Do you ever wonder what your life would have been like if you only had taken that chance opportunity when you were younger? In this episode, Jimmy shares three steps to overcoming your limiting beliefs and achieving greatness in life.

Episode Keys

• How to overcome the fear of success.
• Identifying and recognizing the seven major positive emotions of humans.
• Why we don’t realize our potential in life and others do.
• 3 steps you can take today to become more happy, successful, and impactful in the world around you.
• How doing those things that are uncomfortable for you allows you to grow in your confidence to achieve greater success.

Podcast Transcription

Good morning! Today I want to share with you about a topic that I believe is just basically paramount throughout the entire world. During this time where we’ve had our lives set aside without our own, if you will, agreement, where we’ve had these situations in life forced upon us, how we change the way we live in our daily world, this is where we as humans show our adaptability. The issue then becomes, though, is it really just truly adapting, or do these acts become limiting beliefs in our lives? I remind myself of a quote by Norman Cousins that “death is not the greatest loss in life, the greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.”

Hey, good morning! This is Jimmy Williams with Live a Life By Design, your Monday morning moments of motivation to help you live a bigger, better, and bolder life on your own terms. Isn’t that really what we all seek on this planet? Don’t we all wish that we could just live the way we desire and that we could maximize peace and joy while we’re on the planet? Hey, that’s my goal for you this week. I want to share with you today some areas of life that I feel maybe have you held back from your greatest potential. I want to share with you a few simple steps that I daily have to put into place in combating what is out there in the world giving my mind this feeling of, “Okay. I’ve got this belief. I can’t do this and I can’t do that and I can’t go over there and I can’t do that,” and I want to show you today through this podcast episode how your life can be one of extreme greatness and joy.

You know, have you been holding yourself back? You know, that’s the question I ask many people when I see them, have you been holding yourself back? What is the primary reason for not realizing your potential, particularly during this time of disruption in our world? Have you realized your greatness of life? You know, we all have a reason to be on this planet. We all have a purpose, and on the day that you find out that purpose is when you truly start to live. You know, I believe each of us has this purpose, and it requires us, though, to become the best person that we can become. You know, the issue becomes our beliefs that hold us back from this outstanding transformation of life.

This type of thinking is really called “limiting beliefs”. Your brain has become convinced it cannot accomplish greatness because of your physical abilities, your career position, family heritage, lack of education, et cetera. Now, I want to talk to you just a few minutes about one of my heroes of modern-day. This person did not start out with the secure, loving family that nurtured him throughout life like you and I. Just the opposite – this person started out being given up for adoption, as he was the accident that occurred between two individuals of which were not married and did not have the time nor resources to raise a child. So, he’s given up for adoption, and he is adopted by another loving family that, in his words, were the best parents in the world. Now, he went on, though, to be very, very successful, but the path he took to get his success was quite, shall we say, curved. It reminds me of those mountainous curves in California when you’re going to the coastline from more Interstate and you’re driving over these wild, twisting roads and great inclines, and then you climb hills. This is what this person’s life was like from the time he was a young adult till the time he finally realized his, quote, “purpose of life”.
This gentleman had gone to college as his parents had asked him to. He had taken some courses and he realized he was bored with those, and so he went over to the Art department. When he got into the Art department, he started doing drawings, and realized that, with these drawings, he was manifesting some ideas within himself that would help him create what mankind desired. And so this gentleman then sought out others that he could help understand his dream, his vision, his goal for greatness, and they, too, could see the vision that they wanted to be a part of it.

Of course, this person went on to be worth literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars and changed the way that people on this planet look at communication, music, technology as a whole. Of course, I’m speaking of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs may not have been the most perfect of individuals on the planet, but he found his purpose in life, and he focused purely on those areas of life to help him bring about the greatness he had within himself. I love the fact that Steve Jobs said that basically, you never benefit anyone by thinking small.

