Daring to Dream Bigger

Acknowledging your limiting beliefs

By Maria Romina Dominzain de Leon, Universidad de Montevideo; University Innovation Fellow and Faculty Champion

I know you dream big. You want to change your school, your community and the world… Let’s start with a quick warm up.

If you are reading this sitting down, stand up. If you are standing, stay like this. You are going to follow these steps: 1. Look ahead and point there with your hand (whichever you want). 2. Twist your torso around as much as you can without moving your legs. 3. Remember where you arrived, and the last point or object you saw. 4. Now close your eyes, and, without moving, repeat the previous sequence in your imagination. Remember where you arrived, and the last point or object you “saw.” 5. Now repeat the sequence, moving, with your eyes closed. 6. Finally, you’re going to do the same, now with your eyes open.

How far did you get this time? It is highly likely that you have advanced more than the first time you did it.

This little exercise is a fun way to show that we take ourselves as far as we think we can go.

Repeatedly I heard quotes like “believe in yourself,” “trust yourself,” and “you can do it.” I think I am still in the process of truly understanding what that means. I firmly believe that true learning is not about getting to know new things but about remembering things we already know. Going deeper and understanding them in a profound and applicable way to ourselves.

Trusting yourself is an old and good advice. But, if you don’t know yourself, can you believe and trust in someone you don’t know?

Let’s add some perspective. I don’t want to stand in extremes like “I really know myself” or “I don’t know myself at all.” What I believe is that we can always know ourselves more and choose intentionally to be on a journey of self discovery. Knowing yourself better can lead to growing your confidence, which lets you go further, just like in the warm up we did at the beginning. But don’t wait until you completely know yourself to trust yourself. Actually, can you completely know yourself? How do you know that you are advancing? It’s not a linear step process.

Choosing intentionally to get to know myself has released an inner power I didn’t know I had. For example, I realized that procrastinating was something that was more related to my difficulty to resist emotional temptations and not being okay with being uncomfortable facing the white page. I used to control “the doing,” trying to acquire time management skills to avoid procrastination but it was when I focused more on my emotional side that I could manage my actions better.

I recently discovered that I have a big tendency to look for answers outside of me. I’m a big fan of personality tests. I like to Google everything, from random questions that pop up in my head in the middle of the day, quotes and insights for work to metaphysical self doubts. I ask for advice from other people, and enjoy reading self developing books to answer my questions. Sometimes I do all this stuff without asking myself first. There are some answers that can’t be found outside of me. Why do I procrastinate what I want to do? What do I actually want for myself? Who do I want to be? Who am I?

COVID-19 gave me the opportunity to have more time with myself. I experienced many things, some of them new and others familiar but in a new way. I highlight meditation and journaling as two ways to get to know more of myself and look for answers inside me.

Being still for ten minutes every day showed me that my mind is mostly in the future. I love making plans, thinking about starting new things and listing what I want and have to do. Guided meditations helped me to notice my thoughts and see them with compassion. That gave me the power to come back to my breath and thank myself for coming back instead of blaming me for getting distracted.

Journaling helped me to get out my thoughts and emotions. Writing about my daily mundane experiences is so liberating and gives me energy to focus on what I want. When I find myself blocked in a feeling or a memory I write about it. I acknowledged more parts of me, some of them which I don’t like. But as psychiatrist Carl Jung said, I would rather be whole (with all my parts) than good (with only the parts I like).

Combining meditation and journaling with coaching helped me notice patterns and discover some mental self limiting beliefs and behaviors I have. These limits are preventing me from getting where I want to. Instead of fighting them I am accepting and acknowledging them, observing, feeling and writing them in order to then gently invite them to leave me.

For example, during the UIF Write Now event (where many of us began the articles in this journal) I found myself comparing myself to other Fellows in terms of the number of words written in a warm up exercise. I know, stupid, right? I am 27, I teach at the University, I have been a Fellow since 2017 and I am still comparing myself… Ridiculous! But it is the truth! I guess self loathing habits don’t know about age or work experience. Nowadays I am grateful to ‘just’ be aware of them. Maybe ‘just’ is a lot for me right now.

I don’t intentionally choose to compare myself to others. It’s something I inherited from my upbringing. I don’t choose to have certain self limiting beliefs and habits, it’s something I got from the outside so I won’t blame myself for it. Where I am is conditioned by external causes but does not determine me and I can change it.

UIF showed me people who twisted their torso 359° and gave me tools to twist more. UIF gave me a voice when I thought I couldn’t even bend and empowered me to twist in my own way and authentically. I am writing this because it helps me to grow and I hope it helps you too because I discovered that my purpose is to resignify my challenges into inspiration for others.

So it’s not enough to dare to “dream big” in order to dream big. We have to see what isn’t allowing us to dream as big as we could because we don’t know what we don’t dare to dream. Seeing the limits is a big step in order to break them and in order to achieve our dreams. I realized that limits come in different ways, not always in a negative one.

In my journey of seeing and accepting my limits, I felt that when I acknowledged them without resisting, some of them faded or at least didn’t bother me. And when the limit disappeared, I realized that the dream that I had was no longer mine but from a more limited version of me. That gave me space to release and find a more true dream to my actual self and dream bigger than I ever imagined before.

UIF inspired me to dream bigger and trust in myself. I could have never imagined to be at Stanford among amazing students from all over the world. I thought that it was The dream, that I couldn’t ask for more. But guess what, years passed and life showed me that it was just the start, and a lot of great dreams came true. That was only when I dared to dream bigger acknowledging that I wasn’t dreaming big enough. Focus on the inside and everything else follows.