Limiting Beliefs

Happy New Year! This episode is all about limiting beliefs: the stories we tell ourselves and the lies we believe that keep us from self-actualizing.
 

Transcript

Hi listeners! Happy New Year! How are you doing? Crying a lot? Oh my god, Same! Or I was until recently.

A bit of housekeeping real quick - I used to go by Kayla Ogden on this podcast which is my maiden name - now I’ll be going by Kayla Olive which is my first name and my middle name. You can follow the accounts I’ve had for years on twitter and instagram under @KaylaOlive - I update those whenever I feel like it. I will continue to post whenever there’s a new episode at facebook.com/betterfortheboy . 

Alright let’s get into it.

I’m wondering how you’re doing. Are you inspired? Have you been following your purpose? Do you know what your purpose is? I know what mine is but I’ve been so afraid of it for so long that I haven’t even named it out loud. I haven’t even really told people about it. But here goes. I’m a writer and a storyteller and my purpose is to do those things. That’s all. There it is. Believe it or not, that was really hard for me to say. It just occurred to me that you might already know that. Like when my cousin who played women’s hockey and electric guitar and would hang out with one other girl exclusively for a period of time and then we wouldn’t see that girl anymore and there’d be a new girl, when that cousin came out as gay and we were like oh yeah, we know. That’s cool. Maybe that’s what this writer/storyteller confession of mine is like… I mean, I kinda hope so.

I’ve been secretly afraid of my purpose and I’ve been avoiding it. By secretly I mean I didn’t tell myself that I was afraid and avoidant. I’ve been doing this avoiding on the down low, the low low, by which I mean on an unconscious level, yo. I wonder if you might be doing this too. I wish I had discovered this fifteen years ago  but hey, here we are. I just figured it all out at 33 years old and it’s crazy.

Side note, being sober for six months really helps you figure some shit out. Hemingway famously said, “Write drunk. Edit sober.” But, I mean, maybe that worked for him because, well, he was Hemingway. If you’ve ever tried to have a good conversation with me when I’m drunk, you can imagine how interesting it would be on the page. 

It all began with boredom. I’ve been getting really bored of watching TV. My kid goes to bed at seven and then my husband usually goes back to work or plays games online with his friends in his office. Or he watches TV with me. So a lot of the nights I lay down on the couch by myself and turn on the tv and try to figure out what to watch. My nightlife is so pathetic right now, mostly because of the restrictions from COVID-19, winter weather, and my pregnancy. So I lay there like a sea lion on a rock, if no one was home I would probably just lay there barking too but I restrain myself. This was a couple weeks ago, I put on the Crown because everyone’s talking about it and thought it might help me a little bit with Jeopardy clues. There’s four seasons and the episodes are long so I’m like.. greeeaaat here’s a bunch of content to fill up my loser time. Am I lazy? I wondered. Like am I a piece of shit lazy person? No, I reasoned… If my kid isn’t sticky for most of the day, I’m not lazy… and he’s only mildly sticky and only some of the time. There’s just nothing to do, that’s all.

The next night I went to put on the third episode of the Crown and I was just like yeah this show is quote so good endquote but I don’t give a shit. I don’t want to watch TV. So, instead I just stared at this nice original floral painting I have above our sideboard kind of next to the TV. Just stared and stared. I do this sometimes. Shawn will walk in the room and be like Are you ok? And I’m like, Yeah. I find this past time less embarrassing than watching TV. 

So, I was thinking about things I could do other than this sea lion art meditation thing and I was like, Ok, I could go do some writing. Nah, it’s nighttime, I argued. I’m a morning bird, not a night owl. I can’t work at night. Because I wasn’t distracted from this normally reflexive thought I looked at it a little more closely. I’m the type of person who is productive early in the day and it’s just against my nature to produce at night. Morning bird. Not Night Owl. Well then why am I awake now, at night, brimming with energy - looking for something to do like an OWL high in the branches scanning for a rat in the brush? Oh, and if I’m such a peppy little early bird, how come I never actually get up early? Hmm? Why’s that? BAM!