And man, did he prove that to be a fact. Steve Jobs had the uncanny ability to take nothing and create exceptionalism for everyone. He was quite the innovator. He was quite the entrepreneur. Was he a perfect human being? By no means would we define him as such, but he did do those things that he was uniquely qualified for in such a way that others were attracted and wanted to be a part of that success. You know, I can think of hundreds of limiting beliefs that may have impacted Steve Jobs. You know the good news? He didn’t think of any of them. Steve Jobs didn’t look back and say, “Well, you know, I didn’t go to college,” and he didn’t look back and say, “Well, I didn’t have rich parents.” No, he didn’t look back on any of those false beliefs in life that could have held him back from realizing how great Apple computers would become.

And now, if you know, they are not just into computers. Why, the biggest asset that they have is inventory, is their phone inventory. They sell hundreds of millions of Apple phones. And all this time they thought they were just a computer company.
You see, Steve Jobs didn’t buy into the fact that just because he didn’t get born with a silver spoon in his mouth that he would be held back from realizing his potential. He did just the opposite. He looked at the life head-on and ran right into those things that most scared him. And once he overcame them, boom! He has now found his purpose and living life large until the day that he passed.

So, these hundreds of limiting belief that are living rent-free, mind you, in your mind today that could change your life with a few simple changes in your belief system, that’s where we’re going to focus in this episode of Live a Life By Design. One of the greatest things that we can do for ourselves is explore how these limiting beliefs are holding you back, identify them, and then find ways to change the trajectory of our life, and I’m going to show you that today in three steps. Let’s get started.

One of the greatest limiting beliefs is the fear of success. Now, you’re going to ask yourself, why would anyone fear success? Why would money, fame, friends, houses, cars, whatever it all brings you, why would you fear that? Well, I’ve got news for you, many of the biggest superstars of my lifetime had a fear of success. Not success itself, but success attracts certain things that are not positive if you don’t know how to control them.

For example, let’s take Michael Jackson, one of the greatest music icons of the 20th and 21st century. Michael Jackson had sold so many records, it was unheard of. He was worth millions and millions of dollars based on his talent of dance, music, songwriting. He was phenomenal to the point that he became known as the King of Pop.

Well, the King of Pop also had a problem with all these trappings of life. He couldn’t find, during his lifetime, a means of being happy with just himself. He surrounded himself by all the trappings that money could buy, and ultimately one of those trappings, one of those limiting beliefs to finding happiness, was painkillers. These painkillers were injected into him by a doctor he kept on his payroll to keep him feeling his best. Now, instead of good diet, exercise, and getting the good time of rest that he needs, the doctor was using artificial means to keep him feeling, quote, “happy with himself.” So the limiting belief of “I fear success” may not have been what he said, but it was how he lived that showed this fear.

I mean, why would anyone refuse themselves the wonderful feeling and outcomes of success in life? For one to be successful, you must be understanding and control yourself mentally, physically, and spiritually. By controlling these aspects of your life, you’re thinking, you’re being, you will give yourself an empowerment to become successful. Now, does this guarantee success? No, but it gives you a greater probability for success and help you mature to be the person to handle that success.

There are seven major positive emotions we experience as humans. First is the emotion of Desire. The second is the emotion of Faith. Third, the emotion of Love. Fourth, the emotion of Sex. Five, the emotion of Enthusiasm. Six, the emotion of Romance, and seven, the emotion of Hope. And isn’t hope one of those greatest emotions that take us through the darkest of times in life?

You know, during this pandemic, I can tell you there have been many more people that have suffered with depression, have suffered with issues of mental capability and the ability to see themselves far outside the trappings of this pandemic. Many people have lost hope.

Reminds me of a story I was told where a gentleman found himself marooned on an island all alone. He quickly gathered up what he could of fruits and berries and nuts and things to have food, and he rigged up a way to catch fish with a spear so he’d have some protein and meats, and he built himself a hut from palm branches and leaves, and then, of course, it was very, very, very difficult living, but he survived. He then one day discovered that if he worked with certain rocks, he could create a spark with flint and steel-type rocks, and he created a fire that would help keep him warm in his hut, and the smoke from this fire was just enough that it really gave him a sense of feeling as if he were not alone for those few moments of the day. It gave him a sense of warmth and control of his environment.

