Why limiting beliefs hold us back…

Everyone has limiting beliefs! Sometimes you know what they are and how they affect you and sometimes they appear out of nowhere.

What is a limiting belief?

A limiting belief is something you believe about yourself that can hold you back. What you believe about yourself impacts how you think, feel and behave.

It might be that you struggle to speak up in a group because you hold the belief that 'no one cares about what I have to say'.

It might be you find it hard to do a presentation or workshop because you hold the belief that 'I don't know enough' or 'I'm not an expert' or 'They might ask me something I don't know'.

It might be that you stop yourself from doing a course in a subject you're interested in because you hold the belief 'I don't have enough time'.

Limiting beliefs are totally standard in our lives as human beings and they affect everyone differently. If they're not getting in the way of what you want, then you might not even know you hold a limiting belief about something. 

But when they are very real for you, they can keep you from seeing new possibilities, following dreams and take you away from the amazing, creative person that you are.

Why do we have limiting beliefs?

Experts believe that most of our beliefs about the way the world works are formed by the time we are 8 years old. In the psychoanalytical theory and method of 'Transactional Analyisis', this is called our Life Script.

This involves making sure we survive by fitting in with the adults around us. Just think of how much there is going on at any one time in someone's life - family, culture, faith, community, society....the whole world. As children, we're thinking 'how must I need to behave to fit in, to get my needs met, to survive'.

It's thought that in the first two years (and in the womb), children are in the Delta brain-wave cycle. When you're deeply asleep as an adult, this is the state you are in. Even as you get to 1 year old, you're mainly in and out of this state. This means as a baby, you are taking eeeeeeverything in as you learn about the world, there's no filter at all.

From age 2 - 8, it's thought that children will mostly be in Alpha and Theta brainwave states, which is what you're in while you're under hypnosis or perhaps meditating. So basically at that age you're going about your day hypnotised, open to everything that is being presented to you. Being able to be rational when something goes wrong or think critically is not really a thing your brain can do yet, so you're still in a high learning state. Between five and eight years old, this is when your analytical brain starts forming and you start to interpret and make meaning from your environment.

• If as a three year old you heard a nursery nurse say 'you're so clumsy', you might grow up thinking you're clumsy even though that was bestowed on you age three (when most three year olds fall over a lot anyway!).

• If, as a 5 year old you heard your mum say to a friend 'he/she is not very good at reading', you might take that as fact.

• If, at six years old your teacher tells you 'stop being naughty' when you're fidgeting in your chair, you might take on the belief that your need to be moving to make yourself feel calm is bad.

• If, when you were 7 years old, you asked your dad if you could have a toy when you were at the shop and he got annoyed and shouted 'you can't ask for those kind of things!', you might grow up with the belief 'I can't ask for what I want'. You're not sitting there going 'I appreciate my dad spoke to me like that because money is tight and he has an electricity bill due tomorrow'.

If you feel like you're holding yourself back in certain areas and you don't know why, it might be that you start to take a look at what limiting beliefs you have and notice how they are serving you.
 

Examples of Limiting Beliefs

Once you start tuning into what a limiting belief could be, you'll start to hear people saying them everyday. They're everywhere, so take some time to notice them and get curious.

Sometimes they can start with 'I'm not...', 'I can't...', 'I'm always...', 'I'll never...', 'I'm too...'

• I'm not good enough

• I'm not ready

• I'll never be successful

• I can't fail

• I'm too old

• I don't have enough experience

• I'm not smart enough

• I can't be who I really am or people will judge me

• I can't ask for what I want because the answer will be no

Other times they can be more specific, for example in the workplace:

• I need to know everything that goes on in my team

• I don't have enough experience to go for that role I would be amazing at

It might be that you write them down and get curious about where they may come from.

Limiting Beliefs about Money

Money mindset and limiting beliefs about money are really common, but let's address the elephant in the room - it's never about the money! I'll write another blog about this one day.

