{"id":44117,"date":"2025-06-12T10:14:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-12T10:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.happinessplay.com\/blog\/?p=44117"},"modified":"2026-10-17T19:03:41","modified_gmt":"2026-10-17T19:03:41","slug":"types-of-beliefs-limiting-and-empowering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.happinessplay.com\/blog\/types-of-beliefs-limiting-and-empowering","title":{"rendered":"Types of Beliefs: Limiting and Empowering Beliefs, With Examples"},"content":{"rendered":"

Where there’s a will there’s a way, love lasts for ever, marriage kills romance…<\/em> Are any of these true? In reality they are beliefs: personal opinions and points of view about the different areas of life, which we build up over the years. We already know how beliefs are formed<\/a>, that they shape how we understand the world, and that they are often unconscious.<\/p>\n

What are the types of beliefs?<\/h2>\n

In our approach to managing happiness we start with the wheel of life<\/a>. To live more fully, though, it also helps to review all your beliefs and sort them, with the information you have at each moment, into two groups: empowering beliefs and limiting beliefs<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Empowering beliefs<\/h3>\n

Empowering beliefs push you to grow, to bring out the best in yourself and to reach the goals you set. Work on them and you can change, find success and get through emotional crises in line with your values. Your beliefs influence how you improve any area of your life, so pay close attention to them. Your successes are measured by how strongly you believe in them. Anyone can succeed at what they set out to do, but believing it is as important as working for it.<\/p>\n

Limiting beliefs<\/h3>\n

Limiting beliefs are the main obstacle, and the ones to blame when you do not reach your goals or live by your values. It is always worth asking a powerful question: what is stopping me from reaching success?<\/em> Limiting beliefs usually start in childhood and stay hidden in the subconscious, where we do not assess them consciously. They also reach us through the media, the people around us, society, family and friends.<\/p>\n

Where beliefs come from<\/h2>\n

Both kinds of belief are usually built on experience and, because they feed back into our values (do not forget this exercise to identify your values<\/a>), they act as principles we follow as if they were proven truths. For instance, if you believe you are a pleasant person, you act like one: you treat people openly, you are sociable, you enjoy company, and people welcome you, which strengthens the belief.<\/p>\n

Managing your beliefs<\/h3>\n

You should be able to choose your beliefs simply, reinforcing those whose results you like. If you do not like the results, act differently and change them. It is more accurate to talk about letting go of<\/em> or moving beyond<\/em> beliefs than losing<\/em> them. We treat the rules of our life as possessions, and nobody wants to lose what took time and effort to build. The world makes sense and feels predictable when our way of interpreting it is confirmed. We can even take comfort in a disaster, as long as we predicted it. “I told you so” feels satisfying, not because we wanted things to go wrong but because our beliefs were confirmed.<\/p>\n

Examples of empowering beliefs<\/h2>\n

These ideas come from the NLP coaching tradition, as described by Joseph O’Connor<\/a>:<\/p>\n