How To Overcome Limiting Beliefs (With The People Around You)

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In this clip from Episode 1 of the WeNomad podcastDavid Lahav and I talk about overcoming limiting beliefs by surrounding yourself with people who live the life you want to live.

For more, watch the full 30-minute episode here. Aside from limiting beliefs, we also talk about balancing financial freedom with internal freedom, how to be strategic about where you live, and other topics related to digital nomading.

Key Takeaways:

  • Consciously choosing the people you spend time with can inspire and upgrade your life.
  • Limiting beliefs are strongly held, mostly subconscious beliefs that prevent you from doing or achieving what you want in life. They limit your potential and can move you to act against your own self-interests. They cause you to think irrationally and hold you back in life. Most of the time, people believe their limiting beliefs to be true, but they’re actually just beliefs that can be changed.
  • You can overcome limiting beliefs by surrounding yourself with people who have the same mindset as you want to have. If your close network of people doesn’t live the life you aspire to live, then find people online and connect with them through calls or other forms of communication.

Video Transcript:

Cam:

I’m curious how you’ve thought about your inner circle and the beliefs that they hold.

David:

The most important thing is the people you’re surrounded with. We impact one another, or the community impacts us.

For example, for us, when we spent time together and we chose to be with each other 50% of our days, and the time we spent in Barbados… that was a very conscious choice: This is the person I want to bring into my life, with his energy, with his inspiration, and the way he views life. You impacted me with your energy and the way you’re thinking. It can be a conscious or unconscious thing.

If you look around and your partner, family, and friends don’t live the life you aspire to live in, that’s an opportunity to inspire and upgrade the people you hang out with.

Whether it’s locally, physically, and these days, online communities, books, videos, or courses… They can substitute the actual people that you hang around with because then you’re going to be like a sponge and soak up what those other people — even if it’s virtually or even one-sided, watching somebody’s course or video — you can soak up their believes.

Cam:

That’s such a good point. I’ve been thinking about that point combined with the limiting beliefs thing.

For me, I’ve been wandering all over the place for many years, and so most of my favorite people aren’t where I am. The belief that I’m absorbing from other people… My close network isn’t with me. We’ve been doing this. But doing recurring calls with people — all my favorite people — whose ideas and mindsets I want to seep into my mind, I have recurring calls with them.

And I think that’s a really powerful concept — for anyone who’s in a place where they feel trapped or they feel like they’re not around people who have the mindset of where they want to go; they’re not around entrepreneurs, they’re not around whatever type of person they want to become — that you can build that community online.

You can find those people online. You can set up calls with those people. You can absorb that energy even if you’re not in the physical location with those people.

David:

Absolutely. So, about limiting belief, there’s another thing worth mentioning, and that’s most of the time, we believe that belief to be true. We’re not even aware that it’s a limiting belief. We just think this is reality.

“Oh, reality is I can’t become a nomad and travel and make however much money I want to.” I have a limiting belief. “I can’t do this because of X.” “I can’t do this because of Y.” And as long as we believe that to be true, that’s going to be a reality.

But once we’re even open to questioning — or maybe we see an example of someone else that has achieved the very thing that we tell ourselves we can’t — then something interesting starts happening where those limiting beliefs that we take as reality are now becoming malleable. We can start saying, “Oh, this isn’t necessarily true, it’s what I was assuming that is true.”

Cam:

Yeah, I think that’s where stories are so powerful as well.

Just hearing stories and breaking down the barriers of what’s possible in life, and hearing people’s stories who’ve achieved or who’ve charted new paths and figured out new things to understand, “Okay, even if no one has gone down this path before, I can go down and I can figure it out and I can navigate it. There are no rules. There are no barriers to what I can do and how I can live.”

I've been building digital businesses, wandering the world, and writing about optimizing life for freedom since early 2017. My mission is to lower the barrier for people who want to live with more freedom: whether that be as an entrepreneur, a digital nomad, an early retiree, or just as someone who wants to live a happiness-driven life.