I love to use Chatty (ChatGPT) for advice. A few months ago, I set up two councils of advisors to help me with business questions and personal development. Beliefs are thoughts we keep thinking. They create our emotions, which in turn lead to the actions we take. The result is the life we lead every day. Limiting beliefs keep us from growing in the direction we want to change in. They keep us in place.
The first step towards deliberate growth is to let go of limiting beliefs. With Chatty’s help and my Life Council, I identified and released three deep-seated limiting beliefs within a few days. The experience was liberating. In this post, I am sharing the prompts and the process I used to get to my root limiting beliefs and replace them with new ones.
The root cause
I have been working on limiting beliefs for years. I used different techniques, followed many teachers and worked and worked… Eventually, I resigned myself to the idea, that this might take a while until I saw a reel on instagram. That particular teacher, whose name I forgot, explained the process differently.
He said that once you uncover a limiting belief, you see it for the nonsense it truly is and are able to let go of it easily. If you struggle releasing it, then you haven’t found the root limiting belief yet. You must dig deeper into your belief system to uncover it.
This premise made immediately sense to me. So I started a session with Chatty based on it and the result was simply mind-blowing. I released three limiting beliefs that had kept me stuck for decades within less than a week.
Before you use the prompts below, you have to put together your council. Since the aim is to work on limiting beliefs, ask yourself who you would ask for advice to lead a better life. Who do you admire? Who has a great world-view you want to share? When your council is assembled, use the following prompts.
Prompt 1: Call a council meeting
Please assemble the [name of your council] for me. I will explain my current situation: my thoughts, emotions and actions around a certain topic. The council then asks probing questions until we discover the underlying limiting belief that causes my situation.
Prompt 2: The situation
Here is my situation. [Describe it as honestly as possible. Don’t worry about the language. Just write what comes to mind. Which actions do you take? How do you feel? And which thoughts go through your mind about this topic? What have you tried to change in the past and why didn’t it work in your opinion?] The real cause for my situation is a root limiting belief. Help me find it, please.
Several rounds
The council members will all respond to your situation with questions. Take your time to answer them. You can journal if you want to, or answer right in your session with Chatty. I wrote my answers like this: “To [council member 1]: …” and then on a new line (press shift and enter) “To [council member 2]: …” and so on.
If I had an idea about what the limiting belief might be, I made a suggestion too. Write as much as you want and ask questions in return if you have no clear answers yet. The more you write, the more Chatty has to work with. Once you are done with your response to the first questions, hit enter and wait for it.
The council members will respond. They might offer new thoughts or more questions. Chatty also added very useful summaries of themes and possible underlying limiting beliefs in my answers. We went through several rounds until I figured out the root cause.
Once you do, you will know it because it feels like a tremendous relief. So keep going until you get to the root limiting belief. This is an emotional process. You might have to take breaks. You might cry, which is just your brain going to the bathroom (releasing waste products through tears). Be patient with yourself and rehydrate.
What’s next?
After you have found the limiting belief, replace it with a new positive belief. If none comes to mind, ask Chatty or your council members for suggestions. You can also ask for the next steps you can take to embody your new belief.
If the questions and responses you get from the council are not helpful, consider exchanging or dropping the members that are not a good fit. Ask Chatty to help you decide who else might be a better fit. Remember, the council members can be people, living or dead, or fictional characters from books and movies.
Use this technique with as many limiting beliefs as you want to. You know that you are done when you feel free, at peace and worthy. That’s our natural state. The process might not be enjoyable but the reward is well-worth it. Which limiting belief do you want to uproot first?