• You need to work hard to make money

• If I've got money, people will ask me for it and I won't be able to say no.

• If I'm rich, I'll be too busy

• If I'm rich, my children will be spoilt brats

• I am not good with money

• Being rich is selfish

• If you're rich, you're not a nice person

• You have to be greedy to be rich

Again, you might like to get curious about where these beliefs come from and check out if they are serving you.

Secondary Gains

Sometimes we benefit from holding onto a limiting belief. We are not normally aware of this though, it's an unconscious thing.

For example, someone might want to give up smoking, but if they did that, deep down they might believe they'll miss out on social interactions with colleagues and not want to lose that connection.

You might like to take a look at the benefits you get from holding onto your limiting beliefs, get curious and ask yourself 'what's going on there?'.

Can we change our limiting beliefs?

Coaching can help us to update our Life Script by questioning the way we think, feel and behave and in my experience they can be changed.

As a very surface level example, I used to have a messy bedroom ('it's hard to keep my bedroom tidy') and could never figure out why. Notice my language - 'I used to have a messy bedroom', this indicates a belief has changed.

Keeping my room tidy always felt like SUCH hard work and I tried to, for years and years, tell myself 'just keep it tidy'. I would go through a massive clean up and be like 'right, I'm doing it, I'm keeping it tidy' and then three days later it would be messy again.  It wasn't until I started looking at the belief behind why I had a messy bedroom that I was able to change it.

My mum had always told the story about how she'd never been able to keep her room tidy even at university. So it was partly a belief I'd taken on board from her, but also, I got down to 'if I don't have a messy bedroom, I won't be like my mum and that would be bad!'.  This was a massive 'holy shit' moment for me. No wonder keeping my room tidy felt SOO hard. My mum is amazing by the way, but clearly I'd formed something along the lines of 'must always do as I'm told' as my Life Script was forming in those early years! I found the emotion behind it and was able to change the belief.....much to the relief of my husband 😂

I've given you quite a surface level belief (It's hard to keep my bedroom tidy), but even with that you can see how deep it can go. If I'd have just stuck an affirmation on the wall of 'it's easy to keep my bedroom tidy', I wouldn't have gotten very far if I hadn't gone further into the reason and emotion behind what my belief was.

In summary, limiting beliefs are all around us, they're completely normal and we can change them once we know what they are and where they come from.  And yes our children are forming limiting beliefs everyday no matter how amazing we are as parents 🙈

If you're interested in a belief session to help you change a specific limiting belief, do get in touch!

What Is Somatic Coaching? (And Why It Keeps Finding Women Who've Already Tried Everything Else)

Maybe you already know your patterns.

Maybe you've journaled about them. Tried to reframe them. Maybe at some point you've had therapy, done the course, read the book - probably more than one book. Perhaps you can even name the inner critic. And the socials you've scrolled at some point searching for answers have probably told you exactly where it came from.

And still - in the big meetings, the hard conversations, the pitch you've been preparing for all week - something tightens. Your heart starts racing, your tummy drops, and the version of you who was ready to speak goes quiet somewhere behind your ribs. You watch yourself hand the floor back to someone less right who is more certain. And on the drive home you're already running through everything you should have said.

If any of that sounds familiar, somatic coaching is probably what you've been circling without having a name for it. Here's the plain-language version - no jargon, no mysticism. What it actually is, why it works, and what a session genuinely feels like from the inside.

What is somatic coaching?

Somatic coaching is a body-first approach to change. It works with the nervous system and the body's felt sense - not just thoughts - to shift patterns that mindset work alone can't reach. Used well, it helps people access confidence, clarity and decisiveness when it matters, especially under pressure.

The word somatic just means of the body. That's the whole mystery, demystified.

A somatic coach works with you to notice what your body is doing as you move through your life - the tightening across your chest before a hard conversation, the hollow pit of anxiety before you walk into that particular room, the dread in your stomach that causes you to overprepare.

