Steps to Overcoming Your Limitations

by Delia Quigley -

If you are a goal setting kind of person then you know that just saying you will make changes does not necessarily mean it will happen. There are all kinds of things that can get in the way of our good intentions, most of all our mental excuses.

Change in life is inevitable; actually it is the only thing we can guarantee to happen other than dying.

The question is, do you shape your life according to your dreams and desires or do you just let life happen, like a free fall through time, dreaming of what you shoulda, coulda, woulda done, if only?

Making resolutions, setting goals and making commitments are easy to do but it is the ability to see them through to completion that is difficult and tests our human nature. The fact that self-sacrifice is called for is what makes overcoming our limitations and manifesting our dreams so challenging.

It requires that we give up our comforts, our fears and our long-standing habits, even the ones that are painful or threaten our well being in some ways. At least we know what to expect from them but stepping out into the unknown? Sheeze, now that’s a scary place.

Limitations are not always visible to the eye at first glance. 

They take some investigation, like hidden chambers or weak character flaws that need to be confronted and coaxed out into the light. They begin in our mind as thoughts and translate into actions that hold us back from achieving our potential. Instead we settle for a kind of uncomfortable mediocrity, knowing in our hearts that if I could just take that first step.

STEPS TO OVERCOMING LIMITATIONS

1. Identify your limitations.  

This requires coming to know yourself by observing your thoughts with integrity and scrutiny. By watching your thoughts you begin to notice, say, a tendency to procrastinate, to judge yourself harshly, to belittle yourself or to ignore what is best for you. 

Sitting in meditation helps with this process, as does writing thoughts down in a journal for future reference. 

2. Recognize your limitations.  

Now the work begins, because you have to stay present to how that mental limitation can show up over and over again. In A New Earth, Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, Eckhart Tolle refers to these limitations as a negative state of thoughts that are easily overlooked, precisely because they are so common, so normal. 

You live with these negative thoughts without even knowing you are thinking them. Paying attention to what and how you are thinking allows you to counteract the thought or action before it can manifest. 

3. Accept your limitations.  

Rather than lash out in anger and do battle with yourself, accept that this is the person you have become, and these are the thoughts your ego has created as a means of survival. 

Think of the mind as a computer where your thoughts are made up of random input from past experience, images, conversations, instructions, and interactions. You must first accept whatever and whomever you have become in order to begin changing that person. 

4. Honor your limitations.  

This may be the most important task of the four steps and, for some, the most difficult. To honor life’s lessons introduces them as worthy opponents. 

If we are, as some say, spiritual beings having a human experience, then confronting our limitations should be done with the understanding that these challenges are what help us to grow beyond the ordinary and away from mediocrity.

To honor these lessons is to take them on with a courage we may think is impossible but is within each and everyone of us, just waiting to be called into action.

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