Every day he’d walk the beaches, look in the skies, try to see if airplanes or boats were coming. After a long period of time, realizing that no one knows where he is, not even himself did he have a clue on the map where he would be. He then sought out to do something about his current situation. He designed a raft one day, and he was working on this raft when he looked over across the horizon, and he saw great pillars of smoke coming from the other side of the island. He quickly drops what he’s doing and runs toward the smoke, fearing the worst, and when he got back to where he had this little hut with the fire, he realized something terrible had happened. As he watched the final burning embers of his hut go completely to the ground, realizing the wind had changed and blown embers from the fire that kept him cozy before, now destroyed his only sanctuary from the elements. He dropped to his knees, his head held low. He had now given up what little hope he had and realize now that he was truly hopeless.

And then all of a sudden, in the distance he hears the sound of a horn. Could it be? No, there’s no way. He was so far from the shipping lanes that no ship would ever come near this island, he thought. He hadn’t seen any for the many months he had been there. As he turned around, he could hear the ship’s horn getting louder and louder. And then he saw on the horizon a giant military ship coming toward the island.

As he gained energy, now and hope for just a moment, he saw a glimmer in his eye that this might be someone of which could save him from his desperate situation. He’s waving his hands and yelling from the seashore as he walks into the waves, and here they come, now, on a small boat from the ship. They came up to him. He looks ragged. His health is not good. He’s not eaten well for months, lost tremendous weight. And he tells the gentleman as they get on the shore, “I had all but given up hope and had surrendered myself to die on this little island. How in the world did you come by this island?” He said, “I just lost my hut that I’ve had sanctuary from the cold.” And he said, “This was going to be my last day on this deserted island. I was going to end it all this evening.”

And they said, “Man, we are glad you didn’t do any harm to yourself. We would never have seen you on this island, for it is not on our maps, but for the smoke that you sent up in the sky gave us just enough attention that we could find the island.” It was the smoke from the burning of his hut that was so pronounced, they could finally see it from the shipping lanes and then follow it to bring him to safety.

You see, the moral of this story is that when you think you have seen the last of hope within your own mind, the best of rescue may just be on its way. Help could be at the next step you take, so don’t give up on yourself when you feel like you’re out of hope. Hope is the most powerful of these positive emotions that humans face. So, by focusing your energies on these positive emotions and taking action to grow these emotions in your life, you will find your mindset, life, family, friends, and career will be more pleasurable, powerful, and promising for you.

The only method of growing these emotions in your life is by use. That’s right, you can’t just read about them and they help you. You must put them into practice. There’s no magic potion you can simply drink and become more positive and strong in these emotions. So, the first step to overcoming your limiting beliefs in life is to focus on positive powerful emotions.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, Jimmy, if these are the positive powerful emotions, there must be some that are negative. And you are right, for those of you pessimists listening to this podcast. You know, one day I ran across a friend of mine. I’ll tell you, he’s kind of guy that if you hung with a new rope, he would complain afterwards. But anyway, I digress. You know, the key to loving and living life more abundantly is to live within the positive emotions of life.

To help you stay positive, let’s identify the seven major negative emotions you must avoid. These emotions are the ones that you can find in about any book that tells you how the world typically is. Now, you caught that, I hope, how the world typically is. These seven negative emotions are fear, jealously, hatred, revenge, greed, superstition, and anger. To be very honest, as I always am with our subscribers and listeners, these seven negative emotions are much easier to fall into than the positive ones. You simply have to let down your control, and immediately you will find one of these seven negative emotions rise to the forefront and take over your life. It’s just that simple. A constant battle is taking place in our minds every day with these negative and positive emotions.

One of them will dominate your life at times. For example, some men have a difficult time controlling their anger. I have a friend who suffers with anger issues, and it has ruined his life by estranging his wife and children from him. His business has suffered when well-trained employees leave because of his inability to control his temper at work. One method of reducing or eliminating this negative emotion is to recognize the environment or triggers that cause the emotion to arise in you.

Step number one to overcoming limiting beliefs is simply this: focus on positive powerful emotions such as desire, faith, love, sex, enthusiasm, romance, and hope. You will find yourself thinking more abundantly, living more powerfully, and then also, you will find that more people are attracted to you to do the same.

