Traveling to Your Upper Limit

This month I am traveling more than normal. I will be visiting 5 cities in less than 6 weeks.  Four of the five trips involve airline travel and one is a road trip.  I am traveling for both work and personal reasons, but 5 trips in a row is a lot of traveling for me.

When I am traveling I love to use the travel time to read, unless I am driving of course, and in those cases I like to read audio books.  This weekend I am on trip number two and I am reading a book called, “The Big Leap” by Gay Hendricks.  It is well written and presents a super interesting concept. 

We all have one barrier to living a successful and fulfilled life.  Gay calls it the  “upper limit problem”.  

The “upper limit problem” is our innate intolerance for feeling good.  It is the idea that our brain wants to sabotage us if we sense that things are going too well or we start to feel too good.  I found this so fascinating.  Who doesn’t want to feel good or be successful right?  I am mostly a positive person, but when I really started to work through this concept while reading the book, I realized that I do it all the time.

Have you ever diagnosed a complicated case and felt very proud of yourself?  Did you feel the extraordinary exhilaration of being a Super Vet?  You feel great KNOWING that you came up with the right diagnosis and chose the very best treatment for the pet.  You felt wonderful about that right?  Then, did you go home later and Google, VIN, and research the snot out of that particular disease until you filled your head with doubts.  You read until you feel terrified that you made a big mistake and the pet was surely going to be dead by morning?    Yep!   That is the “upper limit problem”. 

Hendricks writes that we each have an internal meter that is the keeper of our joy.  We have these well-established beliefs that we are only so worthy.  It may be something that we developed in childhood or something that we were born with, but it is deeply ingrained in us.  We have this feeling that we can only be so successful or so happy.  When good things do happen and we should be exceedingly happy, our brain brings up problems to keep us “in our place”, so to speak.

How can we move beyond our “upper limit” thinking?

First we need to recognize the thoughts when they occur.  If you have a success and all of a sudden you start feeling critical towards yourself, a client or colleague; that is your brain bringing up an upper limit thought.    Deflecting compliments can be a sign of an upper limit thought.  When you are brilliant and someone tells you that you are brilliant you may deflect the compliment with claims of inferiority.  That is upper limit deflection. You can work to recognize these sabotage thoughts in your head and work to change them before they destroy your happiness.  That is the point of “The Big Leap”.  Taking a big mental leap to destroy your upper limits and stay in your zone of success, abundance and joy.

There is a lot more to the book than what I can explain here, so I would encourage you to read it.  Perhaps I can help you get a head start by noticing your upper limit thinking so together we can leap over our negativity and open us up to feelings of abundant success.

Have a beautiful week and safe travels to you all.

Dr. Julie Cappel