The Beliefs That Limit You and How to Quiet Them
When Trying Harder Isn’t Enough - On Feeling Stuck, Afraid, and Human
Limiting beliefs are those nagging voices of resistance, rebellion, fear, or anxiety. These intrusive states have a way of ruining happiness, disrupting self-care, and keeping dreams stuck in the clouds instead of grounded in reality.
If you’re human, you’ve faced them many times.
Those moments when the noise of your worries drowned everything else out, when fear and sadness settled in hard, leaving you asking, what the heck just happened?
I call limiting beliefs “Doubt Goblins” to bring them down to size and to work with how the brain naturally filters experience. When you learn how to engage your patterns differently, clarity, calm, and manifesting become more accessible. Instead of allowing Doubt Goblins to pull you off course, you can shrink these pesky destroyers of peace and possibility using a three-step process.
I’ll share a friend’s story to show, rather than tell, what I mean.
When the Ground Gives Way
“When my husband told me he wanted a divorce,” she said, “it was a shock. I believed marriage meant safety, home, forever. He was my person. I was just beginning my spiritual awakening, asking big questions, not getting many answers, and then it all fell apart. Everything I thought was secure just wasn’t.” After the divorce, she moved into a condo and stayed there for ten years, but it never felt like home. “I’ve been chasing that feeling of home ever since. Safety, stability, belonging. It’s been a theme. Every time I started to feel grounded, whether in a relationship, a job, or a friendship, something shifted. It got taken away, or I had to move on.” As she spoke, her voice began to slow, softening under the weight of realization. It was as if she could finally hear the pattern that had been running her life.
I asked if I could mirror what I was hearing. She paused, then said, “Yes.”
“What I hear you saying is this: you’re not safe. You’re not stable. You’re not free to be you.”
Silence. The kind that hums with truth. Then, a quiet exhale. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
Her Doubt Goblin had been with her for decades, whispering the same three lies: I am not safe. I am not stable. I am not free to be me.
This was the first shift. The moment my friend acknowledged her Doubt Goblins, something important happened - she interrupted the cycle. Limiting beliefs thrive on unconscious momentum, worry spirals, fear loops, and the pressure to fix yourself. By acknowledging them, simply noticing what’s there without rushing to change it, she began to shrink their influence.
Learning to Carry What Was Never Yours
Next, we explored what stability would feel like.
“I don’t even know what stability feels like,” she admitted. “My mom has always needed me to live the life she wants, and somewhere along the way, I started believing that keeping her world steady meant losing my own. She’s been my Achilles heel my whole life. I’ve spent years making sure everyone else is okay, feeling like I owe her a version of me that keeps her world stable. But I’m so tired of feeling responsible for that.”
Her voice softened. “Some days, I wonder how I keep going. But I know this much. I don’t want to just survive anymore. I want to be me. Calm. Creative. Free.”
What surfaced next were all the ways she had built instability by trying to please others. “I see it clearly now,” she said. “I need to create a foundation that’s mine. Stable income. Stable energy. Stable self.”
Having Stability isn’t the Same as Feeling Stable
I could feel her exhaustion. This was a turning point, a shift from despair to something softer. She was beginning to name the difference between having stability and feeling stable in the most human and tender way possible.
“What does stability mean to you?” I asked.
She didn’t even pause. “Home,” she said softly. “Having my own space. That’s what stability is for me.”
Then she went quiet. “The strange thing is, I had that. For ten years, I had my own condo, my own life. But I never really felt at home in it. I couldn’t let myself receive it. I kept focusing on what I didn’t like, my neighbors, the HOA, and I never let myself settle into the safety I said I wanted.”
Her voice caught. “It’s like I had the thing I’d been praying for, and I still couldn’t let it in.”
That’s when the old familiar whispers told her she wasn’t safe, wasn’t supported, couldn’t trust what she had, that if she let herself feel secure, it would all be taken away. They had been with her for so long, they felt like truth.
This was the next shift: accepting Doubt Goblins. As counterintuitive as it feels, accepting them is essential. Acceptance does not mean agreement, approval, or resignation. It means staying present without tightening. These Doubt Goblins showed up because some part of you cares deeply, about safety, love, belonging, or getting it right. Fighting them only adds fuel to the noise.
Resistance Gives Way to Acceptance
Every time she thought she’d found her footing, something changed. A move. A layoff. A loss. “Maybe the stability I’ve been chasing wasn’t out there,” she said. “Maybe it’s been trying to grow inside me all along. I think I finally get it. Stability isn’t about what I have. It’s about allowing myself to be.”
That’s the thing about Doubt Goblins. They don’t always sound like doubt. Sometimes they whisper in the language of survival: You’re not safe. You’ll lose everything. You can’t trust this.
For her, that Doubt Goblin had a name: Instability. It had been running her life for decades, disguising fear as practicality and resistance as responsibility.
She paused. “I keep shifting, growing, changing. And every time I do, the world around me rearranges itself. I thought it meant I failed. But maybe,” she smiled, almost surprised at her own words, “maybe I’ve been leveling up. Maybe stability isn’t supposed to look like stillness.”
That is when appreciation slipped in, quiet, steady and patient.
Letting Appreciation Do What Force Can’t
Facing the Doubt Goblins requires courage. But self-awareness reveals the paradox so many of us live inside: we crave stability, yet when it finally shows up, the Doubt Goblins whisper that we don’t deserve it. Once the noise settles, what remains serves you far better: curiosity, clarity and choice.
Instead of asking what needs fixing, you begin to notice what is already true. Find one place, even a small one, where your Badassfirmation already exists in your life or in your body.
It doesn’t need to be dramatic. Subtle counts. Quiet counts.
Appreciation anchors the nervous system in reality instead of fear. From that grounded place, movement and change become easier and more natural. Recognizing who you already are creates the foundation for who you are becoming.
This is where appreciation enters as a soft recognition of what’s already here. Humor helps. So does honesty.
“I see you. I hear you. And you can kiss my tuchas.”
You don’t have to wrestle these thoughts into submission. When you allow them to exist without judgment or urgency, the emotional static begins to dissipate, and your energy returns to you.
I appreciate my breath.
I appreciate this moment of calm.
I appreciate the woman I’m becoming.
That quiet recognition is enough. She nodded, tears forming. “I’ve been trying to build safety from the outside in. But it starts here.” She touched her heart.
Exactly.
Wisdom Finally Be Received
“I get it now, Tina. Appreciation is different because it welcomes in.”
Yes. Appreciation bypasses resistance, the Doubt Goblins, and the noise of the monkey mind. It slips in quietly, steady, patient, and unwavering.
Together, we personalized a simple practice she could actually receive. In this case, we created a Badassfirmation™, an affirmation she could believe. She chose the foundational statement: I am. I am safe. I am stable. I am secure.
As she repeated those words, she tuned into experiences that were one hundred percent true. For my client, a woman deeply connected to the divine, stability and security were constant in that connection. We sat together while she allowed that sense of security to strengthen in her body.
She whispered, “I am secure. I am safe.”
By naming it and feeling it, she created room for more of what she desired.
Living From a Place of Allowing
She shared that this was the most meaningful conversation she’d had in a while. In a season of upheaval, losing her father, her job, and living with her mother despite their long and tangled history, she felt something shift, and in that shift, more paths began to reveal themselves.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of changing perspective, much like the river I wrote about when it comes to wants versus desires. There’s a river here, too, between allowing and blocking flow.
Acknowledge, accept, appreciate, allow.
That is the pathway, and the evolution, of a Badass.
