
The Artist's Dilemma
This shows up everywhere in creative careers.
A creative tells me they struggle with self-promotion, and on the surface, it looks like a belief problem.
- They believe marketing is manipulative.
- Visibility is vanity.
- Perhaps they believe nobody is interested anyway.
But the truth is, in more cases than one, what emerges underneath is a nervous system that associates visibility with judgement, criticism, exclusion, or even humiliation.
The same applies to money.
An artist thinks they have a limiting belief around charging for their work.
That may be true, but sometimes the deeper issue is that charging money creates sensations of discomfort that have little to do with logic.
Conflict.
Guilt.
Fear of being labelled a ‘sellout’.
Becoming someone they were taught not to become.
That’s when arguing with the belief becomes a meaningless battle.
And understanding the protection we think it might be offering a more interesting street to go down.
The Limits of Mindset
To be clear, this is not an argument against mindset work.
There was a period in my life when mindset work was enormously valuable, and it always will be, when looked upon holistically.
Many of us genuinely benefit from learning to challenge assumptions we have carried unquestioned for years.
The framework is not the problem, it’s just that it can get mistaken for the whole picture.
A doorway becomes the house, and arguing with thoughts repeatedly become another way of remaining trapped inside.
The artist who cannot release their work doesn’t need a better argument.
The writer who cannot raise their rates may not need another affirmation.
The CEO who keeps procrastinating may not need more evidence.
The most useful question is not:
"How do I change this belief?"
It's this:
"What happens if I don’t need this protection?"
Not All Beliefs are Equal (The Other Trap)
The self-development world often says:
"You have limiting beliefs. Replace them with empowering ones."
Other spiritual circles offer a different message:
"There are no limiting beliefs. You're already free."
Both perspectives while containing something valuable, can miss something vital.
We can repeat affirmations every morning and still freeze before releasing a song.
We can understand non-duality, meditate daily, and still feel our stomach tighten every time we send an invoice.
The nervous system does not care which philosophy we have adopted.
It responds to perceived safety.
And realizing that we are already whole is a pill so sweet that it may taste so unfamiliar that it feels bitter .
A Different Kind of Curiosity
What I appreciate most about this newer perspective is that it changes the relationship we have with ourselves.
The old conversation often sounded like conflict.
- How do I overcome this?
- How do I eliminate this?
- How do I get rid of this belief?
The newer conversation feels different.
Less adversarial, more curious.
Instead of asking how to defeat a belief, we begin exploring what purpose it serves.
Instead of trying to fix ourselves, we become interested in understanding ourselves.
That shift alone has changed the way I work.
And perhaps more importantly, the way I relate to myself.
Closing Thoughts
If I were rewriting my original article from scratch today, I would still acknowledge that beliefs matter.
They do.
They shape perception.
They influence behaviour.
They affect the choices we make.
What I would add is this:
Beliefs rarely appear in isolation.They emerge from a relationship with experience.
Adaptation. Attempts to create safety, belonging, certainty, or protection.
The next time you encounter a belief you would like to get rid of, perhaps the most interesting question is not whether it is ‘true’ or ‘limiting’.
Maybe a more interesting question would be:
What has this belief spent years trying to protect?
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