Oh my God, I realized. It’s not even fucking true. That’s not even real. I’ve been telling that story for so long. The truth is, I can write at night. Of course I can fucking write at night. Maybe I’ve just been saying I can’t work at night so I don’t have to work at all. 

So, Im laying on my couch looking at the painting and realizing that telling myself I’m not a night owl is just bullshit, like obvious bullshit. Ok, so I should just go to my desk and start writing right now. Then I rolled my body over onto my side so my head was turned on the cushion, very much not committing to this getting up thing, and saw my kids toys all over the living room floor. Oh, I thought to myself. It’s all cluttered and messy. So is the kitchen. I can’t work when the house is a mess. It’s too distracting. I’m just the type of person that needs everything to be organized and clean in order to concentrate and write. And cleaning all of this properly would take like an hour and I don’t feel like it so I guess I’ll just watch TV. Wait a second… BAM! There’s another one! Holy shit. Of course I can write when the house is a mess. Why couldn’t I? Just turn your back to the mess, dummy.  It can’t hurt you it doesn’t even make noise to distract you. I might as well say, I can’t write when I have hazel eyes.. like there will always be a mess somewhere in this house. 

These are what the life coaches and counsellors and positive psychologists call LIMITING BELIEFS! I guess I thought limiting beliefs were bigger and less material. I thought a limiting belief was like… if your parents went through a whack divorce when you were two and you don’t even remember it but now for some reason you don’t trust your romantic partners… something like that. But these limiting beliefs that I had were like sneaky real life little mantras that I just had never challenged and was using the protect myself from failure and success. 

It’s really fucked to think that I’ve been tricking myself and working against myself for so long. If some old white man came up to me and said “Hey little lady, don’t try to write at night time… you’re a morning bird. You can’t work at night. Or Hey little miss, your house is messy, people like you can’t write with a messy old house” I’d be like, “Go fuck yourself, Sanders, of course I can.”

The truth is, I can write anywhere. Give me a pen and a paper, give me a laptop or a fucking typewriter and I will write. Or just give me a phone or a recorder and I will dictate. Or if there in nothing else I will draw the letters in the fucking dirt because I am a goddamn writer. Cut off my fingers and I’ll keep writing in the dirt with my stubs, ok? If I were an ancient Egyptian, I’d be the first one hieroglyphin’. If I were living back in the Bible days, the first five books of the New Testament would be Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and Kayla because you’d better believe I’d be writing down my hot takes on Jesus. I would be have been writing with my quil like, title The Gospel According to Kayla. Chapter One, Verse One: “Hey guys! So, Jesus was a total badass and the romans were fucking jealous.” End verse. In and Out Burger would totally put that on the bottom of their soda cup.

So, let’s talk about the big dirty elephant in the room: the Covid 19 Pandemic.

I’ve been hearing a lot of people referencing Maslow’s pyramid lately. Do you know Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? If you’ve heard of it, you’re probably imagining a pyramid right now. You learn about it if you take an introduction to Psychology course… it’s also just so popular that it’s kind of permeated the culture so that’s why I think you’ve heard of it. It’s this super famous theory that Abraham Maslow proposed in a paper in 1943 called “A theory of Human Motivation”.  It’s always illustrated in a pyramid and sometimes people just call it “The pyramid of needs”. If you put Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs into a Google Image search you will just keep scrolling through endless images of pyramids. The pyramids have five or six levels of needs illustrated on them. The theory is that a person’s most basic needs must be met before they become motivated to achieve higher level needs. Which makes a lot of sense, right?

