Knowing Your WHY Doesn't Get Rid of Your Limiting Beliefs

If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone influential talk about knowing your WHY (why you want to do, be, or have something), I'd have much more money.

Knowing your why is [claimed to be] essential to making significant progress on your goals and dreams. Type 'know your why' into the Amazon books search engine, and you'll find many. Simon Sinek has some convincing videos about why you need to know your why and how to find it.

Yesterday, I got an email from a well-respected writer who talked about the importance of knowing why.

She wrote, One of the most powerful exercises YOU can do before you hit GO on writing a novel or memoir is to become intimately familiar with your why.

When successful people tell you you must find your why, you make the time. It feels like the implication is that when you know your why, it's full steam ahead, and now that you have clarity, you'll be able to muscle through the hard times.

When I read this email, I realized that knowing your why doesn't eliminate your limiting beliefs. Why was that an Aha moment for me?

It's your limiting beliefs holding you back, not being clear about why you want something.

You can be unclear about why you want something, and if you aren't impeding your progress with limiting beliefs about yourself and what's possible, things typically manifest pretty "quickly." [Time is relative.]

You might not need to know why you want something to get it. Desires aren't always clear and don't always make logical sense. Most people know they want what they want, and that's good enough.

What if you discover no good reason why you want something?

What if you uncover selfish reasons why you want something? 

What if you want to experience something just for fun? Are you now frivolous?

What if you want something you don't have the time or money for? Are you now reckless?

What if you want true love but don't meet traditional beauty standards, are disabled, or neurodivergent? Are you now unrealistic?

In this conversation about why you want something, I'm excluding negative reasoning such as why you want your ex-partners who cheated on you never to have a happy life or why you want the business partner who ran away with the money to be "destroyed." This post is about wanting more good in your life, not about wanting negative experiences for others because you're upset or feel victimized. 

When you're searching for why you want to do, be, or have something, you might feel it's not worth it unless your reason is altruistic. You could run into a negative belief that tells you you're not worth it, but if you tell others you're doing it for family or 'to change the world,' then you might convince yourself that's your why when it isn't. 

Most people believe they're selfish if they want something for their benefit or personal gain. We're taught that selfishness is wrong and that we should always consider others before ourselves. We also have a [false] belief that if I get what I want, it takes away from the good others might get. 

When you get what you want, no matter WHY, it doesn't diminish others' opportunities. Reality is not a finite construction.

It's an infinite and taking place within your consciousness. Reality is a mirror of your vibration. So, please want what you want, and don't worry about justifying it to others by explaining why.

Knowing your why doesn't make creating something easier. Shifting away from limiting beliefs does.

Being unclear isn't the biggest hurdle you must overcome to create desired experiences. 

Knowing your why might motivate you to "push through," but wouldn't it be more fun to shift away from limiting beliefs interrupting your natural EASY flow?

Instead of continuing to feel like it's an uphill battle, what if you felt self-confident and trusted how things played out by understanding and embracing how beliefs are structured and how they aid or inhibit your creative process? 

Clarity is great. I love it when I'm clear. It's a satisfying feeling.

But in the broader scheme of things, it's less important than understanding this reality's true nature and mechanics.

Test this assertion out for yourself. Think about a time when you were trying to create an outcome. When you found your why did it make everything easier? Did it allow an unimpeded flow to desirable results?

It didn't for me. If knowing your why made life better, then more power to you. Keep doing what you're doing.

For those who still struggle, I invite you down a different path.

If you know your WHY, I encourage you to combine it with the concepts you're learning here. If you don't, no worries.

You can figure it out later if you want. Or not. Either way is acceptable.

Set aside the pressure to understand your why for a moment. Turn your attention to the structure of beliefs.

Beliefs are energy structures and patterns. When you decide as a soul that you want to create a physical experience, you condense energy (inside your soul) into patterns. Some of those patterns form your physical body, themes of exploration, and personality construct.

Beliefs allow you to experience physical reality as you do.

As a soul, you got excited about creating an experience with an extensive, limited collection of negative beliefs. How else would you expand as a non-physical being in explosive ways?

Beliefs are the blueprints for your physical reality experience. Who you believe yourself to be is made manifest through the structure of a belief, and what you believe is possible or impossible is made manifest through your experiences. 

My award-winning book, The Halfways: A Guidebook for Strengthening Your Intuitive Connection, includes a chapter on beliefs as blueprints.

 In my Play-Doh analogy, beliefs are like the filters at the end of the Play-Doh machine. The unformed Play-Doh takes the shape of the filter on the end of the machine. A blog of Play-Doh becomes a square with a square filter, a circle shape with a circle filter, and so on.

In this analogy, your consciousness is the blob, and beliefs are the filters. 

If you believe you're not good enough to experience what you want, knowing your why isn't typically enough to overpower the structure of that particular belief. It's possible that effort could overpower a negative belief, but it is unusual and takes Herculean effort. 

You will work hard for some time to "break through" a negative belief.

It's much easier to leave the belief as is and adopt a more helpful one.

Swap out the negative belief that creates the "shape" of your current experience for a different one. You can never change a particular belief to become something else. Everything, even the patterns of particular limiting beliefs, exists as is forever. You don't take one belief and change it into another.

The idea that you must change the structure of a belief to make it look different is, in and of itself, a limiting belief. It's a belief that supports limitation and might sound like, There aren't enough beliefs to choose from, so I must make this one look different, or If something is worth having, I will have to work hard.

Instead, adopt and focus on a new belief [new, for you], leaving the discarded "old" one in your wake.

Once you have more desirable experiences, you'll realize that explaining the why to yourself and others never matters.

You want something because it's calling you—no explanation or why justification is necessary.

If investigating your why continues to feel important to you, carry on. There's something important to learn from that experience. 

For those tired of explaining and justifying why they want what they want, begin the new habit of letting go of the limiting beliefs shaping your experience. You can always pick them up again later.

Ask yourself, *What would I need to believe is true about myself regarding this situation to FEEL the way I do?

Your feelings tell you what shape the active belief is: constricting [negative] or expanding [positive].

Question the negative belief!

You believe what you do because the alternative seems worse. All beliefs serve at a high level, especially the negative ones. What terrible thing might happen if you create the desired experience?

Would you lose love?

Would it require unforeseen change?

Would you be seen for who you authentically are, and that scares you?

Would you need to give up the negative belief, convincing you it's "keeping you safe?"

When I first heard that we hold onto limiting beliefs because the alternative seems worse, I couldn't quite make heads or tails of that idea. But the more I played with the idea, trying to make sense of it, the more clarity I got.

Looking through the lens of the *above question, I understood why I didn't openly embrace my intuitive abilities. I denied them to myself and others. If I did embrace them publicly—outing myself, I risked family and friends thinking I was crazy. That was a worse alternative outcome than staying hidden and thought to be "normal" by those I loved and admired.

I held onto the negative belief that if I shared my true self, I'd lose admiration and credibility with family and friends. This was a worse alternative than my reality, so I stayed true to the negative belief that was serving me [at the time]. I stayed hidden under the premise that no one would love and accept me for who I authentically am.

You can explore the *question above to enlighten aspects of various topics, such as health, financial abundance, relationships (romantic and platonic), and personal success.

If this idea excites you, investigate and let me know how it goes. Remember that no matter who asks, you don't need to justify why you're doing this investigation. You're doing it because it's interesting, and that's more than enough justification.

You can hear more about this topic on my FB and TikTok posts.