Avoid Self-Limiting Beliefs - Emerging Nurse Leader

By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN

I recently spoke with a new nurse manager only six months in the role with feelings that she was not cut out to be a leader. There is strong evidence that the first year of leadership is the most challenging and one in which we are likely to make many mistakes. Yet aside from being new, I pointed out to this young nurse that her expectations and beliefs about her own ability to achieve success would shape her perceptions, actions and ultimately her leadership outcomes.

Self-limiting beliefs like these can be about the world, about others but are most destructive when they are about ourselves. They usually involve black-white thinking about success, personalizing things that happen to us and catastrophic thinking by assuming the worst. For this young manager, she sees the role as a toggle switch (she is either fully succeeding or not) versus a sliding scale where she is incrementally getting better.

Our self-limiting beliefs can serve much like the underground perimeter wire with an electric collar that is often used to keep dogs from running away. We stop ourselves when we face what seem to be impossible challenges. We frame these challenges around our assumptions of our own abilities. We may also have self-limiting beliefs if we subscribe to scarcity thinking versus abundance thinking. With scarcity thinking, we might believe that only a few select people can be great leaders. If we think from a framework of abundance, we believe that anything is possible and developing greatness is within the reach of everyone in their areas of passion. We are able to think bigger and take risks.

As the author Michael Hyatt points out, we need to ask ourselves the question of what we could achieve if we changed our sense of what is possible. Our beliefs can keep us stuck if we don’t. Hyatt recommends the following process to revise our beliefs:

Recognize a self-limiting belief – for this young manager, it would be the belief that she feels she is not cut out to be a leader.
Write it down – putting the belief on paper can help to externalize it so we can work on it.
Reject or reframe the belief – for our new nurse manager, this would involve shifting her language from I am not cut out to be a leader to I have not yet achieved where I want to be with my leadership.
Reorient your thinking – after you reject and/or reframe the belief, you should then begin working with the new belief that you have created as your framework.

Our thoughts do determine our lives so how we re-frame our experiences matters. We all have limiting beliefs about ourselves, the world and others. If we don’t confront them, they will ultimate hold us back especially in leadership.

Read to Lead

Hyatt, M. (2018). Your best year ever: A 5-step plan for achieving your most important goals. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.