So at the bottom of the pyramid are your basic needs, first your physiological needs like food and water, second your safety needs like shelter. Then after you aren’t hungry and thirsty and needing a roof over you head.. you start being motivated to get your needs for love and belonging met - you want an intimate partner, a group of friends to hang out with or some close friends to connect with. After you’ve got all of that sorted out you’re opened up to be motivated by your esteem needs - you’ve got your food and your house and your partner and now you want to accomplish some things… you want a promotion or a medal or a strong social media presence or something. Then usually at the top of the pyramid is “ahhhh” Self-Actualization!!! Which means reaching your full potential.

Okay so you look at this pyramid, and it just kind of makes sense and it’s memorable and you’re like okay, I get it. I personally learned about it like fifteen years ago and never forgot it but also never really thought about it. But it’s been coming up a lot lately, I’ve noticed, because of that crazy little thang called the Covid-19 global pandemic. There’s a lot of people out there saying, yo, cut yourself some slack. If you’re behind on stuff or you don’t feel like you accomplished anything this year, if you’re uninspired or downright depressed, people are saying hey that makes a lot of sense. It’s okay. They’re like, you can’t be expected to be at the top of Maslow’s pyramid right now, just like self actualizing your ass off while your life has been turned upside down by this invisible beast. You have to figure out how to get food, how to work from home, how to maintain an adequate level of socialization and give love receive love while standing six feet apart in the cold and covering up half of your face. No one expects you to be killing it at your highest purpose right now. And I imagined all of these successful people who had spent their lives climbing up this pyramid, who had been hanging out at the top level - self actualizing and reaching their full potential, just sliding back down to the bottom because both their parents died of Covid or they’re stuck at home raising their kids instead of running their businesses. 

BUT then recently I learned that Maslow himself NEVER ACTUALLY USED A PYRAMID TO DEPICT HIS THEORY AT ALL! So, what? Is the pyramid just bullshit? Is Maslow like rolling over in his grave every time someone pins a cute illustration of the pyramid to their self-help Pinterest board? What is happening? Shall I add this to the list of things I learned in high school that are now outdated? First, I find out Pluto isn’t a planet, then I find out my tongue isn’t divided into quadrants where the taste receptors sense bitter, sour, sweet, and salty respectively? I guess that one should have been obvious. What else kind of bullshit was I taught? Probably lots of racist, nationalistic stuff… but I digress.

So there’s this quote - kind of wrongly attributed to Carl Jung which is, “People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.” Maslow expressed this idea, the hierarchy of human needs, and some other dude put it into a pyramid, and the pyramid rang true… it became a meme. By which I don’t just mean a funny pic on the internet. I mean it was an idea that spread from person to person in our culture. And it really resonated with people and it went on to be a basis for a lot of other ideas and thoughts. Even if maybe Maslow didn’t think of it that way, does that mean that the pyramid isn’t a good idea? A man can’t stop a good idea. The idea is more significant than the man. If Einstien changed his mind, we wouldn’t go, hold up guys… shut up about this e=mc2 thing, EINSTIEN, the idea MAKER doesn’t like it anymore. Stop the idea! Stop the idea! I think a person is a vessel for the idea. It comes to you, flows through you, and moves on.

But IS the pyramid a good idea? Is motivation in life really like a pyramid that we climb. I don’t think so anymore. Life isn’t really something we climb up or tumble down, is it? When you’re going through your day and having your experiences and choosing your words and actions, it’s so much more complex than that. Life is something that we move through. There isn’t really just up or down, it’s so much more dimensional than that. You can have no friends or loved ones, and still jump higher than anyone else at the Olympics. You can think of a groundbreaking theorem while waiting in line at the food bank. Everyone can hate your guts, and you can still be the best damn banjo picker this side of the Appalachian mountain range. 

The pyramid was created by some management consultant in the 1960’s - around 20 years after Maslow published the paper it’s based on. Maslow himself was already obsessed with Transcendence, which he said can happen to some self-actualizers. The pyramid was the same type of diagram that was being used all over bureaucratic management power structures in the 60’s - with owners and CEO’s at the top, Managers in the middle and manual laborers at the bottom. The pyramid attributed to Maslow was an easy illustration to help people understand how to motivate workers in the work place. In other words, if you don’t give someone a lunch break they won’t function as well in their job.

