#upper limit problem

New on blog: Why You Should Be Reading "The Big Leap" Right Now!

When we are in a zone of “Feeling Good”, everything is happening just the way we want, after a while we can’t take it anymore! We hit our Upper Limit of feeling good and we self sabotage our “feeling good state”! At the end of the last year I came across this book “The Big Leap” written by Gay Hendricks that changed my outlook towards life. And I am going to tell you why!

Absurd Ways We Wreck Our Own Success

Ever been on the brink of something REALLY COOL only to  have something really crummy happen?

What if I told you it’s not bad luck – but something we do to ourselves.

No kidding.

One of my coaching clients was about to have a phenomenal breakthrough with a discussion with a friend as they were walking through the middle of a Tucson park. This women was so afraid of bringing up the…

Why You Need To Question Your Reality

The human brain is something of a lazy creature. It’s an evolutionary mechanism at work; those brains of ours just don’t want to waste time thinking about things they don’t have to! Thinking new thoughts requires creating new neural pathways. So, for the most part, they reach for the tried and true, over and over again. But this inherent biology also creates a bigger problem: [color]The reality…

Do you ever feel like every time you gain momentum in your business, life or relationships that you hit a brick wall? That for every two steps forward you take one (or maybe three) back?

You’ve got a problem – a big problem that will keep you stuck where you are - unless you do something about it. It’s what Gay Hendricks calls the Upper Limit Problem in his fantastic book The Big Leap – Conquer Your Fear and Take Life to the Next Level.

Your Upper Limit is essentially the subconscious programming (usually set in childhood) that keeps you in your comfort zone and chokes off the flow of extra goodness in your life when you get outside of that zone.

Think of it like your home’s thermostat… when it gets too warm (i.e., too good in your life, business, relationships), the air conditioner kicks on and blasts cold air to cool it down a notch (and take you back into your comfort zone). When you bump up against your Upper Limit, your mind can – and will – come up with all manner of ways to put your good feelings on ice.

I ran right smack into my Upper Limit not so long ago. I’ve been a work-from-home mom for the past several years and had recently made a decision to launch again into the work I love doing, which is designing and implementing transformational personal development and empowerment seminars and retreats. I was chomping at the bit to get started. I enrolled in Marie Forleo’s B-School, planned my work times and was jazzed to get started… and promptly caught a horrible flu that dragged on for four long weeks.

Both of my boys got sick, too. In fact, my entire family was sick for pretty much five months straight. Wow! That’s some Upper Limit! I didn’t know what it was called back then, but like magic, Marie Forleo came out with this fantastic video talking about Upper Limits, which led me to pick up Hendricks’ book.

You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? Think about your own life and the times you’ve been on a roll, only to have some unexpected terrible something rear its head (a fight with your loved ones, a bad financial decision, a car accident, excessive worrying), and instead of flying high, you feel steamrolled.

So, what can we do about it? How can we break through our Upper Limits so we can reach our next levels, or as Hendricks calls it, our Zone of Genius?

1.   You have to be willing to allow more good into your life and to allow the feeling of feeling good. If you’re not willing to feel great and allow yourself to have a fulfilling life, you won’t. It’s that simple. Begin with, “I am willing to allow more love, financial abundance, vibrant health, etc. (you fill in the blank) into my life.”

2.   Ask yourself how much love and abundance you’re willing to allow yourself. A lot? A little?

3.   Identify how you sabotage yourself when your Upper Limit kicks in. In my case, I got physically ill. You may start a fight or go crazy with the credit cards. When you think about times you’ve been feeling great and then done something to undercut yourself, can you see a pattern?

4.   Identify the real problem. When you find yourself engaging in self-sabotaging behaviors,  you can do the 5 Why’s Exercise (which I discuss in my blog) to drill down to the root of the destructive behavior. That is the real problem or emotion that needs to be addressed.

5.   Keep playing and exploring with the 5 Why’s and asking the questions. You might want to write down your observations and feelings that come up during your self-inquiry and what changes you observe in your thought pattern, behavior and life.

Hendricks outlines his own process and how to operate in your Zone of Genius in The Big Leap, which I highly encourage you to also read.

Most importantly, remember to be kind to yourself. No one is perfect. Simply by making a habit out of self-inquiry, you will reap huge rewards. It’s those who pursue their greatness with tenacity who break through barriers and rise above limitation to embody their greatest potential.

I'd love to hear from my readers!

How have Upper Limit Problems manifested in your life? How have you overcome them? Please comment below.

If you found this post helpful, please share it with your friends and sign up to receive weekly insights for entrepreneurs and world-changers, inspiration to keep you motivated and empowering strategies for living your greatest life.  

The Five Why’s is a process originally developed by Sakichi Toyoda of Toyota Motor Corporation to get to the root cause of a problem and identify the process that had failed (in his case, in the manufacturing of Toyota vehicles). I have tweaked the Five Why’s process to help me uncover hidden limiting beliefs, get to the root cause of being stuck in an area of my life or business and to help me identify my ideal clients.

A key to using this process is to go deep – don’t settle for superficial answers if you’re looking to dig up a problem, bring it into the light and solve it or move past it. Sometimes you need to go seven or eight levels of “why” to get to the true cause, but five rounds will usually suffice.

