The Tyranny of the Possible — Why Your Self-Limiting Beliefs Are Keeping You Small

Well, hello there, my friend.

Jonathan Doyle with you once again.

Welcome aboard to the daily podcast.

Regular listeners, new listeners, let's take this journey together.

Today, we're gonna talk about something called the tyranny of the possible.

The tyranny of the possible, which is what?

It's the tyranny of the self-limiting beliefs that may be just below the

level of consciousness in your life.

What am I talking about?

I'm talking about what you believe is possible for a person like you.

The like you thing is really important because you have these

internal conceptions about what somebody like you can possibly do.

The only problem with that belief system is that it's completely false, really

unhelpful, and is likely to consign you to mediocrity, the tyranny of the possible.

Remember that so much of what happens in our life is semi-conscious at

best, subconscious most likely.

The way I often explain this to people is I say, I'll be sitting there in a

conversation with them trying to explain this principle, and I'll say, "Hey, where

were you on Christmas Day last year?" And they'll have no preparation for it.

They'll go, "What?" And I'll say, "Seriously, wh- where were you on

Christmas morning last year?" And almost without fail, I've never

seen somebody not able to do it, they will remember where they were.

It might have been family, it might have been out for breakfast, whatever

it was, they remember where they were.

And then I ask them the next question.

I say, "Where was that thought, that memory before I asked you?" So they had

no idea I was gonna ask that question.

So I say to them, "Where, where was that memory before I asked you?" And the answer

to that is it was floating around in this massive semi-conscious subconscious, you

know, that we have all our memories in.

So what I'm trying to suggest to you early on is that there are a huge number

of memories and beliefs and ideas that are carried around in our subconscious

or semi-conscious that we obviously don't think about most of the time.

So can I prove that principle to you?

Can you at least accept that, that there's a huge number of things about you that are

swimming around in your mind a great deal of the time that you don't think about?

And the one we want to focus on today is this self-limiting belief about

what's possible for someone like you.

You see, most people don't fail by-- because they try some outrageous

goal and just can't get there.

You see, if you set some kind of outrageous goal,

well, f- a few things happen.

Often, people around you are like, "That's crazy.

Why are you doing that?" But even if you never attain some really amazing

goal that you go after, I mean, the good news is at least that you're

going to become someone in the process.

Somebody that sets out to run an ultramarathon and takes it seriously, even

if they, you know, go on a hundred-mile run and then they break down and don't

finish, they've still become somebody quite remarkable on that journey.

You see, a problem in life isn't that you're gonna set

goals that are too big for you.

The real problem you've got is that you've got this self-limiting, this

capping belief about what you think is possible for a person like you.

But what you find with really successful people is they kind of

renegotiate that belief with themselves.

You see, one of the first things we have to do, and something I

really try to teach people, is you've got to get on your own team.

Now, it's really nice if you have supportive people around you that

really want to see you triumph and win.

That's great.

But sometimes we don't get that, and we never get it perfectly, even if we do.

But the one person who really does need to be on your own team is you

And you have to change this belief about what you think is possible.

I remember years ago reading a statistic that the average male in my

country, for example, and this would be similar in a lot of places around

the world, the average male has enough energy stored as body fat to run two

back-to-back Olympic distance marathons.

So, you know, there is a capacity there.

There's an energy source that could theoretically run over 80 kilometers.

But of course, no one's doing that, right?

But then I used to say to people, "Look, imagine someone kidnaps one

of your children, and they send you a ransom letter and they say,

'Unless you run an Olympic distance marathon in the next five hours, your

kid's gonna meet a terrible end.'"

Now, trust me, you would find a way to make it 42 kilometers.

You just would.

The capacity is there, but it takes an extraordinary

circumstance to bring it out.

And what I'm trying to draw your attention to is that your problem

really isn't ability or capacity.

So you can learn any number of skills.

You really can.

If you decide that you wanna focus on something, become good

at something, you can learn it.