So, you’re not at the bottom of anything, ok? Everything you’ve learned, you still know. You’re still just as tall as you’ve already grown. I really believe there is always a move toward growth. 

Maslow himself did say some really cool shit though.

I think Maslow was a cutie and sweetie. Something in particular I find adorable about Maslow, other than the fact he looked like he could be Mario and Luigi’s dad, is that he really admired other people. When he was starting out, his whole inspiration around Self Actualization was because he had these two homies, Ruth Benedict and Max Wertheimer and he thought they were fucking rad. He said they were very, very wonderful people. He loved them so much that he started taking copious notes about their personalities, trying to figure out what made them so special, so different from everyone else. Can you imagine if you had this little psychologist friend who though you were so great they took notes when they hung out with you? Once he kind of dissected their personalities, he had this Ah-Ha moment where he was like.. these characteristics could be a pattern, or a generalized framework for identifying other exceptional people.   

In the time that Maslow was working, it wasn’t really en vogue to study the psychology of great, healthy people. The field was more concerned with people who are mentally ill and the pitfalls of the human condition. But our cutie Maslow was like, “I wanted to prove that humans are capable of something grander than war, prejudice, and hatred. I wanted to make science consider all the people; the best specimen of mankind I could find.”  

Okay so, he studied the personalities of public figures that he thought were probably self-actualizers like: Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Rosevelt, Jane Addams, William James, and Aldous Huxley. This is just so funny to me because it seems really unscientific. So, then he screens 3000 college students, of which he only found one who he thought could be a self-actualizer. And I guess 12 others that were well on their way. So, he thought that it was pretty rare to be a self-actualizer. He did say anyone could be one though. He said, “There seems to be no intrinsic reason why everyone shouldn’t be this way. Apparently, every baby has possibilities for self-actualization, but most of them get it knocked out of them.”

Anyway, Maslow himself wasn’t really drawing this pyramid. He was more talking about growth vs. deficiency. He thought most people lived their lives motivated by deficiency. Like, I’m hungry.. I’m lacking food, I’m motivated to get food, my actions are all around this lack. Same goes for safety, affection, and self-esteem. When you’re lacking in these things, you’re motivated by that deficiency and thus, according to Maslow, you’re not motivated by growth. Self actualizing itself is about knowing what makes you uniquely you and living that out to the fullest of your potential - fueled by curiosity, love, and a sense of purpose.

So, yeah, Maslow was cool and everything but I tend to take early psychology with a huge grain of salt… I mean, just look a Frued.. he was a total freak. Maslow died before the internet and he was going around making notes about his friends and stuff. 

I saw an illustration by Anja Nov on Winter Solstice of three eels under the moon. In the caption she wrote: “The eel embodies determination, constant forward movement, and endurance. It reminds us that we are, in fact, on the right path. And yet, the eel shape-shifts, observes, waits in the shadows. It knows that forward movement involves, at times, lying in the dark, in the most mysterious, clouded parts of ourselves, until it is time to strike with all the electricity our souls can muster.

Both personally and collectively, we are all lying in wait, in the muck and dust right now.  May we have the patient determination of the eel, guided by the ebb and flow of the tides--guided by the moon.”

I like this metaphor much more than choking on sand at the foot of a pyramid, bruised and battered from my fall. 

Seriously though, If you haven’t been pursuing your dream or being as productive as you might like, maybe you could try what I did. If you can’t find anything that you’re genuinely interested in or excited about to watch on TV one night this week… ask yourself why you aren’t working on your thing. Why aren’t you practicing your chords or applying for that job or studying that subject? Like why not? Then just listen to the answer. Is it real? Is it really a brick wall standing between you and your purpose? 

