EP #8 THE UPPER LIMIT PROBLEM : Why You Self-Sabotage When Things Go Well

 Ever notice that right when things start going really well, something goes wrong? You get sick, pick a fight, procrastinate on the thing you care about most—it's called upper limiting, and it's your nervous system's way of pulling you back to what feels safe. 

In this episode, we break down Gay Hendricks' concept from The Big Leap: the invisible ceiling that limits how much success, happiness, or alignment you allow yourself to feel. 

You'll learn why your body sabotages you when you exceed your emotional comfort zone, how upper limiting shows up (exhaustion, illness, relationship conflicts, procrastination), and how to regulate your nervous system so it catches up with your growth instead of holding you back. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Change doesn't start with what you do. Change starts with who you are. I'm your host, Kendall Keaton, and this is the Identity Advantage.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Welcome back. I am, I'm pretty excited to talk about what we're going to explore today. So lately, there's been a lot of conversation about this season that we're in, just in general, this idea of sort of shedding what no longer serves you and creating space for what's next. It's like the year of the snake, moving into the year of the horse. Now, if you follow any of that kind of thing, like astrology, energetic cycles, or even just like seasonal rhythms, you've probably heard of people talking about this, this transition period, like one that releases before you build momentum. But if you don't follow any of that, you absolutely don't have to for this episode, but just stay with me for a second. What is interesting about all of this is that before I ever connected these dots, before I don't teach any of this stuff, I just I like to follow those who do. I find it interesting. And a lot of times I will find that it really coincides with what I'm experiencing. And before I had ever really connected the dot between the year of the snake, moving into the year of the horse, my personal mantra going through this next year was going to be and is I am releasing what no longer serves me to make room for what does. And then I came across the fact that we are ending the year of the snake, with which is shedding everything that no longer belongs before you we move into like in the middle of February, into the year of the horse, which is forward move moving momentum and action-oriented, which is really what I am and what I'm all about and what I wanted to do. And I was feeling this stagnation that I wasn't used to. I actually had felt this like pull to where, okay, I need to do some sort of fast or I need to do some sort of like three-day cleanse. And I really felt and saw the signs and had the intuition that yes, your body needs this, and I ignored it. And then my body came back and I ended up getting sick. I got sick for about a week, a week and a half or so, just didn't, I had no energy. I had, I just felt exhausted and fatigued all the time. I didn't listen to those intuitive nudges. And so my body made sure that somehow I got what I needed, which was a little bit of rest. And I have a close friend who's also a fellow uh coach and mindset mentor. And she had just reached out to ask, you know, kind of how things are going. And I told her, I was like, you know, I really got sick. And I think it's because, you know, I had these urges to do this cleanse. I didn't listen. And, you know, so my body came back and and had opinions about it. And she responded and was like, it also could be, had you thought about maybe you're upper limiting yourself. And it really took me off guard because I mean, I responded to her and I was like, I didn't even think about that. Did not even cross my mind. And I know all about the upper limit, about limiting beliefs. And the upper limit comes from a book called The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, which is one of the first self-development books I ever read years and years and years ago, and have read it several times since then. And so I know the concept, I've applied it to my life, and yet still, this is like testament to life as a journey. We are constantly, constantly learning and sometimes just relearning the same things. And this is something I'm so glad it came up because it's something obviously that I needed to revisit, and I want to revisit it with you today as I start applying this to my life right now. Because it's so important and something I think a lot of people might be experiencing right now, just in this transition, just because it's the new year and we all have goals. We all have new things that we want to do. So, in this discussion today, I really want to talk with you about upper limits, what they actually are, how they show up, even when you're doing the work, and why growth, even having a growth mindset, can sometimes feel like resistance, it can feel like fatigue, it can feel like things just like falling apart. Sometimes it feels like self-sabotage, but it's not necessarily that that's what's happening. It could be that you're getting ready to expand. Upper limiting, in simple terms, is when we will subconsciously sabotage ourselves anytime we start feeling too good or too successful or too aligned or