Transform Your Life: Breaking Free from Limiting Beliefs
How I Overcame Conditioning to Unlock My True Potential and Empowerment
Thinking back on the kind of life I lived from 0-21, I can’t really imagine continuing that for 80+ years now. It wasn’t necessarily a bad life, it was just filled with a lot of things that turned out not to be truthful. And I had no idea why until I was able to break my “conditioning” and actually see the potential of the life I could live once the harness was taken off.
First, a little bit on the conditioning experience, which I’m now very familiar with. We grow up in small worlds surrounded by our family and peers, and the first mentors we see are our parents or guardians. We idolize them and believe them to be the best source for everything we need in life. After all, they are our parents, and who better to learn from than the very people who brought us into this world and have proven to have survived the Earth experience thus far?
There’s nothing wrong with learning from your parents, but it’s a good idea to note that you can only learn as much from someone as they themselves have experienced. For most young adults, when they leave the nest, they will find shortly down the road that there were things they needed to know how to do that their parents, school, and friends failed to teach them. Sometimes it’s just because they never got around to it. More so, it’s because they actually didn’t know how.
At a young age, we are thrown into the schooling system, which is to be trusted indefinitely without questioning a damn thing. After all, so many people went through it, and it has been in place for over 100 years, so why not just go with the flow? In school, we are forced to study a variety of subjects, most of which we never use in the real world. Just for a moment, imagine the education you could have had if all the fluff was taken out, and you actually learned how to operate in the world? Imagine learning skills like how to communicate, how to deal with your emotions, how to talk to and network with people, or, God forbid, how to actually make money?
If you count 4 years of college, the average person is in the schooling system for around 17 years. Can you imagine spending those 17 years instead taking in valuable content that is actually going to help you pave a way for yourself in the world? I can. For the last 20 years, I’ve been doing just that, and I’ve amassed enough knowledge and experience to circle my old self 50 times over. For example, I started a business on my own 6 years ago and grew it to 7 figures. Even though I was a business minor, they didn’t teach me how to do that in college. I didn’t even hear about that being an option... to start your own company.
To be fair, not all things you learn in school are worthless, such as learning to read, write, and basic math. But when you take into account the 17 years that the average person spends in that system, are they getting the value for their time? I’ll let you decide that one..
During the summer after graduating high school, I was preparing to go to college as a business major and had selected a school out of state, which was something I was petrified of doing. So why did I do it? I desperately felt that I needed a change, and looking ahead to college, I didn’t feel like my network and education system had prepared me for the real world. I sensed that I was missing so much valuable information out there and knew I had to learn it.
Luckily for me, I spent $125k on a college education that did not go to waste. I made a bold move and changed my major from Business to something more Psychology-based. My desire was to study human behavior. I had a teacher who was later fired shortly after I graduated from the university for not following the curriculum properly. He was kind of a nut, but boy was he an absolute genius. I’d never met anyone like him before. He was like a mesh between a rebel gangster and a philosopher. I never knew anyone could live on the edge of both sides like that.
When I met with him for the first time, he asked me why I was in his office, and I said that I wanted to learn about people more than anything else in the world. I wanted to understand them, the choices they made, their desires, and how they operate in the world. I remember him kind of laughing after I finished because he could see from my demeanor that I was just a sheltered kid from a small town of 7,000 people. He knew so much about me without me even saying anything to him. I was mesmerized by this and wanted to learn how to do it too.
He told me that this was not some type of training that you read in a book and then understand. It would require physical action and willingness to experience things differently, take in and process new material, and that I would have to put my upbringing to the side.
I asked him why, and he said,
"Because your current beliefs and ‘restrictions’ will get in the way of you accepting the new material. You have to become a completely open book in order to discover the richness of life."
He suggested private lessons, and the training began.
It took about 3 years of constant failure before I finally started to break the mold. I was a really sheltered kid and needed more work than most people. Luckily, the expansive internet nowadays makes it a lot easier for people to find and experience what they need to grow. My teacher put me through years of in-person acting exercises in order to get my mind and body used to living and handling things differently. I played a variety of different characters, some close to home, most very far away from what I knew.
The process was painful, but I could see that I was learning that there was a whole world of possibility out there, and I was the one who was just restricting myself to holding a one-page book instead of a "never-ending story." Quick tangent: that’s a book and movie that also added to my life experience and offers huge life lessons if you feel like checking it out.
I remember my teacher giving me the example of when you walk up to the checkout counter at CVS and the cashier asks you, “How are you?” Most people just answer, “Good, how are you?” because they know that the cashier doesn’t really care how they are. That right there is restricting ourselves from expressing how we truly feel. Next time someone asks you that, I challenge you to actually share something with them that shows them how you are doing, whether good or bad. It will truly shock them and may even break them out of the mold for a second. You may see a glimmer of humanity in their eyes because YOU were the one who just opened them up to it.
