Nir Eyal

Anything that decreases your motivation to try,

and persist and increases your suffering along the way.

And that's in fact how it does this.

These limiting beliefs are so pernicious because in the short term, they feel good.

In the short term, they protect us from suffering.

Remember, all motivation is about the desire to escape discomfort.

Well, when I used to have terrible anxiety around public speaking,

not the best thing to feel when you are a professional public speaker, or at least that's your dream.

And what would I do when I was about to get on stage?

I would get sweaty armpits and I would feel the cotton mouth and my heart palpitations would get going.

And I'd start telling myself a story based on my beliefs that I'm not going to do very well on stage.

And what if I forget what I was going to say and people are going to laugh at me?

And I bet other public speakers don't feel this and what's wrong with me?

And I would go down this rumination cycle.

that made me shrink and I would cancel on, I wouldn't take opportunities and I would look for ways to get out of speaking engagements because that limiting belief protected me, right?

It protected me from embarrassment.

It protected me from potential danger.

And so I constantly was being pulled back by that limiting belief.

Well, today, I've adopted a new liberating belief.

That liberating belief, even though I feel the same physiological symptoms I've always felt, I'll be totally honest with you, John, I have the sweating armpits and the cotton mouth and the beating heart right now.