Being a professional coach has allowed me the opportunity to work with a wide range of people, not only those living with sleep disorders like narcolepsy. The challenges that exist for people seeking positive changes in their life are often very similar regardless of their personal situation. Although people each have their own unique challenges in life, they often fall in to the same traps and make similar mistakes. In this article I share five of the biggest mistakes I see people making when setting out to improve the quality of their life and enhance their health and well-being.

1. They Don’t Believe That Change Is Possible

Limiting beliefs have more of a negative impact on your life than any other factor. After all, most of us are pretty rational – we're not going to spend a lot of time on something that we believe is doomed for failure. Why would you even try to lose weight if you genuinely believed that everyone in your family was destined to be overweight?

We all carry around numerous limiting beliefs. They come from a variety of sources as well as from our own interpretation of the world around us. Humans can't help but learn, but sometimes we learn things that are inaccurate.

"Old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false." - E. O. Wilson

Fortunately, you can eliminate limiting beliefs and replace them with beliefs that empower you. Imagine replacing a limiting belief with one that makes life easier and enables you to be more successful. How would you feel?

What is a Limiting Belief?

Well for our purposes we will define a limiting belief as one that causes life to be less than completely satisfying.

You might believe that you can't be a doctor, but if you have no interest in becoming a doctor, what's the harm? There's no point in dealing with a belief like that, because eliminating it isn't going to have a positive impact on your life. I would always encourage you to focus your energy where it can have the greatest impact. The belief that you can't be a doctor is not a limiting belief based on our definition. So, limiting beliefs are those beliefs that restrict desirable options or your happiness.

Consider that if all of your beliefs were 100% accurate, you would be able to have nearly anything you've ever wanted. Believing the right things has a huge impact on your level of success.

"If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?" - W. Somerset Maugham

Limiting beliefs have a profound effect on our lives. They affect our lives in so many ways, and none of them are good. If you can eliminate the 5 most limiting beliefs you possess, your life would experience significant changes for the better.

Limiting Beliefs Prevent Success

One of the main ways that limiting beliefs have a significant negative impact on our lives is that they short-circuit the success process that follows:

1. Decide clearly what you want: It's tough to accomplish something meaningful if you don't identify it first.

2. Do something to make it happen: It takes action to attain any goal. Some people claim that you can practically wish a Porsche into your driveway without lifting a finger, but the real truth is that some action is required. You'll have to do something to accomplish anything meaningful.

3. Adjust your approach as you gain new expertise: You might not know enough at first to realise the perfect path. If it's not working, do something else. Adjust your approach based on your results.

4. Keep going until you're successful: If you kept improving your approach and you never gave up, how could you possibly fail? It's a simple process, but frequently, the simple processes can get you where you want to be. We spend too much time figuring ways to work around our faulty beliefs.

If you have a limiting belief, you will most likely stumble on Step 2. As mentioned earlier, most people won't take an action they think is doomed to fail. We think to ourselves: “Why bother?” Well this is exactly how limiting beliefs get in our way.

Frequently, people are unable to complete Step 4. Many decide too quickly that something won't work. As soon as you believe it won't work, you're unlikely to continue trying.

There’s a man in the real estate community who makes a great living buying and selling houses. He frequently has to make over 100 offers to get one accepted. How many offers would you make before you decided that it wouldn't work?

Achieving big things usually requires time and effort. Frequently, that effort needs to be intelligent and calculated, as opposed to the lower-your-head-and-plow-ahead type of effort. It takes time and experience to put forth the proper effort. You can't do this with a limiting belief in the way.

Other Negative Affects of Limiting Beliefs

Besides preventing your success, limiting beliefs also negatively affect your life in other ways, too, such as:

1. Limiting beliefs taint your experience of living. You will do fewer things over the course of your life when you’re constricted by your limiting beliefs. Imagine what your life would be like without any limiting beliefs. Surely a fuller, richer life is more appealing to you, no matter how great your life is right now.

2. You unintentionally harm those around you. Even with the best of intentions, you affect others with your limiting beliefs. You’ll likely teach your children false ideas that limit them and even affect your friends with misinformed advice.

3. You fail to grow fully as a human being. It can be useful to view life with the purpose of eliminating your limiting beliefs and experiencing everything in the world that appeals to you. If you could do those 2 things, what kind of life would you have lived over the course of your lifetime? What path are you on right now?

4. You'll be inefficient. Limiting beliefs cause us to find an alternate path, if we look for one at all. If we don't believe the best route will work for us, we spend a lot of time following a less direct path in an effort to work around our limiting belief. Save some time and deal with the limiting belief instead.

2. They Don’t Set The Right Goals

It's possible to pursue and accomplish a goal, only to find out that what you wanted was actually something entirely different. Often people with narcolepsy and other sleep disorders will focus on striving for increased energy and wakefulness in their lives. When asked the questions “why do you want this” and “what will that give you”, the common responses include things like:

- I want to be able to enjoy the things I love

- I want better career prospects

- I want to be better able to cultivate relationships

What these people are really hoping to achieve (their actual goal) is the outcomes that they reference. The increased energy and wakefulness is merely a gateway to achieve what they truly want.

