I’m going to talk about a limiting belief I discovered and overcame six or seven years ago.
I mentioned my journalism career recently but this came when I had another career change from journalism to being a product manager and was struggling with some aspects of the job.
As a journalist I’d worked with words and ideas and had become very comfortable in that arena, but as a product manager I had to expand my expertise to cover other areas.
Product managers in web development work with web designers and web developers to develop websites and one aspect of the job I was struggling with was giving feedback on designs.
With my boss and one or two stakeholders we could gather behind a designer’s computer and you know stroke our chins thoughtfully and offer feedback designs for web pages.
This is something I really struggled with because I had a limiting belief that I wasn’t qualified to talk about visual design because I’m colour blind.
This belief had embedded itself in me from an early age.
When I was 14 I was given the standard colour blindness test where they show you a multicoloured picture of dots with numbers written in a certain colour. If you can’t read some of the numbers, you’re colour blind.
This doesn’t mean I only see in black and white, like many people think, but that I struggle to distinguish certain colours on the red-green spectrum. 1 in 12 men are colour blind but only 1 in 200 women, which is interesting.
This didn’t seem too big a deal at the time – I was more into music than art – but the nurse did say I would never be a pilot or an astronaut.
But the belief I was no good at visual art and design had been embedded even early than that. At primary school once we were preparing for a school play and I was working on the set design. I’d been colouring in some kind of backdrop when the teacher came over all flustered and pulled me away from the backdrop. She told me off for using the wrong colour and said I wasn’t good at it and should work on something else.
So 30 odd years later, I’m standing at work afraid to give design feedback because I held a belief that my colour blindness made me unqualified to talk about all aspects of design.
But then I went on a personal development course around that time where we covered limiting beliefs.
I realised that I’d let this one aspect not being able to perceive subtle differences on the red-green spectrum cloud the whole area of visual design.
So with this knowledge I went back into the design reviews with a much more accurate understanding of my capabilities. Shades of colour play very little part in most web designs – rarely outside the main branding. There were so many other areas I could comfortably and confidently talk about. The layout, the fonts, the size and shape of things, the imagery, the padding, the general functionality and user experience.
It was so freeing not to have this one small limitation affect this whole reasonably big area in my new job.
Then I was giving so much design feedback the designers probably preferred the old me that stayed quiet.
There’s a famous quote from Henry Ford that says: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can't – you're right.”
And that’s the crux of limiting beliefs - you have a belief that limits your ability or willingness to play in a certain area. But what you find when you examine them more closely, is that they’re often based on nothing more substantial than fear or fear – of failure. And if they are based in fact, like my colour blindness, the impact is often a lot less than you think.
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