Limiting beliefs create a gap between what you believe you can do and what you can actually do

A role came up last year that you'd have been good at. You read the description twice, found the two things you couldn't do, and didn't put your name forward. Someone with less experience did, and they've been fine.

Or there was the meeting where you had the better idea and let it go, because it wasn't fully formed and you'd have had to interrupt to say it.

Neither of those felt like a limiting belief at the time. They probably felt like an accurate reading of the situation in front of you. That's what makes this particular gap so easy to miss, and so worth looking at.

Nicola Taylor said this at the Revved summit in Auckland this month, talking about organisations. It holds just as firmly for the strategy you've set for yourself.

By story she doesn't mean your goals, which are written down somewhere. She doesn't mean your capability, which is usually higher than you're giving it credit for. She means the working assumptions you've never said out loud, because they don't feel like assumptions at all. They feel like a description of how things are.

Nobody argues with these, because nobody notices they're holding one. They quietly decide which options turn up for you in the first place, well before you get anywhere near making a choice. Which also means they're sitting somewhere you can get at.

More competence rarely shifts a story on its own, because you end up with more data and read it the same way. The filter is still in place.

What does shift it is evidence you go out and collect on purpose. Not evidence that arrives and gets quietly filed as luck or an exception. Evidence you name, write down, and let land.

Roger Bannister ran a mile in under four minutes in May 1954. The record before his had stood since 1945. That's nine years of very good runners not doing it.

Forty-six days later, John Landy ran it faster. Within a few years it was an ordinary standard for elite middle-distance runners.

Nothing physical changed in that time. As Nicola put it, the mile hadn't changed, the pain of the race hadn't changed, the brutal training hadn't changed. What changed was what runners understood to be possible. Previously, they had been certain it was impossible.

The capability had been sitting there the whole time. That's the useful half of this is: a story can hold you a long way below what you can do, and it can also let go and push you above what you thought possible.

Worth remembering that the one you're running now was chosen too. Not deliberately, and probably not by you, but chosen. Which means it's available to be chosen again.

And when a room full of people each quietly test what they've decided is available to them, that's the thing we usually call a change in culture.

Start with one sentence written down, and one small thing tried before Friday.