And you're also born in a moment in history where the knowledge that you

need to do so many things is now free.

Like with YouTube, you can learn just about anything, or you can buy online

courses that aren't that expensive.

So knowledge isn't your problem The real problem is what

you think you're capable of.

And as I've said so many times, we live in this society of consumption

and distraction so that not many people think about this a lot of the time.

So I was in the gym yesterday, and if you follow me on Instagram, um,

I just knocked out 100-kilo bench press, and off camera I did 120.

And I'm 52 years of age, and that is not a brag.

It's just I'm able to do it.

I have the capacity to do it because I've built that capacity.

I have this idea in my head that I could do this kind of thing because

I have some proof for it, and so I bring that thing into reality.

Again, many of you know I play a lot of golf, and yeah, golf is

about discipline and work, and you've got to practice a lot.

But I can promise you that there's actually a lot to do with

belief about what's possible.

Let me give you a good example, and I don't mean to bore you with golf stories.

Any golfers out there know that if two golfers get talking to each other

about golf, it just goes on for hours.

But I will tell you that a while ago, I changed my practice strategy, and

I spent a lot more time working on putting and a lot more time working

on my short game, chipping around the greens, that sort of stuff.

And what I found is that as I began to play more golf and play more

holes, I would constantly find myself in a position of confidence.

I would have this sense of, oh yeah, I can make this putt.

Oh yeah, I can make this recovery shot because I'd done it so many times.

So my belief about what is possible was different than somebody who

doesn't do that kind of work and just turns up and just hopes for the best.

So yeah, we build capacity by practice and things we do, but I'm trying to draw your

attention to the power of the belief, that once you believe you can do something,

it's quite profound what actually happens.

And again, if you don't have that belief, if you won't get on your team, who will?

One of the most exhausting things as a parent, many of you will rem-

will know this, is like trying to get your child to believe something.

You know, they'll be like, "Oh, I can't do that.

I'm terrible at that." And you're there going, "No, you can." Like,

you have the belief for them, but they don't have it for themselves.

So there's this incredible power in changing your

belief about what's possible.

And I kind of have this mantra these days, which is really unpopular, and we

live in this therapeutic culture, right?

Where so much of the language we use is about trauma and childhood and all

these things, and I'm not trying to be f- uh, frivolous or flippant about it.

But I, I've come to believe that sometimes you don't need 30 years of therapy

to change a belief I mean, beliefs can change much faster than that, and

this is the part people get stuck on.

They want it to be complex.

They want it to be.

They go, "Well, it can't be that simple, Jonathan, or everybody

would do it." And I'm kinda like, "Well, you know, uh, it kinda is.

You just have to decide that you're going to believe something different." And

don't expect a, a load of cheerleaders.

Don't expect everybody to go, "Wow, that's the greatest thing."

People are gonna be like, "What the?" But that's why you gotta

be on your own team first.

Here's a cool quote from Michelangelo that kinda bears some of this out.

Listen to this carefully.

He says, "The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too

high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark."

So he's basically saying the problem you're gonna face in life

isn't that, you know, that you set a high target and missed it.

The thing that most people are gonna experience is that they either never

set a target at all, or they set one so low that they kind of reached it

and their life just was pretty mundane.

So I just wanna put this idea in your head in this episode that

your problem isn't really knowledge necessarily or skill or talent.

The problem is that you may have already set a limiting belief about what is

possible for you, and the only person that can eventually really change that is you.

Now, you can have people-- I, I'm really good at helping people at

least get into the position to launch.

I'm good at helping people get into the position where they

can consider the possibility.

But eventually, each of us on our own has to develop that level of

self-belief about what is possible.

So that's it for today.

I want you to think about that.

I want you to think about where have you been limiting

yourself, what could be possible.

You have this one life, just one, and there is so much that

you can do by changing your belief about what's possible.

All right, that's it for me today.

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jonathandoyle.co.

God bless you, my friend.

This has been The Daily Podcast.

You and I are gonna talk again tomorrow