whatever is beyond what our nervous system is used to. And it's not a punishment, it's not like the universe smacking you down, saying this is not for you. It's just protection, it's your body's protection. Your body and your brain are always trying to bring you back to what feels familiar, even when what's familiar isn't what you actually want anymore. And we can look at this through the lens of a comfort zone. Like we've talked about this, the emotional comfort zone, your emotional scale, and the area on that scale with which you live. Gay Hendricks talks about it as an upper limit. He talks about it in the sense of you have a ceiling of how good your body is used to feeling, whether it's your body, your mind, your mood, any of that stuff. There is a ceiling at which you're you have capped out more often than not. And anytime you start to go above that, even though it feels good, your body, your nervous system, your emotional regulation, it is unfamiliar to it. And so it will do something to pull you back down. It will send you thoughts out of nowhere that bring you back down into doubt or worry or whatever it is. It will have you self-sabotaging, maybe in your relationship. We all have that emotional home base, a range in which we're used to living. So for a long time in my life, that range was pretty low. So for a long while. And so, even feeling content or hopeful, like I'd get my hopes up, that felt unfamiliar, and I'd do that thing where, oh, I'm not gonna get my hopes up, and I would bring myself back down to that's probably not gonna work out anyway. Because my nervous system was so unfamiliar with a feeling of hope that it felt dangerous. And so I would bring myself back down and therefore would never do the things that I was hopeful about. And then I could say, see, it didn't work out. Now, over time, once I realized this is what was happening, that I had an emotional scale that I could increase, that I could climb that ladder, that I had an upper limit that was coming back to self-sabotage me, over time I was able to raise that baseline. So that contentment versus being something that was just out of my zone actually became normal. And then I could feel feelings that were more motivational. I could actually believe in the hope. The hope would turn to optimism. Optimism would turn to actual action, taking an expectation, not just hope, but hopeful expectation. But one thing that doesn't get talked about enough, it is getting some more attention lately, but not quite enough, is that your nervous system has got to catch up with your growth. And if it doesn't, it tries to pull you back. So I was working the mindset, I was working the thoughts, I was feeling those emotions. But it doesn't matter who you are, how successful you are. We all have a ceiling, we all have an upper limit. And Gay Hendricks in his book would actually say the better you're feeling, the more successful you are, the more important it is to become aware of your upper limit. When your upper limit is hope and you're comfortable feeling hope, it can actually get really comfortable there. You don't even realize you're upper limiting yourself because hope feels good. Excitement feels good. But when you get yourself, you've got to get yourself up into expectation and the joy of having all of those things. The higher you climb on those on that emotional scale, the harder it is for you to realize that you're upper limiting yourself because you're actually feeling pretty good the majority of the time. I had to get sick in order to realize what was happening. I had to experience just excessive fatigue, like, gosh date, like, do I need 10 hours really of sleep to be able to function? Because that's what it felt like. My body was just exhausted and I really had to look back and say, okay, what is happening? I think twofold, I did not listen to my intuition when it said, hey, you need to slow down and take some reflection time and do a little bit of a cleanse and kind of release some things that that are blocking you right now. I didn't listen to it. So my body spoke up, said, Hey, slow yourself down. I had to. I was able to reflect and realize that, oh wait, I was so hyped on do do do, go, go, go, get, get, get. My nervous system was on high alert because I was not letting it catch up with me. Your nervous system has to catch up to your growth. And if it doesn't, it will try to pull you back. Not because you're feeling, not because you're not ready, not because it's not meant for you, but because you are stretching, because you're getting ready to expand, because it is meant for you. Now, in his book, Gay Hendricks goes into the four zones that we could possibly live in. We live in, like, and I'm not, I want to do an episode on those, but that's not today. But they just to cover them briefly, there's zone of incompetence, zone of competence, zone of excellence, and zone of genius. A lot of people live in their zone of competence. Doing something that you're decently good at, it's nice, it's safe, it's nothing special. Zone of excellence. There are people who live in the zone of excellence. And when you live in the zone of excellence, sometimes it can be construed as living in your zone of genius. But there's still a little bit of you that's gonna feel like, I bet I could do something more. You still feel just a little