Here are some tips on using the Five Why’s process:

When you find yourself engaging in self-sabotaging behaviors (aka, limiting beliefs), you can do this exercise to drill down to the root of the destructive behavior.  Go for feeling and emotion. Deep core beliefs often reside in your primal brain, which doesn’t use reason to make decisions. This is also why you have to drop down to the emotional language level of the primal brain to truly uproot deep beliefs and patterns.  

If you’re stuck – not moving forward in your life or business, procrastinating about doing something or just can’t “move on”, you may need to do the process twice – once for a process failing (like if a business transaction went awry) and another time for identifying the emotional / belief pattern that caused the process to fail.  

Identifying the emotional drivers and migraine problems of your ideal client will make a world of difference in your ability to connect with them and successfully provide them solutions and products they want. Use the Five Why’s process to drill down to the root causes and emotions your ideal clients have around the problem you can help them solve.

Let’s take a recent example from my own life. In short, I found myself on the cusp of launching a new business, only to run head-on into a major limiting belief (Upper Limit Problem), which manifested in prolonged physical illness, sabotaging my business progress and self-confidence.

Here’s how I used the Five Why’s to get to the root cause and move forward:

What’s my problem? Manifesting physical illness to prevent me from having the capacity to do work and start a new business.

Why #1: Why would I stop myself from starting a new business? Because I would have to expend a lot of time doing all the things necessary to get it going.

Why #2: Why wouldn’t I want to expend the time? Because it would take away from time with my children and husband.

Why #3: Why wouldn’t I want to take time away from the family? Because I would feel like I’m a bad mother and wife (a negative association that was set for me by a father who prioritized work over family).

Why #4: Why would I feel like a bad mother and wife? Because I’d be acting selfishly and doing something just for me.

Why #5: Why wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) I do something “selfish” or just for me? Because selfish people are bad people and no one likes or loves a selfish person.

You can see that for me, the real limiting belief I had around starting a new business stems from the fear of being perceived as selfish, a bad person, a poor mother and wife and the fear that as a result, I will lose the love of those I love most and no one will like me.

Once you have insight into what’s truly driving your behavior, you can shine a light on your fears and dispel them. Many techniques for removing fears and busting through limiting beliefs, such as Emotional Freedom Technique, Timeline Therapy, Neurolinguistic Patterning processes and more, but a simple technique you can begin with is to ask yourself, “How…?” and “What could… / What if…?”.

How could I be both a great mother and wife and do what brings me joy?

What if I could build my own business and not compromise on what’s most important to me? What could that look like?

The words “how” and “what if / what could” open the mind to possibility and eyes to opportunities.

I'd love to hear from my readers! How have limiting beliefs manifested in your life? How have you overcome them?

Please let me know in the comments section below.

If you found this post helpful, please share it with your friends and sign up to receive weekly insights for entrepreneurs and world-changers, inspiration to keep you motivated and empowering strategies for living your greatest life.

I’ve written a few times about my time as a phone jockey. In many ways I feel like the six years I worked at that place became a black hole of negativity – not just with the work, but negativity in myself. 

They had a computer system that would crash if you looked at it the wrong way. I get the feeling like it was coded by a group of drunken monkeys, but I digress. It always used to give the most bizarre errors. Stuff like “Page file absent from the ladder. Send error report?” and “Ladder crashed in the library. Send error report?”

Perhaps if they could’ve corrected the ladder everything would’ve been better? Doubtful, but a man can dream can’t he?

August 29, 2010 was the day I released Ryan 2.0. It served me well for the most part. I’ve released several service packs and bug fixes over the years but it’s still the same basic code.

Honestly I forget what level I’m at now. But it’s time to scrap Ryan 2.0 for something bigger. Something better. Something, dare I say, revolutionary.

A lot of good things have been happening for me lately. I am turning over a new leaf in my life and it feels pretty good.

But I hit a serious snag a few days ago. I had the worst anxiety attack of my life while in the middle of Sam’s club on my first day on my new job. Sweating, rapid heart beat, shortness of breath, and feeling faint – not a good first impression.

This was four days ago. During that time I’ve barely gotten off the sofa. I haven’t eaten right. I still carry about this low-grade anxiety and jumpiness that I can’t shake. I still don’t think starting this job is in my best interests right now. I’m probably about to shoot myself in the foot, but my well-being is more important than any job. I can’t do a job, or write, or do anything if I’m locked in a padded room.

I emailed a friend of mine about this incident. She suggested that I developed an “upper limit problem.” WTF?

Psychologist and writer Gay Hendricks in his book “The Big Leap” explained the upper limit problem. To sum it up, the upper limit problem is when you start to experience some success and change but your body shuts down and you fall back into old, familiar patterns of thought and behavior.

My friend – the wise and learned one that she is (she’d probably kill me if she read this) was right on point. I think my upper limit has been reached.

While it explains Thursday, how is this going to affect me when I hit a higher upper limit than I have hit so far? Like when I see my book in print for starters.

Alas, that’s another problem for another time. Back to the original point of this post.

Today I announce that Ryan 3.0 is in development. It will be bigger, badder, and highly efficient. It will be stronger, faster, and more resilient.