For years, I wanted to be a writer, and for years, my wanting added up to exactly zero actions required to be a writer. I had my idols: Mark Manson, Tim Ferriss, Brené Brown, Ramit Sethi, James Clear, people who thought for a living and put it on a page. I looked at them and thought, “I want to do that.” But I couldn’t hit publish, not in public. Academic articles were fine. They were a currency and a necessity to earn my PhD, part of the game I’d signed up for. And if we’re honest, probably fewer than 10 people were going to read those anyway. But public writing would be my name, on LinkedIn, with the workings of my heart and mind revealed, and people could see it. The horror! So I waited for a long time. For more experience. For more craft. For the day when I’d acquire enough of whatever it was that writers had and I did not. Then a friendly bet with two friends (write one post a week for 6 months) put the excuses on the stand, and they wilted on cross-examination. The defense rests, your honor. When I finally hit publish on my first piece, the only thought in my head was, “This is what I was so afraid of?” How small it turned out to be up close. What I had, though I never named it as such, was a limiting belief, a fixed story about who I was (someone not good enough yet to write in public), that I carried for years. For me, it was an uncontestable fact. Some part of me knew the belief was false, but it ran my life anyway for the better part of a decade. A story that flimsy should not be that strong. And yet every one of us has some version of this. Maybe yours is that raising your rates would be greedy, so you keep quoting the same prices. Maybe it’s that you’re not really a leader, so you wait for someone to knight you as such. Why these beliefs form and how you loosen their hold over you is what the rest of this article is about. Part of it is just how our brains handle belief. In a 2008 study, researchers put people in a scanner and had them judge statements as true, false, or uncertain. When the participants agreed with the statement, it was fast and lit up a region tied to reward. Disagreement was slower and drew on the brain’s effortful, deliberative machinery. Uncertainty was slowest of all. It is easier to accept a thought than to doubt one, and we often arrive at our limiting beliefs to keep us safe. At least at first. But the belief changes what you do, what you do builds a stack of evidence, and the evidence confirms the belief. Without updated information, it forms a self-reinforcing loop that doesn’t leave easily. I believed I wasn’t ready to write, so I didn’t publish, so no one ever responded to my writing, so there was no evidence anyone wanted it, so waiting was clearly the sensible call. You believe you’re bad at keeping in touch, so you don’t call, so the friendships thin, so you’re right. I want to be precise here, because I had this part wrong for a long time. My limiting belief was not a distortion of the evidence. There genuinely was no proof that anyone out there wanted to read me or my work. Of course there wasn’t. I’d never given anyone the chance to. It was an accurate summary of a world the belief had helped build. And early on, this belief was both true and useful. There’s a version of “I’m not ready to say this in public yet” that was good judgment. It kept me from broadcasting half-formed thoughts I might have regretted later. The trouble starts when something that was a truth quietly becomes the truth, and stops describing one situation and starts describing you. That is why the usual advice to “challenge the thought” fails if you believe it means to simply contradict the thought. Done poorly, you might argue with the belief, but you will lose, and the belief comes back even stronger. When Jonas Kaplan and his colleagues scanned people’s brains while their deeply held beliefs were being contradicted, what came online was the amygdala and the insula, structures whose day job is protection. Your brain defends an identity-level belief the way it defends your body. You are not engaged in a well-mannered debate of pros and cons. You’re in a flight-or-flight response where your security and safety feel threatened, real or imagined. This makes it really goddamn hard to shift and explains why the advice to just believe something better has such a good conversion rate on book sales and such a poor one on results. So we sneak up on the limiting belief. We wait until it’s lying asleep deep into the night and move upstream to the stack of evidence it rests so comfortably on. That is where we launch our campaign to uproot this guest who’s overstayed its welcome. Two moves to take this on. First, run an audit. Write the belief as a sentence, in quotation marks, and in the words you use in your head. Not, “I have some hesitation around visibility.” More like, “I’m not a writer,” “I’m the ops person, strategy isn’t mine,” or “I’m not someone people invite.” The real sentence is a little embarrassing, and that’s why it’s so important to trap it on a page. If you can’t find your belief, look for your gaps between knowing and doing: Wherever you have the skill, have the knowledge, and consistently don’t act, there’s a belief likely lying somewhere in between. Now, list the evidence, specific episodes with dates that support this belief. When was it right? There will be some; this belief didn’t come out of nowhere. But the next step is to hunt for contrary evidence in three places, because a belief about yourself is never only about you. It’s also a claim about other people and about how the world works. Yourself. When have I done a version of this, and it went fine? There’s at least one. Find it. Others. Who does this without the thing I think it requires? Can I find at least one other person? The World. What actually counts as qualification here, and who told me otherwise? Crucial to remember is that absence of disconfirming evidence is not evidence. Nobody reading your writing is not proof no one wants it. If you want me to believe in aliens, show me an alien. Second, build new evidence. Years of not publishing don’t get overturned by one Tuesday night with a notebook. The belief built its case by stopping you from acting, so act and figure out the new belief later. Ask what someone who didn’t hold the belief would do this week, then cut it down to the smallest thing that still counts as the behavior. Think tiny. So tiny as to feel silly. One post. One invitation to the person you’ve decided is too busy for you. One opinion said out loud in a low-stakes meeting. One small action isn’t the hard part. The hard part is the second action and then the ninth one, because combating a limiting belief means battling inertia. An object at rest will stay at rest unless we expend significant force to get something moving. For me, I needed my two friends and a bet. The commitment lived outside my own head, where my self-doubt and identity as a non-writer could not restrain the action. So don’t just pick the smallest action if you want to supercharge this. Find a way to increase the accountability: a standing bet, a public promise, a person who’ll notice if you don’t. Ulysses Grant tells a story in his memoirs about riding across the plains as a young officer, listening to a pack of wolves howl in the dark ahead. The sound was enormous. His companion, amused, asked how many wolves Grant reckoned were out there. Not wanting to look green, Grant lowballed it: about twenty. They came over a rise and found two. Two wolves, side by side, making every bit of that noise. As Grant put it, “There are always more of them before they are counted.” Fears and evidence for limiting beliefs count the same way. Having started in June, I published every week for the rest of that year, before moving to posting five times a week. Thirty posts and several longer pieces later, and to my genuine surprise, a fair number of people read them. They even enjoyed them! It turned out I didn’t need to become a writer before I could write. I needed to write and let my mind fill with new evidence, until the limiting belief finally looked at the new stack and agreed to step aside. What would you be doing if you didn’t believe it? And what’s the smallest version of that you could do anyway? This article You can’t argue your way out of a limiting belief is featured on Big Think.