unsettled or a little unfulfilled. And I've moved into my zone of excellence, but I really, really want to move into my zone of genius. I don't spend very much time in there, and that's what I want to do. I want to move into that zone of genius. And lately, the goals that I have set for myself this year are helping me or are pushing me to rub up against that zone of genius. I'm getting closer to it. And when you start moving towards this, when you start moving towards your zone of genius, your fullest high potential, like we all want to get to that place. And as we start approaching it, as we start getting closer, sometimes first, it can feel a little destabilizing. It doesn't feel calm at first when we do it. This is your upper limit. This is the ceiling, this is where your upper limit hits. And for me, it showed up as exhaustion. Even with enough sleep, I was just completely tired. I started procrastinating, been really bad procrastinating on things this month. And I would blame my ADHD brain, which I do have one, but that wasn't the whole issue, but that's where the blame went. I was feeling oddly unmotivated about things I do actually care about, things I normally am motivated to do. My system was saying, my nervous system, my upper limit was saying, hey, this is a lot. Slow down. This is very unfamiliar. Unfamiliar, unknown to our nervous system is unsafe. And it's gonna try to pull us away from that. Sometimes this will show up as illness, sometimes it shows up as distraction, it shows up as procrastinate procrastination, it shows up as a fight with your partner or with your spouse. It can show up in a lot of different ways, but it's not because you're doing anything wrong, it's just because your nervous system is sensing expansion. A really good example of this comes up in relationships a lot. Most people in relationships have this like most common fight that they will have. Like you have this, like, oh, we always have this discussion. Why do we keep having this discussion? Things always turn up in this exact fight. And sometimes, if you will notice, when things are really going well in your relationship, when you're having a stretch where you're just communicating well, maybe the intimacy is good, like you just feel like this is a really good point in our relationship. And then shit hits the fan, a fight out of nowhere. Because your relationship has an upper limit. It has a limit to which you can feel good in that relationship, a limit to where things are going good. And if you are aware of it, you will find yourself when things are going really well. Watch yourself because you'll start saying, Oh, I wonder when shit's gonna hit the fan. It's like you expect it to happen. Things can't, things are going too well, something bad is bound to happen. We have all of this proof that things only go well so often that we actually start expecting it to go bad during the times that it's going well. And that expectation of shit hitting the fan is what will bring up those emotions of now you're a little worried, now you're doubtful, now you're on the lookout for that next fight. It's an upper limit situation. So, what do we do about this? Like you have to first be aware that it's there. So there's this gap, there's this, there's this lag between who we want to become, this future version of us, that this is really what I want. And there's this gap between that and who at a subconscious level we still believe that we are. So my nervous system, my subconscious still had beliefs I thought I had dealt with. And because I had really not dealt with them, it was bringing them back up. Good thing it did because I want these things dealt with. But I still had, when I went back and looked, okay, what are these beliefs that are bringing me down? When I'm feeling really good, why am I getting pulled back down into not feeling well, into being tired, into procrastinating, into avoidance? But I still had these beliefs that maybe I wasn't capable of doing these things that I want to do, that I wasn't capable of speaking to bigger audiences. Maybe I'm not capable of writing the book that I want to write. Maybe what I have is just where I'm supposed to stay. All of that is fear speaking, is my upper limit saying, hey, we've never stretched this far before. Let's just not. It's okay to think about it, but if you're gonna actually do anything about it, yeah, I'm gonna pull you back down here. Every time I was stretching towards something bigger, my nervous system was trying to pull me back into what felt safe. Maybe some of you want to stay there. And if that's where you want to be, that's okay. Me personally, that's not where I am happy. Safety to me does not mean happiness. It just means known. And I want to experience different things. I want to stretch my limits. And if you are somebody who does want to stretch your limit, if you really want to see what you are, what your potential is, what you are capable of, then you've got to be aware of where your upper limit is limiting you. Where is it? When is it hitting? And what can you do to stretch above that? And it's not, I've used the term self-sabotage a lot, and it's not self-sabotage in the way you would normally think of it. It's not you being lazy, it's not you lacking discipline, it's not you falling off the wagon or falling off the path. It's your nervous system saying, Whoa, this is new, let me catch up with you. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, yeah, this feels familiar, I want to give you just a few questions that you can just really gently ask yourself in the moment. There's a couple things that you can do if you feel like this is you, if you feel like you have felt this, whether it's in your work, in a side job that you're working at, in a goal that you have, whether it's a might be a health and fitness goal, like you do really good for two weeks and then you order pizza and a 12-pack of donuts. There's an upper limit in there. You hit a, you lose so much weight and it's like you hit this plateau, like, oh, I can always get down to this weight, and then I can't ever get past it. You have an upper limit. If you're looking for someone, if you're looking for your soulmate and you go on, you've been going on dates and you get into the third or the fourth date, or you get to a certain part in the relationship, and then things just fall apart. There's an upper limit. If you've had the same New Year's resolution year after year after year, sometimes you make it a week, sometimes you make two, maybe you're still on it and you feel yourself falling off now. There's an upper limit. So ask yourself, where in my life am I expanding faster than what feels safe? Is there an area in your life where you have very lofty goals, you are being very ambitious, which by the way, is not a bad thing. I'm not saying lower your goals. I'm not saying to water anything down. I'm just saying be aware of maybe there's an inconsistency between what you want to do and what your subconscious believes you're capable of. We have to raise the limit. We have to raise your capacity, raise the belief you have in yourself to be able to handle better, to be able to handle more. And not more as in more to do, but more abundance, more happiness, more joy. If you've only been getting those in small doses, then anything that could possibly bring you more of that, your body actually perceives as a threat. It does not see more joy if we put this in numerical terms. Let's say you get you're getting two units of joy a day, and you're doing something that could possibly bring you a hundred units of joy. Your body does not look at that. Your emotional home base does not say, oh, 50 times more joy. Yes, let's go get that. Your body says, What in the world is that gonna feel like? I have no clue what that's gonna feel like. That is unsafe, that is scary. So let's let's just put that off a little bit. Can we just avoid that for a little while? If you are not used to large consumptions of good feeling emotions, when you start to feel some and then you start to feel more, your body does not say, oh yes, that's fun, let's go get some. Your body says it perceives it as a threat simply because it's unknown. Your body does not perceive good and bad. Your body, your nervous system, perceives known and unknown. And known, no matter how bad it is, is safe. You can be completely miserable right now, but if you have been miserable for a decade, your body really wants you to stay there. You're still alive, you're still breathing, therefore you have survived it and it is safe. Keep getting in the bad relationship over and over and over and over and over again. Because your body, your subconscious, recognizes that pattern and says, Yeah, maybe he did hit me, but you know what? I survived and it's safe and it's known. I'm not saying these patterns serve you by any means, but this is what it is. Your body does not perceive good and bad. Your body perceives known and unknown. And when it perceives too much of the unknown, whether it is positive or negative, it will throw an upper limit on you. Now, the good thing is, and he doesn't talk about this in the book, but you have a lower limit. When you raise your upper limit, kind of the lower limit comes with you. There's a base range, and it doesn't widen. It's not like it goes taller, but still you have a base range. Your base range will go up as well. There are a lot of emotions that I used to feel on a daily basis that I lived in unaware I was living in them. Depression felt so common, felt so known, I functioned fine on a daily basis, feeling completely depressed with a smile on my face. Sometimes unaware that I was walking around in a depressed mode. Because it was just known. My body just was so comfortable with that. I just went around on my daily tasks, my daily chores, my daily workload in a state of depression, mostly. Now, I'm not saying there aren't times where I feel that, but it is immediate awareness when I do, because it is below my limit now. And so those thoughts that I used to have to journal every morning and every night to get myself from a point of depression up to contentment are automatic. And when I feel those, which did come up this past month because I was not feeling great, because I was fatigued, and because of that not getting as much done as I wanted to, those feelings of that negative self-talk was kind of coming back. But I immediately would feel it and could very, very quickly access those thoughts and those emotions, that state of being that could bring me back up to where I was. Because my body, that was unknown to it, it has a lower limit. It said, Whoa, you're dipping down lower than what we're