Rather than coaching you around those responses, the work happens at that layer. In the body. Where the pattern actually lives. Most coaching approaches start with thoughts, goals, or behaviours - addressing the mind first and trusting the body will follow. Somatic coaching reverses that: regulate the nervous system first, and then watch what becomes available in your thinking and your choices.

Why it works where mindset work alone doesn't

Here's what most coaching content won't say plainly: insight isn't change.

You can understand a pattern completely - think you know where it came from, possibly know why it runs - and still repeat it. You can know the theory behind your own holding-back and still watch yourself hold back in the next meeting. This isn't weakness and it isn't insufficient effort. It's just how the body works.

Under pressure, your nervous system scans for threat faster than your thinking brain can keep up. If it reads the stakes as dangerous - and for a lot of women working in male-dominated environments, it does, because those rooms have historically cost them something - it runs a protective response before your conscious mind gets a word in.

Maybe your shoulders rise. Your voice might land higher than you meant it to, or soften just slightly without you choosing to soften it. Maybe your mind blanks, the sentence you had ready, practised over and over just disappears, and you're stuck mid-thought while trying to look like you're not.

And it runs the same calculation in the quieter moments too - the thoughts that spiral after a conversation you thought went fine, the yes you heard yourself say before you'd registered the question, the email drafted and deleted and drafted again and still not sent.

So when you try and reframe it, that reframe has to bypass the body to land - and the body doesn't always listen to reframes. Somatic coaching works at the layer that mindset reframes skip over.

'Somatics is the study of the self from the perspective of one's lived experience, encompassing the dimensions of body, psyche and spirit' ~ Thomas Hanna

The bind most women arrive carrying

There's a particular place most of the women I work with have reached, and it's worth naming because it's usually what finally brings them here.

They're done shrinking - starting to notice the moments when it costs them. Maybe they forgot to pick the kids up once because they stayed late, only for no one at work to even notice the sacrifice. Maybe they missed dinner with the family for a meeting that could have been an email. They're done with softening the ask so as not to ruffle emotional men's feathers, and done with going quiet in rooms where their opinions and insight could create meaningful change for the very people the system wasn't built with in mind.

And deep down, they're also worried about what happens if they stop shrinking.

What if I take up space, say the thing, push back, hold the line - and it costs me? Gets me taken off the project. Makes me the difficult one. Loses me the relationship. Confirms what they already suspect about me.

That bind is not irrational. It's not a mindset problem. It's pattern recognition based on real experience - experience that likely started well before the boardroom, in the specific ways the world teaches women to manage themselves carefully in rooms that weren't designed for how they lead. The boardroom is just the latest room where the old pattern gets activated.

Somatic coaching doesn't try to talk you out of the bind. It works at the layer where the bind actually lives - in the nervous system, in the protective responses that haven't yet been shown the room is different now.

What sessions give you - and why it's rarely what’s expected

"That's not what I thought was holding me back" is one of the most common things I hear after a first session - and it almost always lands as a relief.

Because the thing they walked in naming wasn't wrong. But underneath it, something else had been waiting - something the body had been holding for a while, that the mind had been quietly filing under the wrong "I just need to work on this" folder.

More often than not, sessions don't tend to go where my clients think they will. They tend to go somewhere more alive than they realised.

There's a concept called the felt sense that sits at the centre of why this work reaches places insight alone can't. It's not quite a feeling - it's more a pre-verbal knowing, a whole impression held somewhere in the body before it's been broken into language or logic. Slightly murky, slightly hard to pin down at first. That's exactly what makes it useful - because the felt sense carries information that thinking doesn't have access to. When something surfaces from it, it has a quality of "oh - that's what that is." Not an insight you reasoned your way toward. Something that was already in you, waiting to be heard.

What surfaces looks different every time. Sometimes it's recognising that a dynamic you've been navigating at work is a version of something much older - and suddenly the intensity makes sense in a way it didn't before.

