Ditch the Limiting Self-Labels: How Self-Perception Shapes Your Success
Unlock Your Potential
Do you use limiting self-labels to describe yourself? learn how to unlock your potential.
“The words you use to describe yourself might be the biggest obstacle to your success.”
The words you use to define yourself could block you from unlocking your highest success and potential. In this article, learn how identifying and overcoming self-imposed self-limiting labels can profoundly impact your personal growth and achievements.
The Hidden Impact of Self-Limiting Labels
The labels we apply to ourselves have far more power than many realize. A label is more than just a descriptor — over time, it fundamentally shapes how we perceive ourselves and what we believe we can achieve.
“Examine the labels you apply to yourself. Every label is a boundary or limit you will not let yourself cross.” ~ Wayne Dyer
When we label ourselves as shy, unathletic, bad at math, tone deaf, or any other quality, it impacts what we think we can and cannot do. Calling ourselves shy constructs a narrative that it is an innate trait we cannot change rather than a behavior that can shift over time. Labeling ourselves as bad at math suggests an inability to learn and improve in that area.
The labels we use, often without conscious thought, construct boundaries in our minds. As Dyer pointed out, they limit what we believe about our abilities, talents, and potential for growth. Even when a label has some truth, it is rarely the whole story. Believing that narrative prevents us from seeing possibilities beyond it.
“Studies show that 90% of people hold at least one limiting self-belief. Are you one of them?”
Labels Limit And Inhibit You From Being The Best You Can Be
For example, labeling yourself “not creative” means you likely won’t explore creative hobbies or activities. The label inhibits you from nurturing that dormant capacity within yourself for fear of failure or difficulty. However, creativity is a skill that nearly everyone possesses — and it can be cultivated through practice over time, even if your self-perception is of someone who is uncreative or artistically untalented.
Don’t Close Yourself Off To Infinite Possibilities
The same applies even to labels with a more neutral connotation. Calling yourself an introvert, while apt for some, can construct a boundary that makes you less likely to develop public speaking skills or put yourself in leadership positions. It can become a security blanket or excuse that inhibits personal growth.
When you close yourself off from that possibility of growth, the self-limiting label has constructed a boundary you have chosen not to cross.
Chopra’s “Who Am I?” Exercise to Reveal Limiting Labels
Years ago, when I studied with spiritual and wellness leader Deepak Chopra, he shared a powerful exercise to help expose the dominant self-labels holding you back. Chopra said to take a few quiet minutes to repeatedly ask yourself,
“Who am I?”
Notice your automatic reflexive responses. Do you instinctively bring up socially assigned labels like mother, teacher, daughter, lawyer, or descriptors of your ethnicity, gender, age, or religion? You may define yourself by titles, possessions, education level, past failures, or singular life events. Observe if you place yourself in identity boxes based on what external experiences shape your self-perception.
This powerful exercise reflects on the labels you currently identify with.
How do Label And Limit Yourself?
As Chopra’s insightful exercise reveals, most of us reflexively rely on labels applied to us by society, family history, expectations, and pivotal life events in shaping our sense of identity. Yet no single label could ever capture the entirety of who you are at your core or all you can still become.
Don’t Limit Your Potential
Allowing any label to rigidly define you without question erects limiting walls around your potential. Too often, we never take the time to ask ourselves what other aspects of self may lie unexplored within us, invisible to us because of the simple labels dominating our self-perception.
Overcoming Limiting Labels to Unlock Your Potential
So, what can you do to overcome the unconscious self-limits you have adopted over the years? An initial step is to start noticing these subtly toxic narratives and labels through deeper self-reflection, self-questioning, and introspection in your life.
You can also gain valuable perception by candidly conversing with trusted friends and family to understand their perspectives on your self-limiting tendencies.
Where Did That Limiting Thought Come From
Examine times when you expressed doubt or a defeatist attitude about your capabilities. What story were you telling yourself in that situation?
See if you can trace when and how that harmful self-label originally took hold in your psyche. Unpacking the genesis of self-limiting identity stories is crucial.
Comfortable Old Stories
As you bring deeper awareness to self-restricting personal labels currently holding you back, get genuinely curious about their presumed accuracy and usefulness. Ask yourself openly — are these self-assumed identities reflecting innate, permanent truths about my abilities? Or are they just comfortable yet unwarranted old stories I keep defaulting back to?
What bold areas of untapped talents and latent potential could emerge if I drop self-imposed barriers rooted only in the muted limits these negative labels impose?
Bravely Challenge Old Beliefs
Moving beyond damaging labels requires mindfully challenging their certainty. Internally examine stories of possibility that transcend the boundaries those labels created. Through sustained effort and courage, over time, you can dismantle the walls that once held you back. Eventually, an old label no longer fits – you have become someone different through personal expansion.
Give yourself the license to envision possibilities completely outside those shackling lines of negative self-talk.
“Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future.” ~ Deepak Chopra
Evolve and Empower Your Identity
Your self-concept should never stay static or permanently boxed in based on fleeting past events or circumstances. You must continually refresh your self-image, evolve your sense of identity in empowering directions, and lean into your innate capacity for personal growth.
Shed Self-Limiting Fears and Faulty Assumptions
By shedding self-limitations rooted in fear or faulty assumptions, over time, you can actively dismantle once sturdy psychological walls that had silently held you back for years. When stale labels and self-perceptions no longer fit the more expansive version of self you courageously grow into each day, take comfort in the fact that the momentum behind your self-directed growth becomes unstoppable.
The Future Belongs to Identity Pioneers
While descriptive labels will always have some practical use in short-handing aspects of our personality to the world, the real danger comes from their invisible influence in restricting what we allow ourselves to accomplish based on who we believe we are and are not.
“The day you change the way you look at things is the day those things change for you.” ~ Deepak Chopra
By clinging to self-limiting labels without deeper questioning or resistance, you construct barriers that constrain your development, choke your life experiences, and even damage your health over decades. Actively examining and evolving beyond these self-sabotaging old stories and worn-out labels that no longer serve your becoming frees you to create radically new trajectories filled with expanded potential.
My Wish For You
I hope that you will see that:
- What circumstances you came into this world with does not define you.
- What others have told you does not define you.
- What you have seen does not define you.
- You are filled with infinite possibilities.
- You Must Fearlessly Explore The World Of Possibilities.
Are You Ready? Who Are You?