See, the opposite limiting belief, though, of the fear of success, is the fear of failure. This belief is so devastating that people who fear failure never attempt anything that could be successful for them.

As a kid playing Little League Baseball, I had a talent for playing the game. I got to tell you, I enjoyed that game of baseball more than any other sport. I watched it on one of the three channels on TV that we got every weekend. If the Texas Rangers were playing ball, I was watching them. I enjoyed it, and I also liked, you know, the Kansas City Royals, for example, were one of my teams.

But as a kid playing Little League Baseball, I had a talent for playing the game and I did often. And we were willing games for the season, and I would typically bat in the four-hole position on the roster. Now, I don’t want to brag, I don’t want you to think it’s a brag because if it’s not a brag, I’m telling the facts, right? So, if you’re telling facts, you can’t be bragging. I was pretty good at the game of baseball. I played third base just like George Brett, I used the same glove George used, I wore the same cleats when I got older that George had used, and I’ll be honest with you, I had quite a run in baseball.

Then, something happened that summer in Little League. The coach always said, “I can count on you, Jimmy, to get on base to start another scoring position set up for us. That is why I want you in the number four slot.”

Well, that was good until something happened. I got hit by a pitch right on the outside of my left knee. Now, I was only about 10 years old. I tried walking to first base, but I had to stop since my knee began swelling significantly. It was giving me excruciating pain up and down my knee area through my leg. I sat down in the baseline and started rubbing my knee and our coach came over to look at my knee and waved at the dugout for a pinch-runner. Coach helped me to the dugout and examined my now very inflamed and swollen knee. He placed an ice pack on my knee and motioned for my parents to come over to the dugout and check it out.

Well, after a trip to the hospital emergency room (one of many for me, I played a lot of sports and motorcycles and, well, that’s just another story in life). But luckily, I only had suffered a bone bruise, some significant swelling in the ligaments and tendons, and most of all, my psyche was bruised, and I was knocked senseless with that. But after a few days, I started running again to see if I could play the next weekend. My knee felt pretty good, and I felt I was ready to get back on the roster.

However, I had developed something that I didn’t realize, and it had manifested in fear. You know, I’m talking about the fear of failure. My first at-bat after my injury, I would subconsciously step out of the batter’s box with my left foot. I am a right-hander, so I did this to avoid getting hit again on the left knee. Somehow, I had told myself that I did not appreciate getting on hit on that bone in my knee, and it hurt terribly. Well, needless to say, I was struck out due to this crazy instinct of swinging off-balance when I stepped out of the box.

To help me though, my coach said, “We’re going to overcome this fear. Before you had gotten hit on the knee, you had no problem staying in the batter’s box and hitting the ball very well. But now you’ve developed this tendency of fear.” And now, the fear of failure has said in my mind, because I am not paying attention to my opportunity to bat, I’m fearing the ball coming at me.

So, coach did something for me that really helped me overcome this. He started pitching me some wiffle balls for battle practice. You know, the little balls with the holes in them, that if you got hit with one, you wouldn’t even hardly recognize you’d been hit. And it didn’t hurt after he hit me a few times with the wiffle balls, and I begin staring these wiffle balls down until I knock the soup right out of them.

Well, then he progressed to throwing tennis balls for me to hit. Same outcome. Man, I just stood there, he hit me a few times with the tennis balls, and that was okay, but I connected with that bat, and I sent some of those tennis balls flying out into the outfield.

Then we started using baseballs. Now, I sat there through wiffle balls and through tennis balls, and then he started throwing baseballs. Well, I stayed in that batter’s box as he pitched those baseballs at me, and here came one right at my rib cage. Now, I got to be honest with you, I stayed in that batter’s box and I was going to see this ball until it flew off my bat and way out there in the outfield. Instead, I turned a little to my left, my back toward the pitch, because it hit me right in the rib cage. Now, he wasn’t pitching that hard, but at the time, being about a ten-year-old, it did not feel good. And he just said, “Oops! Sometimes that happens. Get back in the box, now hit this next one.”