He gave me another example: coming up to the checkout counter when the cashier asks you, “Did you find everything you were looking for?” He told me that when asked that, he would respond with, “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be up here.” Sure, that could come off as rude, but I knew that what he was trying to show us is how scripted our lives are without us even realizing it. Where’s the humanity? Where’s the community? Where’s the empathy? These things are not natural to us from birth; they need to be invited in and learned.
You may be wondering, can I learn these kinds of things without a teacher like this? The answer is, YES, you can. Once you are aware that this path exists and that it has been hidden from so many by modern-day society and their brainwashing culture, you can surely begin. A great place to start is by questioning just about everything. Don’t question it to prove it false; question it to see if it genuinely makes sense for you and the path you want to go on.
We now know that college is not required to make it in the world. I do have a degree, but I never used it to get one job I ever had. To this day, it sits with dust accumulated in my closet; I’m not even proud of it. But what I am proud of is the experience that I had at my university and what I ultimately took away from the training. That is a time period I will never forget and owe all my future success to. My professor forced my mind open to all the possibilities out there and showed me through questioning things and experiencing things differently, that I was responsible for molding my own character. I was taught from a young age not to disagree openly, engage in conflict with others for any reason, or risk failure. After being willing to confront those things and try them out, I realized so much more about myself, including who I was and where I wanted to go.
It’s your responsibility to discover your true self, why you’re here, and what your WHY is. You can’t do that if you’re not willing to push the boundaries of what you know or what you think you know. It’s very much like a video game, but in real life. When you realize that every day that you spend “working on your character,” your decisions, knowledge, and experience compound to give you a better, fuller experience in all your future experiences.
BE YOUR OWN GUIDE
When you sit down with yourself and reflect for a few moments, you will be able to see what is working for you in life and what isn’t. If you write these things down in 2 columns, it’s even better. Then you can take the things that are not working and search for alternatives. Question them, find people doing things differently, and learn from them. Then comes the big step.
STEP INTO THE RING AND TRY THINGS DIFFERENTLY
If you aren’t willing to try things differently, the chances of improving and getting what you want are slim to none. After all, the reason why you don’t have what you want or you are not where you want to be is because you’ve been led to believe that doing the things you’re doing will eventually work out.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”
I remember a scene I was doing with a classmate of mine under my professor’s direction. I was sitting at a desk, writing my grandfather’s eulogy and had to be at his funeral within 30 minutes, prepared to read it in front of our whole family. All of a sudden, my friend Teddy came blazing through the front door in hysterics, yelling at me for my attention and saying that something awful had just happened to him. I didn’t even turn around because I was on a time constraint and was already running WAY behind. “Teddy, I can’t talk now,” I said in a mildly frustrated voice. He said, “What do you mean you can’t talk right now? I just hit a cat on my way home and it’s stuck to the front of my car. I can’t even live with myself right now.” A few more quick back and forths on why I couldn’t give him the attention he wanted put me in a slightly more frustrated state. But it wasn’t enough. My professor could see that it wasn’t truthful, and I could hear him barking orders from the sidelines.
“You have to be at that funeral in 20 minutes, and you’re not even half done! How does that make you feel? Your friend clearly doesn’t give a f*ck about your situation; how does THAT make you feel?”
I felt enraged, to be honest. It reminded me of all the times that I had been dismissed and not heard in life. Sure, Teddy hit a cat, but my grandfather just died, and my friend was not even acknowledging that in this moment. While I did acknowledge the cat, I just didn’t meet his expectations. My mind froze up; I didn’t know what to do. Because what I was about to do next, I had never done before. I didn’t even know it was an option.
“Throw him out of your room and finish your activity!” I heard my professor yell. “Get rid of him.”
“Teddy, get out,” I said in a choked-up voice. I couldn’t even express what I was going through.
(I wasn’t aware of this, but apparently before the exercise began, Teddy was instructed by the professor not to leave the room unless he actually felt he needed to.)
Teddy told me he wasn’t leaving until I helped him with the cat.
“That’s a garbage attempt! THROW HIM OUT!” my professor screamed.
At that moment, something inside me just snapped. I pushed the chair back with my legs so hard that it skidded across the floor until it hit the wall, and in one fluid motion, I turned to face my friend, my face red, my eyes twitching.
“GET THE FU*K OUT OF MY HOUSE!” I screamed as I started walking briskly toward him with the full intent to force him to leave.
Teddy took one look at me and ran for the door. He left the room, and the exercise ended.
My body and mind were in shock. I had never expressed that kind of emotion towards anyone before, but it was exactly how I was feeling given the situation that was created. It made me realize that I had things inside me that I didn’t even know about. Sure, that’s not a nice thing to say to someone, but what we can gather from this experience is that in that moment, I had discovered something new: “Self-Respect.”
