Everyone has changed thousands of limiting beliefs in their lifetime without any effort or awareness. Your belief about God, money, drugs, education, work, love, sex, and faith has shifted multiple times — you thought about all of them differently when you were eight than when you were twenty-three than you do now. That’s thousands of belief changes, and you didn’t even notice most of them.
Our neurology is set up not to notice these shifts because we like to maintain a coherent sense of self — an identity that requires a stable set of beliefs. So we don’t look back and think “my beliefs have completely changed.” But they have, effortlessly.
This insight directly undermines the belief that “it’s hard” to change limiting beliefs. If you’ve already done it thousands of times without trying, the process is clearly natural and easy. The challenge isn’t the change itself — it’s bringing consciousness to the change so it can be directed intentionally. However, Joe acknowledges that beliefs can also become more limiting over time — people can grow more constricted, angry, and small-world as they age if they aren’t engaged in self-discovery.
Related Concepts
- Trusting awareness dissolves limiting beliefs without effort
- Transformation doesn’t have to be hard
- Identity creates rigidity and limitation
- Seeing through limiting beliefs is realization, not behavior control
- Changing behavior is the most efficient way to change consciousness
- Awareness changes what shoulds cannot