In the process of making this episode, I learned that people use labels and limiting beliefs. My label, was Early Bird. Yours could be Virgo, Woman, Uneducated, Christian…. You name it, literally.  But I didn’t need to stay in that box that I had drawn around myself. It was just a illusion. 

The second type of limiting belief I had was an “I can’t” belief. I can’t write because the house is messy. In my case, it was just a lie. In your case, your limiting belief might be true in a way. Like if you’re disabled so you can’t run a marathon. You’re right, you physically can’t run. Sometime we have to redefine the thing we want to do rather than dismantling false ideas about our own abilities. So, if you can’t run - then being a runner is not your purpose, even if it once was. What CAN you do? You are still a unique person with the potential to grow and do awesome things. Dwelling on true impossibilities is a way of avoiding growth.

There’s another limiting belief called Learned Helplessness that I hear is super prevalent. I started looking into this and it was so fucking sad that I had to stop. One video told the story of how when elephants are born in India, the trainers will tie them to a post with a rope that’s strong enough to keep them there. They will struggle to get free and get away for days until finally they will learn that they can’t, they’re helpless. Then, when the elephant grows up, they are able to use the same little top to tie to the elephant to the post, even though the big elephant could easily get free… they never even try.  For some reason this story just destroyed my heart and I think as a mother it’s just… too deep to think about how a child might be taught that they are helpless! If you feel helpless all the time, helpless to steer your own ship and be a part of creating your own future, you might really need professional help and I suggest you seek some! Oh man and if this is you I’m really sorry but the good news is you can unlearn it! 

Another type of limiting belief is comparing yourself to other people. I think a lot of people struggle with this. So, if like me, you want to be a successful fiction writer, you might look at other people in the field who ARE successful. So, I could choose to look at someone contemporary like Donna Tartt, for example, who wrote The Goldfinch… which I consider a fucking masterpiece. I could use her example as an inspiration or it could be a fucking thorn in my side. How could I ever possibly compete with someone like her? She’s a rare genius. If one needs to be like her to be a published writer, I’m not in the class, like there is just no way. Really, why would I compare myself to a living legend like Donna Tartt when I’m just starting out? I read her masterpiece, not her first draft, and I don’t know what she went through to get where she is… but I’m sure it didn’t involve laying on the couch watching TV for hours every fucking night. There’s always going to be someone better than you, and it might not just be the masters, it might be your neighbor. But that says more about the fact that there’s so much room to grow than it does about any deficiency you might have.

There’s the belief that if you’re vulnerable you’ll get hurt. I have this one too. 

Learning and growing and trying things almost always includes some form of vulnerability. You have to kind of show your soft belly a little bit and you might be scared that someone’s going to just plunge a knife into you.

When I was just out of childhood in my early adolescence, I distinctly remember being at the mall with my best friend, Amy Gail, and we were walking through Chapters. Chapters is the name of the big book store in Canada, like Barnes and Noble. In the center of the wide isle there were these bins of books. This big deep bins with what looked like hundreds of different books in them. They were hardcover and soft cover fiction books. They were on sale for like 80% off, for 4 dollars and 5 dollars. I looked around the store at the thousands of books that lined the shelves, the other bins of discount books down the row. I picked one up. It was heavy with a glossy cover. The authors name, the cover art, the title. It was over 800 pages long. So, this author wrote this whole fucking book, this 800 page story, which is, like, impossible. THEN, they managed to get it edited and published and stocked by this huge retailer… I thought, this was another impossible mountain to climb. How many people had to believe in this work for it to end up in my hands. And I plucked it out of the bargain bin. It’s practically garbage, I thought. After all of that, what’s the author left with? Embarrassment. Failure. In that moment I thought that wanting to become a published fiction writer was probably like dreaming of becoming a famous movie star or pop music icon. I can’t be a writer. How audacious, how conceited, delusional would I have to be to pursue this. It’s strange in this moment to wonder why, looking at all of those published books I didn’t think to myself: if all of these people can do it, so can I. I thought, there must be millions of people trying to do this, and so few that actually succeed. It would be really dumb to try to do that, I thought.  