I never thought that expressing myself truthfully out in the open would lead to me feeling much more satisfied with myself. I always focused on the other angle: how other people were going to feel about me. I never thought that by honoring myself in this way, I would end up improving my relationship with myself and building trust with that part of me. This was a huge milestone, and I started to understand myself faster and more fully. I had broken the mold and seen a whole new way to live.
Since that story happened nearly 20 years ago, I have become fascinated with building an authentic relationship with the self and teaching others to do the same. My work has led me to discover that it all starts with that inner part of us. Once we satisfy that “inner child,” it’s like a master key that unlocks various doors for new journeys, leading to new experiences and life improvements.
How Can You Begin to Do the Same?
Journaling: One of the best ways I’ve discovered for learning about yourself is through journaling. Start with a private journal just for you to read and use to collect your thoughts. This could either be typed or handwritten; the most important thing is that you structure it in a way that works best for you. Be brutally honest with how you feel, even if you find yourself saying things you don’t want to say. This will help you understand your inner child and its needs, which are also your needs but may have been hidden within you. Once you begin to have these thoughts and conversations with yourself, you can start to satisfy these needs within yourself, and the healing will begin.
Journaling is a great form of self-reflection and therapy. If you’re not a fan of typing or writing with a pen, you could start an audio journal, which I have also done. You can use the voice app on your phone or any other portable recording device to get your thoughts down. I have had an audio journal since 2014 and still record my thoughts and feelings on walks to this day. Occasionally, I’ll go back and listen to my audio notes to see how far I’ve come or to revisit something that I still need to work on.
Listening: Listening is a skill that most of us think we know how to do well. In fact, it’s a skill that must be learned, just like everything else, and our recent technology age has made it even harder. Listening requires calming the mind from anxious thoughts that often force themselves to the forefront, making us believe they are the most important things to focus on until they are done. What happens if we address all those things and finish them? Usually, the mind generates more work and things to focus on, and the cycle repeats. Thus, you are never actually free to offer your attention to another.
Listening isn’t just about hearing other people; it’s most important to be able to listen to yourself. A great way to start is to take a few moments during the day and genuinely ask yourself: “How am I doing right now? What can I give myself right now that I know I need?” When you address a need you have and begin to provide that for yourself, it unlocks a feeling of “self-respect” within you. You will begin to feel a warm, caring, and loving energy, usually near your heart or gut center . This is a sign that you are giving yourself what you need, whether it is rest, fuel, socialization, or a walk in nature. You have answered the calling of your inner child, and that inner part of you has become a bigger fan of you because of it. I usually do this type of check-in with myself in the late afternoon, after I’ve worked for a few hours. Most times, my body feels a little restless, and I need to calm myself and re-ground. I do this by putting on a quick guided meditation that is 10 minutes or less. Despite the short time, I feel completely different afterward and feel proud that I was able to give myself what I needed to keep my day on the right track.
Confide in People You Trust: A great way to either double-check your own work or see other angles you couldn’t see yourself is to ask a person close to you how they see you in these recent days. Is there anything they pick up on from just being in your energy? Are you working too much? Not getting enough sleep? Been irritable recently? Having a trusted friend, family member, or partner to confide in can help you stay on track and not forget about self-care.
One More as a Bonus...
Explore New Situations: Expose yourself to new things, new areas, new people, new scenarios. Being willing to drift outside your comfort zone means you’re willing to discover your full arc and what really speaks to you. Think about the things you’re currently passionate about and interested in. How did you find out about those things? Can you continue to explore life this way occasionally challenging yourself and picking up new interests?
I was always fascinated with different cultures but never thought I would enjoy learning other languages as much as I do now. I started with Italian culture and the language, never thinking I’d be able to learn a foreign language completely on my own. Six years later, I hit the advanced level; some even considered me fluent. After that, I explored other languages such as French and Spanish. Now, I’m learning Japanese.
So how does this relate to you?
When you expose yourself to different things, you’ll never know what will spark interest. If you find something outside the box that you want to do, never doubt yourself. You can do anything, and there’s always a way; it’s all about beginning and then tweaking the path along the way. If you have already achieved things like this, NEVER forget them. Never forget the passion you had while learning them, how alive you felt, and most of all, that you DID IT. That means you can do the next thing and the next. It’s all about momentum, and reflecting on something hard you did in the past is a way to bring the confidence and belief in yourself that you need to take on the next thing. If you can’t recall anything like this from your past, the excitement lies in conquering the first thing, so I urge you to start slow and remain consistent.
Wrapping Things Up
One of the greatest things we can focus on is tweaking ourselves and slowly bringing in the life we want. When we honor what makes us feel good, we not only begin to live our dream lives but also share our best, most confident selves with everyone around us. You never know when that energy could inspire someone close to you and change their life for the better. And it never would have happened had you not taken the first leap of faith to transform your life and break free from your limiting beliefs.
Thank you all for reading this very real story about my life. I hope it has opened up some new pathways for you to explore and brought about some inspiration within you.
May you continue to have a wonderful journey and life experience on this rock floating through space.