used to, and we do not like this. We're not as familiar with this as anymore. Let's step it up a notch. And I was very quickly, within a matter of minutes, able to get myself back up to where I wanted to be. Because as you raise your upper limit, your lower limit will raise as well. Another thing to be aware of, another question to ask. What happens right after things start going really well for me? If you can take yourself back to maybe starting to notice some of these patterns, when things are going really, really well, what are some of the things that happen? What are the behaviors that I see in myself or in others that happen? Because let me tell you the behaviors in others that you would notice, if that's what you're seeing, like I don't see that anything I do, but I See somebody else does this, notice that. It could be in your response. Somebody might be doing something and you respond differently to them when things are going really well to bring your upper limit back down. So being aware in those times where things are going well, what happens? Think about patterns in your relationship. Think about patterns in your goal setting. This is usually. If you set goals, how long do you usually stick to them? What is the thing when it seems to be going really well? What is the thing that will throw you off? And then one thing to do when you are feeling really good, because here's what we tend to do is when we are feeling good, sometimes we have a hard time allowing ourselves to sit in that moment because we're always waiting for the floor to drop out from underneath us. It's funny that when things are going bad, people will say, Well, watch out, things come in threes. How often have you ever told yourself that when things are going good? I've never heard someone say, My life is going really well, and I bet two more things happen because you know what? Things come in threes. More often than not, we will dismiss something good, call it a coincidence, give the credit to somebody else. We will downplay our success. What if when something good happens, you let yourself marinate in that and wonder about what the next best thing will be? Let yourself sit in those good feeling moments for as long as you can, because the more time you can allow yourself to sit in the good feeling emotions, the more comfortable your body will become in feeling them, and your upper limit will raise your capacity for more will become more. This is how you raise your upper limit. This is how you start working on those limiting beliefs. This is how you regulate your nervous system to be okay with feeling happy and feeling joy and not letting things like guilt will jump in sometimes when you're feeling happy. You're feeling really great, and then you think about the fact that maybe somebody you know who's close to you isn't feeling great. Then you feel guilty for feeling good and then make yourself feel bad. You upper limited yourself because somebody else wasn't feeling happy in the moment. There are all these sneaky ways in which our body and our brain and our system pull us back because it doesn't want us to feel too much of something that we're not used to. Remember, even if it's good, your body does not register good and bad. It registers known and unknown. So normalize the good. Let yourself sit in those positive emotions a little bit longer before moving on. I think the majority of us, especially if you're listening to this right now, we believe in a better version of ourselves. We want to be better people, better humans. Maybe it's a better mom. Maybe it's you want your business to grow. Maybe you want to start a business. Maybe you want to be a better spouse, a better partner, just a better person in general. You are probably somebody who has a growth mindset or who wants to have one. And when growth feels hard, it doesn't always mean that it's not going to work out or that it's not for you or that something's wrong. There's something that needs attention. That's all it's doing, is calling you out and say, hey, something over here needs attention. When you find an upper limit, it does not mean that you have to stop. It's just a sign that you need to bring your nervous system with you, that it needs to catch up. If you're feeling tired, if you're feeling resistant, if you're feeling a little bit off track, maybe it's not that you're failing, but that you're just actually standing right at the edge of your expansion. And your upper limit noticed it and got scared. And when we're not aware of it, the upper limit wins. So I would invite you to take this question with you today of where are you? Where could you be upper limiting yourself? And it's not because you can't handle more, it's not because you can't handle that, but because you haven't yet taught yourself that it is safe to have it. You are expanding, and your job now is to grow your capacity so that you can stay where you once might have sabotaged yourself out of. Thank you so much for listening. And if something you heard today made an impact or changed the way you think somehow, then share it with somebody you care about. Because sometimes it's that one moment, that one idea that changes everything. And until next time, remember if you want to do something you've never done, you have to become someone you've never been. That is the identity advantage.