Now, quick and dirty, some other really powerful limiting beliefs. There’s the fear of other people judging you. Who are these other people and how much do they actually think about you anyways? They’re probably thinking a lot more about themselves than they are about you. There’s also guilt - lots of people think they don’t deserve what they really want. You think someone else is more deserving. There’s also a limiting belief that you should be doing something else instead. 

But Kayla, I don’t have a purpose. There’s no such thing as a purpose. Nobody has one, that’s just silly. Okay. That’s what I used to think too. Actually, I get hung up on that ALL the fucking time. I’ll be wondering how to live my life or grow or self-actualize and then I’ll just realize I’m like an amoeba in space and why even bother. My therapist actually suggested once that my nihilism might be a limiting belief. She’s like, or maybe if you think like that about your life then you just don’t have to try. 

Everything is small compared to something else, but to you - your life is where everything happens. Your body senses every bit of the world that choose to set it in. Your lineage, so for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, has been unbroken. Humans who lived in other places in the world, in unimaginable eras, got together and fucked, and the right sperm met the right egg and all the shit worked out. Think of all those sperm that didn’t get to the egg so that you could be YOU. So, isn’t it worth figuring out what’s special about you? And all those babies that were born through pain, expanded in childhood, survived to adulthood to fuck another one of your ancestors, sorry, make love. I bet your ancestors all made love. All of their stories. Their struggles. So many generations of humans needing to keep humanity moving into the future, passing the baton to YOU. If they were all alive now, how much they would be curious about you. 

The truth is, you choose to have a purpose. Life pushes you from behind, purpose pulls you forward by the heart. Purpose calls and when you hear that sound, It lights you up. Don’t cut the rope to your purpose by telling yourself stories about why you can’t do things. Each excuse saws away at the fibers of the cord until you’re untethered. Now you’re free of your purpose. It’s chill. It’s probably Netflix and Chill. You have no responsibility to pursue it. But time waits for no man. If you don’t move forward, you will be be moved. 

 Without your purpose to pull you, now to be pushed forward by a sightless, horny, hungry fiend, the ID, in whatever form it takes. Your base nature cares not if you stumble on stones or are marooned in a bog. It just shoves, shoves, shoves you forward so you pitch chest first, head whipping back. Now you’re easy pray for vampire corporations that seek only to suck your bank account dry, until it’s all red, at any cost to you - if they need to destroy your self esteem, play with your dreams - dazzle you with false hope only to leave you broke and cheated - no problem for a blood sucking corporation.

But Kayla, my purpose is to sit the in the hottub for an hour, and I can’t because I’m pregnant. Yes, you can! Oh wait, no no you can’t do that one. Don’t do that. That’s not… that’s not your purpose. If you don’t know what your purpose is - hit up success coach Megan Woodruff at meganwoodruffcoaching@gmail.com and she’ll get you sorted out.

Back to me. Do I write every night now? Did I drag the television out to the curb? No, not exactly, but at least I’m honest with myself about my behavior and I am doing real things that are integrated with my purpose like taking writing courses, reading great books, and doing research for my first novel - even at night and even if the house is messy.  And you know what? It’s not really that scary. It’s invigorating - doing the thing that I love that I’m good at… self actualizing, if you will.

I’d be interested to know what your limiting beliefs are. So next time you’re bored, ask yourself why you can’t work towards your goal or do something that is integrated with your purpose right now. You might find that there’s a limiting belief there that you just have to look at a bit more closely for a while, until it disappears. 

One last word from Maslow:  He said, “One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.”

That’s about it for now.

Happy New Year, listener. Don’t forget, you’re the eel. Just because you’re waiting doesn’t make you any less electric.