Looking at limitations

It’s easy to tell yourself that the things holding you back are all outside of you, and that you can do nothing about them. It is true that there are many factors over which you have little or no control. Yet those things are not your true limitations. Your limitations arise from the way you see the various realities of the world. Your limitations come from how you choose to interpret and deal with the circumstances in which you find yourself.

You can absolutely be free of those limitations because you can change your story.

Imagine that you are walking on a journey of several hundred miles, from east to west. After a few weeks of good, steady progress, a massive mountain appears in the distance ahead. As you move closer and closer to the mountain, it looms ever larger in your view. Eventually, you reach the foot of the mountain. Now you have an important decision to make. Is the mountain a limitation? Do you choose to see it as something that will stop you? Will it force you to abandon the dream of reaching your destination to the west? You can view it as such, and when you do, you have created a limitation. The mountain was just a mountain until you came along. It had no intention of being anyone’s limitation. Your thoughts made it into a limitation.

There is another way to see the mountain. You can see it not as something that will destroy your dream, but rather as something that will indeed give much value to your dream. You can realize that by working your way over, under, around or through the mountain, your dream becomes that much more desirable. In fact, far from being a limitation, the mountain may very well make your dream even more magnificent. The view as you cross the top of the mountain could likely be the most beautiful and memorable part of your journey.

You did not put the mountain there, and you probably cannot move it. You can, however, successfully deal with it as it relates to your own life, just as you can successfully deal with any reality that comes your way. Whether you choose to see something as a limitation is completely up to you.

What are your mountains? What things do you consider to be limitations in your life? What if you considered them differently?