In a precedent article, I talked about a technique that helps unearthing deeply buried limiting beliefs.
Most of the time, simply realizing what the belief is helps identify the solution and formulate another belief that will positively impact a given situation.
Some times however, it is not enough.
In this article I’m going to teach you a very simple technique, one you can apply instantly after this short read to give yourself advice on how to solve your limiting beliefs and answer your questions.
You can answer your own questions
The first thing you need to realize is that you can answer your own questions.
You are more than capable of providing yourself with good advice. You have all the answers — or the basis for it — in you based on your experience and deep knowledge of yourself.
However, it’s really hard to get to those insights when you are deeply involved in the situation: you lack hindsight.
You are so deeply concerned and affected by the issue that you lack the clarity to find the right answers and solve the situation.
I want you to realize that the main part of the problem is not that you don’t have the answers but that you are not in the right mindset to articulate them.
And switching into the right mindset is something we can solve and I can help you with.
Finding the right question
Before jumping into how to change your frame of mind, there is another point I want to make.
Much like explained in my precedent article on how to discover limiting beliefs, you have to identify the right question to ask.
You are going to get answers and if you are motivated enough, you will take action on those answers to solve your problems.
It would be much more efficient to ask the right question from the start, to solve the real problem rather than answering “surface” questions and not really solving your problem.
Let me illustrate with an example.
Let’s take Mary. She is struggling in a bad relationship with Peter who is being abusive. However, she is deeply attached to him. She is not sure about how to solve this problematic situation.
To solve it, she really needs to be mindful of how she questions herself.
If she addresses the first question that comes to mind like:
“What should I do regarding my relationship with Peter?”
She might get the answer:
“Leave him, it’s a dangerous and unhealthy situation, you deserve a better”
However, if this is a recurring pattern and she has had the habit of finding herself in abusive relationships, the right question to answer might be:
“How can I not find myself in abusive relationships?”
By solving the first question, she will change the current situation but perpetuate the pattern. By solving the second one, she will durably and positively influence the rest of her life.
You get my point: be mindful about qualifying the problem and finding the right question to ask yourself.
How to ask “your best self” and get your best answer
Now you know you can answer your own questions and you are attentive to asking the right question.
Here comes the simple and effective technique to switch to the right mindset and provide yourself with your best answer :
Talk to yourself as if you were another person.
Much like in mindful meditation practice, when you step out of your own thoughts to watch them, you want to step out of your own body and advise yourself like would a friend.
This is very simple, yet very effective.
How many times have you provided good advice to friends in a particularly touchy situation? How many times have you been thanked for your insights and judicious remarks to help friends?
By stepping out of your own body and imagining your giving advice to a friend, you are immediately gaining hindsight, avoiding emotional and irrational thoughts and seeing the situation with greater clarity.
Here is a complete breakdown of how I proceed:
- I fully qualify the problem and find the right formulation of my question to maximize the impact of the answer
- I sit at a table in a calm environment: this just helps being in a more focused state. However this technique could be used on the spot whenever you need it, I just find having a quiet environment allow for a better immersion in the technique
- I usually close my eyes
- I imagine myself sitting across the table and answering the question
- I open my eyes and spend some time synthetizing the long form answer into something more condensed and actionable
This is it. Simple, elegant, extremely effective.
Conclusion
This article shows another very simple mind tool to improve your life and unchain your mind from limiting beliefs, all of it in order to deeply influence your life for the better.
If you have other tools, use the comment section below, I’d be happy to experiment, research and talk about them in future articles.