What he did for me was teach me that sometimes in life, things don’t work as you plan. But, don’t allow the fear of failure to rob you of your glory. So, to make a long story short, the next game I’m up and I am in the batter’s box, and I’m facing a 0-2 count. Now for those of you that aren’t baseball fans, I’ve got zero balls and two strikes on me, and there’s no outs, and there’s not going to, starting out with me in that four position in the roster.

Here comes the pitch and it was inside and low, right at my left knee. I stayed with the pitch, and it broke a little to the inside, and I swung with all my might and created a triple. Now, the good news was I was on base. The better news was, I no longer feared failing at baseball. I looked at it for the fun it was, and after I hit that triple, you couldn’t have run me off from that ball game that night. One of my favorite quotes by a great baseball player was Yogi Berra. Yogi Berra had a statement about baseball, and in other parts of life, I really enjoyed reading. Yogi said, “Baseball is 90% mental. The other half is physical.”

So, the rest of the season was success for me as my hitting percentage climb higher than it was before my injury. So, the motto of this story, as I said, is the fear of failure is overpowering, but the second step to overcoming the limiting belief of failure is to find tactics that help you see through the fear and realize you can win again at whatever is holding you back from trying.

The final step to overcoming limiting beliefs is perhaps the toughest: do that that’s uncomfortable to you. Become comfortable with these acts. Prove to yourself that your limiting beliefs die a quick death if you will simply do what you feel uncomfortable doing. By converting the uncomfortable to the comfortable, you transform your psyche – your belief system – to a new paradigm. Now, I am not saying you must skydive or parachute from a plane, but if your brain is telling you that you can’t do these acts and it’s something you wish to do, I say strap on and jump out of the plane (of course with a tandem jumper with you). I also will tell you that most men understand that airplanes, unless they’re on fire or they are going out of fuel, no one needs to jump out of one. That’s my theory anyway. By overcoming the limiting belief of doing uncomfortable activities, you will find yourself more eager to challenge the status quo of life. You’ll set new records for yourself and discover more happiness in life.

I mentioned many times in this podcast – and gosh, we’re on the 85th episode! This has been a lot of fun – I mentioned that I rode motorcycles as a kid. Now, I have done everything you can imagine with that motorcycle, from jumping the hay bales, to jumping creeks, to jumping ponds, and railroad ties, whatever we could find, we jumped on this motorcycle. And the reason being is, I got to watch as a kid Evel Knievel perform. You remember him. He was the superhero of stuntmen during my day as a kid, a real-life superhero. This man defied odds, cheated death, and was paid millions to do so. I often had this fear, though, that I couldn’t jump a pond dam on our land. These things were quite long, and they were treacherous. If you failed to land just precisely, you and the bike were going to be damaged in some form.

I had this fear that if I was too short on the jump, the bike and I would end up in the pond with water everywhere. If I was too long in the jump and I missed the ramp, I’d land hard on the side the embankment. I would damage the bike and my body. But in my mind, there I was, Las Vegas, Nevada at Caesar’s Palace. Those beautiful fountains were spraying water up in the air. All I needed was to picture myself in front of this crowd of adoring fans, put the bike in gear, lay heavy on the throttle, and let the ramp take me into the air and safely land on the other side.

Well, let’s just say I’m not Evel Knievel. But, when we got the bike out of the pond, I felt a sense of accomplishment that I had conquered and uncomfortable act. From that point on I felt that I could take on any challenging task and have a reasonable chance of success.

What acts or projects make you uncomfortable? Why don’t you list one or two of these out this week in your goal sheet and let’s just tackle them head-on. You see the challenge for this week is you must find a means of overcoming your limiting beliefs. You must focus on the seven most powerful positive emotion while avoiding those seven negative ones. Overcome your fear of failure by simply taking the first step toward that project, task, or act that you have been fearing. And lastly, jump in! Perform that one act that was most uncomfortable for you so that you will gain confidence to tackle those things in life. It’ll surely be less painful.

Make the act a comfortable one that gives you excitement, not fear of life. Go ahead, live a life on your own terms! Live large, live loud, and live it to the fullest, because this is what life is all about.

Go out and live a life by design.

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