Creating Impact From the Inside Out & Hitting Your Upper Limits
I’m really excited for today’s podcast as we are going to talk about some cool things. I’d say it was a continuation with what we dove into last week--trusting your inner guidance and really learning how to listen to it. Today we are talking about creating impact from the inside out and I’ll teach about what are your upper limits and how you know when you’re hitting them.
To dive in, I know you want to create an impact externally. You want to help people, you want to make a difference, you want to make an impact on this world. In order for you to create impact externally, it first starts within. In order for you to help 100 people, you first have to help yourself. Whenever I am a guest speaker at masterminds or other people’s group programs, this is what I start off with. In order for you to help 100, you have to help 1--you first have to help yourself. Your clients are always going to be the person that was 2-3 steps behind you and in order for you to truly help them, you first would have to have made that transformation and impact from within. I know you have a really big purpose and you want to do so much but all of that external success and external impact is truly going to come from you doing your own work and really truly only focusing on yourself; which off the bat already sounds kind of selfish. What does that mean? You’re trying to help other people but I’m telling you to help yourself. That’s truly what it is!
How Our Brain Works
We get data towards us in many different modalities: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory--we have a hundred billion bits of data getting sent to us per second and the job of our subconscious mind is to filter through the data by either deleting, distorting, or generalizing and spitting it in 1.6 bits of data per second into what we see. It’s going to delete, distort, and generalize based on your internal model of the world which is made up of your identity, beliefs, values, memories, experiences, conditionings, all the way down to time and location and even your mood. So perception is projection, what you see externally is a direct reflection of your own internal world.
Doing Work on Your Internal Model of the World
If you want to see success externally, if you want to create an impact externally, that is first going to start from within. That first starts with you doing the work on your internal model of the world, where is your identity? Are you truly being that person you want to be? Where are your beliefs at? Are you operating from new beliefs that empower you and are who you want to become? Or are you building your business/foundation on outdated limiting beliefs? An example of limiting beliefs you may be building your business on: “I’m not cut out for this. This isn’t going to work. I have to work really hard to be successful. I need to make everyone happy. Their approval of me matters a lot so let me make sure that I’m coming across in a way that’s going to be accepted. Or maybe you’re operating from values that aren’t in alignment with who you truly want to be. One of the offerings that I have with my clients are breakthrough days that are 6-8 hour coaching calls dedicated to a personal breakthrough in your life and during that breakthrough day we do a value elicitation. If you are on your way to becoming an entrepreneur but within your values of what business is--wealth isn’t up there or it’s number 10--no wonder why you’re having a really hard time selling yourself. No wonder you’re having a hard time creating revenue in your business because you don’t value wealth. There are some limiting beliefs and unaligned thoughts of what wealth means to you that is triggering a self-sabotaging behavior versus a behavior and an action that’s geared toward a result you want. In order for you to see that impact externally that you want to make, it all starts from within. The three deepest layers of our internal world are identity, values, and beliefs. If you change your identity, what happens is that you change yourself at a cellular level.
Reflections Points to Know if You’re Doing the Inner Work
Where are you desiring to see something external of you and realizing that what you want is because of what you lack within. One of my dear clients says that they always want to really help others. But what she really needs is to help herself and that’s not anything that I can say to a client. You have to come to your own awakening and journey--if you’re reading this, I’m going to plant the seed that anything you’re desiring externally of you, look within. Are you giving it to yourself? If you desire to be more visible on social media, are you truly seeing yourself and are you allowing those closest to you to truly see yourself? Are you really showing all facets of yourself? Are you speaking your truth? Are you enforcing and holding your boundaries, are you creating them? Are you being honest to yourself about what you truly desire? Are you really seeing yourself for all that you are? If you’re not, then what you’re going to see outside of you is all the ways in which you are not being seen by others or all the ways in which your visibility isn’t working on social media.
How to Utilize Creating an Impact From the Inside Out & Helping Us Get to the Next Level Version of Ourselves
Personally, I realized that I’ve hit an upper limit last month. We all have an inner thermostat setting--this setting determines how much success we allow ourselves to enjoy in different areas of our life--whether that be in business, relationships, or our own self pleasure. When we exceed our thermostat setting, we may do something to sabotage ourselves causing us to be brought back to that old, familiar zone where we feel secure. So if you’re at 75 degrees and that’s you making $5000 a month and you continue doing what you do and your income starts to increase--you’re getting all these requests to do podcasts and other things that now your thermostat is hitting 85-90 degrees. This is outside of your comfort zone, if you don’t recognize that you’re going to hit an upper limit problem here, you may sabotage yourself. This happens to a lot of us, even in the health & fitness/nutrition world. You lose 10 pounds and then you gain 20 because you didn’t address the upper limit problem. A lot of times what happens, when we achieve a certain amount of success in one area of life that then we feel really guilty or anxious about. Old beliefs clash with the new, amazing feelings that we’re experiencing. If the old belief wins, you’re likely to self-sabotage. You will do something that puts you right back to where you used to be. This definitely happened to me, I hit an upper limit problem and the old belief won. I’m not angry or upset about it, I actually think it’s good that it happened because I believe that challenges and obstacles are made for us. It was meant for me to experience all that I did the last couple of weeks, to really hit a lull because it reminded me so much of when I was first starting my business--how stuck and anxious I felt and how it was really difficult for me to take action; and I haven’t been there in such a long time.
