A person with limiting beliefs would have never lined up to start the challenge. Eventually the idea would have been chucked on the “nice idea but will never happen” scrapheap in the corner of the mind.

You might be wondering why you would deliberately sabotage your own success through holding limiting beliefs, when there’s no sense in doing that. However, beliefs are often not based upon a logical framework of ideas and can be extremely resistant to logic. Your beliefs create your reality, so in order to have a different reality, the beliefs need to change first.

Much research has been carried out in the medical world on the power of beliefs as part of the healing process. The placebo effect has been well documented, in which people suffering from the same ailment are split into groups and told that they will be prescribed a new drug to treat their condition. One group will be given the genuine drug, another group will be given a pill that contains no drugs whatsoever, a placebo.

When results are compared, it has often been the case that the placebo group have displayed results as beneficial, if not more so, as the group that were taking the genuine drug. The Placebo group had faith in the skills, knowledge and abilities of the doctor prescribing them their pill and this faith generated a belief that they would benefit from taking it. And so they did.

Many studies have been conducted on ‘cancer survivors’ defined as being people who had been given a terminal diagnosis of cancer with a poor prognosis for recovery and yet are alive and healthy ten or twelve years later. In one study, it was found that there were no common patterns in the treatment received by these people. However, the one thing that all these survivors shared was that they believed that the method of treatment they were getting was going to work for them. The belief, rather than the treatment, made the difference.

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