By focussing all their efforts on trying to achieve the wrong goal they fail to work towards the things that really matter. Yes the energy and wakefulness can help and certainly may be included in the plan as critical drivers, but often it’s possible to work towards the goal outcomes that they want without changing these inputs.

Having clarity over the outcomes that are most important and meaningful to you, strengthens your emotional connection to them. This in turn supports the motivation to achieve them.

I have worked with many clients who have discovered that simply shifting their goal focus to something that matters most to them (like pursuing a hobby they love), allowed them to actually create a plan to make this happen and bring it to life. Goal achievement then creates motivation to move forward and work towards new goals. This is seen regularly in coaching relationships.

When setting your goals, make them SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable/Attainable,Realistic and Time Bound). For more information on these have a read of our blog post The Importance of Setting Goals.

3. They Hope For Change But Don’t Make A Plan

The plan you develop is just as important as the goal itself. To bring the things that are important to you to life, you need to create a roadmap to reach them. Many people fail to reach their goals by simply failing to make a plan. This is part of the goal achievement process vs the goal setting.

Your plan should have measurable milestones which allow you to see if you are on track. Being able to quickly recognise when you have shifted off course, allows you to make the changes needed before you end up so far off course that it becomes a major challenge to get back to where you need to be.

By measuring your progress and setting both daily and weekly actions, you have the chance at reaching your goal with the least amount of effort. It requires a significant amount of energy to start each day without a plan and simply trying to work our what you will do. The cognitive energy required could simply be used on completing the action steps required. Think about not planning your morning ritual. If you wake up and spend 20 minutes trying to work out what morning activities you will do, this was time wasted that could have simply been used to complete the activities you wanted. More often than not failing to make a plan and write it down, leads to inaction and the many negative consequence that result (e.g. lost motivation, reduced feelings of self-worth and self doubt).

4. They Fail To Invest In Themselves

Whether you like it or not, the creation of positive transformation in your life requires an investment in yourself. It definitely involves an investment in time for both learning and practice. It often will have a monetary cost as well. The important thing here to remember is that you are investing in the most important thing that there is - YOU! This is time and money well spent.

I’m often asked questions about how I moved from a place of struggle with narcolepsy to a place where it has little meaningful impact on my life. A big part of that process was investing both time and money in educating myself about everything and anything that could possible help. I have done countless courses, read many books, studied Human Potential Coaching, become an Oxygen Advantage Functional Breathing Instructor, a HeartMath Institute Stress & Well-Being Assessment Provider and AddHeart Facilitator and studied mindfulness and meditation. I’ve invested thousands of hours into mediation, breathwork, trying out technology, supplements, nootropics, Behavioural and Positive Psychology strategies and tools, sleep strategies, morning and evening rituals, productivity systems, different nutritional protocols and fasting strategies … and so on. They key point here is that I have invested both time and money and as a result I have seen returns that are in my view worth significantly more than the investment I have made. This has enabled me to live a life that is not defined by narcolepsy and that is rewarding and full of joy, fulfilment and purpose.

There is no real way around this one.

5. They Expect Change To Happen Overnight

I would love to say that this is possible, but it simply is not. The process of transformation and change takes time. It is mostly invisible, which means you need to believe in where you are going and that your plan will get you there.

Let’s consider the example of when you do a workout. Immediately after you finish you don’t see a change nor will you the next day. In fact when you workout for a week, you are extremely unlikely to see a change. This does not mean change isn’t happening. Gradually over many months change though, it starts to become visible. You will notice changes to your body composition, strength, aerobic conditioning, energy levels, confidence, mood and countless other things. Imagine if you decided to not continue on with consistent training. Would you achieve the results that had planned?

The same applies to the plan you put together for your life with any sleep disorder. The change is gradual and nearly always invisible. But, eventually you will notice it and more importantly feel it. You may not become an Olympic Gold Medal winner (or maybe you might), but you will continue to become a better version of you. If you are consistently improving your habits of health, well-being and the way you optimise your life, you can be fairly confident that you will be living your best you!

Coaching with the Narcolepsy Life Academy

Coaching with the Narcolepsy Life Academy provides a blend of traditional coaching and a mentor/consultant relationship. Specialising in lifestyle optimisation for people living with narcolepsy and other sleep disorders, the journey of transformation often involves a greater amount of information and strategies to be shared than in a more formal coaching partnership.

Each relationship is unique and the level of knowledge and understanding of lifestyle strategies varies between clients. For this reason the ratio of education to the facilitation of conversations helping clients to gain insight and awareness also varies. What remains consistent is the support, motivation and cultivation of awareness for each client.

If you would like to find out more about coaching and how we can help you to start living your best life then please feel free to contact us. We would love to speak with you.

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