Sometimes it's the pattern that's been showing up all week - the 3am replay, the way you already knew walking in which conversations were going to cost you, the tension that arrives when a particular person's name comes up in the calendar - finally having a logic to it, rather than feeling like something that just keeps happening to you. Sometimes a version of yourself you'd forgotten about turns up in the space, and you remember what it felt like to be her before you started managing quite so carefully.

None of it is dramatic. More like a quiet click. Something settling into place.

There's a parts-based layer to this work that changes things for most people. Under pressure, what shows up in the body isn't a malfunction - it's a protective response, a part of you doing a job it took on in rooms that were genuinely risky. The question is never how do I get rid of this part? It's what is this part protecting me from, and what does it need to ease up a little? When a client lands on that reframe, the whole room shifts - the tension in her face, the set of her shoulders, the pace of her breath.

Most of the women I work with aren't naturally disconnected from their bodies. They've been trained out of it - in environments that rewarded speed, performance, and certainty, and quietly penalised the kind of noticing that slows you down. That awareness can be rebuilt. It usually comes back faster than people expect.

Is somatic coaching the same as therapy?

Therapy can be focussed on talking - often around earlier life experiences or clinical conditions - and is delivered by clinically trained practitioners. If that's the work you need, therapy is the right room. Somatic coaching is focused on how you show up in the situations you're actually in and in the moments that matter. The work can be deeply therapeutic in nature but sits between therapy and transactional coaching, and for women who have already done a lot of one or both, it tends to be exactly the layer that was missing. I've been told "I've done more with you than in a couple of years of talking about it in therapy" - and while that's not a criticism of therapy, it points to something this work does differently.

Who benefits from this work - and what becomes possible

Maybe you're working in sport, or in an industry that still, in some rooms, treats your presence as a surprise. You're capable and experienced. You also carry, quietly, more than the job description covers - the invisible load of being the one who notices what's about to fall over, the one who smooths, the one managing the room's emotional temperature alongside her own, before the day has technically started.

Here's what tends to shift when that changes.

One client had something sitting on her to-do list for months. Something that could have really put her out there, made her more visible to the industry. It would get to the end of the week and she would add it to next week's to-do list - not because she didn't want to do it... it just, well... kept getting unconsciously missed. After one piece of work together, she just did it. Didn't deliberate, didn't keep imagining the best way to do it. Had a kind of "I don't care" attitude - not that she stopped caring about it (she cared a lot), just that she wasn't bothered by the risk of it anymore. What she was unconsciously afraid of never happened and she achieved what she set out to do without overthinking it once. This is what becomes available.

What the shift feels like for most women is less noise. The headspace that was being eaten by overthinking, prepping, replaying - it comes back. The transformation isn't confidence, you already have that. It becomes about capacity. You say the thing you wanted to say and don't think about it beforehand and don't replay it after. You stay in the hard conversation instead of going quiet or over-explaining your way through it. You finish the week with something left in the tank for your actual life - not because you stopped caring about the work, but because it no longer runs the show.

You don't rise to the occasion. You respond from the level of safety your body believes is available.

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If you're like 'yes please, I want to know more'…here's a couple of invitations:

Self Aware Women Leaders is my mailing list for women working in sport and male-dominated environments who are looking for the under-the-surface work to understand more than just mindset reframes - you're totally welcome to join.

Join Self Aware Women Leaders →

1:1 Somatic Coaching - If you're an individual intrigued enough to find out about working together, more information is on my Work With Me page. Have a read and then book a call so that we can chat. Don't wait til your mind tells you you're completely ready - it's just a chat with a vibe check - I won't pressure you into anything, promise!

Organisations - If you’re an amazing company looking to support your women in a meaningful, impactful way via 1:1 coaching, click here

Jenni Schanschieff is an International Coaching Federation trained Executive Somatic Coach working with women in sport and male-dominated environments. She is the Oceania Network Lead for the Women's Sport Collective and is based in Auckland, New Zealand, working online with clients around the globe.