When looking at the upper limit problem, ask yourself: what did it do for me? What did it teach me? Working through our upper limit problem really is about becoming aware of it, becoming aware of when you hit it and becoming aware of what is that old belief that is driving this pattern.
Identifying Upper Limit Problems
It’s really cool that you can easily identify upper limit problems by identifying a few key factors: Self-sabotage, worrying about things, being critical or blaming others. Where are you stopping the flow of abundance, love, and success? We are made to have as much love, abundance, and success as we desire but what we lack is the capacity to allow ourselves what we deserve. We don’t think we’re worthy of it, we feel shame/guilty about it, and that’s when we hit the upper limit problem. When you notice yourself hitting them, the question is: How can I increase my capacity to expand and allow the flow of abundance, love, and success? We increase that by calling in our wonder child and moving into the upper limit from a place of curiosity, excitement, and wonder. That’s the key to overcoming internal struggles; move out of the self-blame and criticism and instead move to curiosity and wonder: I wonder why I did that. I wonder why I treat myself like that. This is when we move to inner child healing and identifying the attachment wounds that created these upper limits for ourselves, these beliefs that hinder and stop us from progressing into who we want to be.
The time that we are born until 7 years old is when the critical mind is being developed, our subconscious mindset is being developed. So each of us carries engrained unconscious ideas of how happy and successful we can be. We are born and automatically download societal and cultural conditionings of how happy and successful we can be. We download our family trauma and notice how successful and happy our parents’ relationship could be and all of those unconscious ideas are just self imposed limits. When we can learn to expand our potential happiness and our potential to feel abundant, we can then move through those upper limit blocks and move onto the next level of success.
First upper limit problem that Gay teaches about is feeling fundamentally flawed--this is that worthiness wound. This is the feeling of when you make that full commitment to being yourself and having the fear of failing, the belief that tells you to stay small. If you fail, at least you failed small and not at your biggest potential. This is a big one for me personally. This is the feeling of not feeling good enough--feeling constantly that there’s something bigger outside of you that you need to achieve and this is the belief that I see the most. This happens when the love you received growing up was conditional. You then give yourself conditional love, it’s hard for you to love yourself unconditionally because growing up you did not receive unconditional love and attention from a parent. Maybe you got congratulated when you got good grades, your parents always identified external achievements you did well on versus complimenting you for being who you were or complimenting/bringing light to a failure in a non-negative way. This isn’t to say that our parents are bad people, we are born perfect, we were just handed to imperfect parents. We each have our own healing journey to do--that’s the point of life, to come back home to who we are. When you have kids, you’re not the passing on mother/father wounds, instead passing on the truth.
The second upper limit problem is disloyalty and abandonment--this is when you feel like you can’t expand to your full success because it would cause you to end up all alone. If you are successful, you’ll be abandoning everyone else. If you have this barrier, ask yourself if you broke your family’s spoken or unspoken rule to get to where you are? Even though you are successful, did you fail to meet the expectations your parents had for you? If you answered yes to either of these questions, you’re likely to feel more guilty as you feel successful. This guilt can make you put on the brakes; it can make you prematurely quit, hold you back from doing everything that brings success, joy, and love.
The third upper limit barrier is believing the more success makes you a bigger burden--this is the feeling that you can’t achieve your highest potential because you’d be a bigger burden than you are now. This is for those of us who feel like we can’t take up more space or that we have a hard time expressing our emotions and feelings to others. You feel guilty for feeling. When we learn to remove this guilt for a crime you never committed, what happens is that you’re able to break away from this upper limit. This is really about acknowledging that you are not a burden but rather a cause for celebration. That is not your truth. Where did you learn that? Where did that belief come from? Is that past life or generational?
The last upper limit hidden barrier is the crime of outshining--this is an unconscious belief where you think that if you achieve your full success, you are going to make others look bad. You can’t shine too much or you’ll make others look bad. I had a client who would dull herself and not speak for herself to make everyone around her feel better and good. That’s not the truth, that’s a conditioning, trauma, wound that’s been handed down generation after generation; or there was an experience that happened in your childhood where you learned to not outshine, to stay small and dull down your talents, strengths, and genius so that your sibling didn’t feel bad about themselves.
I love using upper limits and inner child healing in my coaching and also within myself because this is how we start to create impact from the inside out. This is how we start to unpack what are the hidden beliefs that are stopping me from achieving all the success that I want, from achieving all the dreams/goals that I desire. Going back to some key points of when you’re hitting an upper limit problem is when we self-sabotage, worrying about the future, when you have criticism of blame on yourself or others, and when you deflect compliments. The cure to that is reflecting on how to create the capacity for more abundance, love, and success for myself? What are the new beliefs about myself that I want to adopt? What positive action step can I take to allow more room for this in my life.
One practice that you can start to embody to consciously allow yourself to create a deeper capacity to hold love, success, and abundance is to feel it in your body. Sit down for meditations and see if you can fill your heart with so much love, feel it in your chest/heart, feel it in your toes and then send that love to others. This is a really great semantic practice for holding more capacity for love and success. What does success in your body feel like and can you hold that expansion? Embody your new beliefs, create your new story, and embrace it. Step into your zone of genius--what is that for you?
