Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay
I ask new clients to complete a series of reflective questions before we begin our work together. Some questions are about the coaching relationship: “What approaches encourage or motivate you?” Others about the client’s life: “What are you proud of?” or “What has been your biggest disappointment?” or “If you could change one thing about your life so far, what would that be and why?”
One of the most important questions I ask is “What is your most common self-limiting behavior?”
I ask this question because I find that most of the limits we place on ourselves are self-imposed ones. That’s true of my clients, and that’s also true of my own life.
Yet we often don’t realize that we are holding ourselves back. In her book Now What? 90 Days to a New Direction, coach Laura Berman Fortgang notes that these limits may not appear to be self-imposed because “they are so well-integrated into your life that the lines [between externally-imposed limits and self-imposed ones] have become blurred.” Clients sometimes comment that until I posed that question, they had not really stopped to consider how they limited themselves.
The answers that clients give to that question vary. Many people say it’s procrastination in one form or another—not starting something, not finishing something or engaging in endless revision and polishing. Some let general feelings of distrust or resentment stop them from moving forward. Some people get paralyzed by the belief that they “just don’t have what it takes” to achieve something. They believe they aren’t smart enough or good enough.
Our self-limiting behaviors are usually rooted in fear: fear of failure, of humiliation, of isolation, of the loss of a sense of belonging.
In her book, Playing Big, leadership coach Tara Mohr calls these self-limiting behaviors “hiding.” She says that we use these behaviors to convince ourselves that we are moving forward in the most diligent way we can” even as we avoid stepping into bigger roles. Through these hiding or self-limiting behaviors, Mohr says, we can “put off the scary work of stepping into our roles as leaders, creators, and change agents.”
Throughout the coaching process, I try to help clients become more aware of when they are limiting themselves, and we use a variety of tools to help them overcome the anxiety and fear that are at the roots of self-imposed limits.
What about you? How do you limit yourself in ways that keep you from doing the things you want to do with your life?