Achieving Your Goals. Every individual harbors conscious or subconscious ideas that can turn into limiting beliefs, hindering goal achievement. Childhood or self-created, these beliefs, like one about your self-image with money, may impede success.

If you think you’ll perpetually struggle and remain poor, you’re likely paving the way for failure. Your belief in enduring poverty becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This applies to any negativity, be it in your career, education, or personal life, like maintaining a healthy weight. Changing how you perceive yourself can be challenging, making it difficult to release those limiting beliefs.

There are eight telling phrases that point to a limiting belief:

It’s hopeless

Anytime you use the word “never” is a clue that you’re focusing on a limiting belief. For example: “I’ll never have any money because you need money to make money.

I’m helpless

When most people feel uneducated or helpless, they blame their circumstances instead of working to change them. “I can’t manage my money because I don’t know how” sounds insightful, but the part that’s missing is the feeling of helplessness when all you need to do is take a personal finance course or buy, read and practice the lessons in “Personal Finances for Dummies.

It’s useless

The belief that any action won’t make a difference fuels the notion that nothing you do matters. Saying, “Working out an hour a day won’t make me lose weight anyway,” reflects a defeatist attitude. How do you know? Have you committed to anything beyond a couple of weeks?

It’s the universe

Sometimes a limiting belief has to do with the idea that outside forces that you can’t control are at work keeping you down. You can’t find a job or get clients because the economy sucks, where you live is depressed, you don’t have the right clothing and so forth, but you do nothing in your power to change it because it’s destiny. “Everything happens for a reason” type of thinking can be very limiting and make you feel powerless.

I’m worthless

The idea that you’re not smart enough or good enough to do what you really want can be a very strong limiting belief system and seems to affect women more than men. You feel you’re not pretty enough, smart enough, or good enough to have something, so you don’t take the steps to achieve it, because you don’t feel that you deserve it.

It’s genetic

While there are certainly some instances where genetics play a huge role in a person’s life, the truth is that almost everything that is genetic can be fixed with the right mindset, training, exercise, and outlook. You’re not stuck with your genetics, but if you think you are, you may not try any of the things to pull yourself out of the rut you’re stuck in.

I’ll fail

The truth is the fear of failure is something most people have as a limiting belief. “I’m a bad public speaker so if I do it, I’ll be judged, and I’ll fail anyway so why try” is a common refrain. But, how can you set that belief in stone if you’ve not tried?

I’m different

The limiting belief about being different is that different is necessarily bad. You don’t want to be who you are because you’re different and you’ll be looked at as different by other people. You’re afraid to be who you are, and because of that you don’t even know who you are, and you’re too scared to find out due to fear of rejection and ending up alone.

If you catch yourself thinking any of these phrases, actively detach from them and shift to ‘why not me’ instead of ‘why me.’ Consistently ask, ‘why not me,’ recognizing that you’re no different from those who have set and accomplished goals. The distinction lies in the action, not in intelligence or talent.

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