to talk about, and so on.
Socioeconomic status. How much money did your family have? Were finances a source of anxiety? What kind of home did you grow up in, and what part of town was it in? Did you get to wear what you wanted, or were you stuck with hand-me-downs? Did your status make you a target for teasing or ridicule? Did you have so much it made you uncomfortable, like you were flashing your wealth in the faces of those who didn’t have as much? What about the kids you hung out with? Did you stick with those who had similar backgrounds? What labels did your family/friends use for those who had more or less than you did?
Cultural background. Are you part of an immigrant or ethnic minority? How did it influence the way you were raised? Was your life a blend of that culture and the one you were raised in? What are the expectations and value system of your culture of origin? What challenges came with this experience? Did you feel those outside your experience didn’t understand your family or its priorities? What slurs or comments did you hear that targeted your ethnic group?
Geographic location. Did you grow up in a rural or urban area? What are the values and norms of the area? Is there a particular identity associated with that region? Is it agricultural, industrial, coastal, etc.? How did your location influence your thoughts about what a “normal” childhood experience should look like? How do the values of that upbringing show up in your life today? Did you long to escape the kind of environment you grew up in? Did you decide early on it was the only way of life for you and stay put? Why did you want to leave or stay?
Political and religious influences. Was religion important when you were growing up? What beliefs did your religious upbringing ingrain within you? What are the politics of your family or the part of the world you grew up in? Is or was there any conflict between your religious and political belief systems? Are your current beliefs in line or at odds with how or where you were raised? How do you think about those whose belief systems don’t align with yours?
Social network. Who are your friends? Who do you spend time with? How do all of the above factors influence your chosen network? Has that changed over the course of your life, or has it remained consistent? Do you seek out those who are like-minded, different from you, or some of both? Do you find yourself trying to stay in line with the expectations of your group? Do you silence yourself to fit in? How does this network uplift you or bring you down?
Remember that you don’t have to know the answers to all of these questions just yet, but seeing the various angles in black and white should instill an appreciation for just how complex our programming truly is. When I started to do this work on myself, I realized how little awareness I’d had around the experiences that had formed me. They were just my experiences; I hadn’t ascribed any particular meaning or weight to them. One of the benefits of this exercise is that it gives you the opportunity to think about who you are through a layered approach that will hopefully show you how awesome you are to have come through what you have.
If you’re tempted to dismiss the exercise because your life was “easy” and privileged, don’t. Our programming in and of itself isn’t good or bad—it just is. Its impact on you is the real point of digging into it. You’re reading these words because you believe your life can be better. Remain open and don’t close the door on any element of examination based on preconceived notions.
My own programming played a huge role in where I was when I began this process. For me, the question “What do you want?” couldn’t effectively be answered until I understood why I was so far removed from where I wanted to be in the first place. I had to look at the influences and expectations that had shaped my life, and that was no straightforward task. As the child of immigrants, my early life included a hodge-podge of influences. We lived in student housing; my parents were closely tied in with their cultural group but also had many American friends. We didn’t have much money, but I always received the best educationally because we lived in a college town where the learning standards were high. My own parents came from a culture that valued higher education, so I learned early on that being a good student and eventually going to college and beyond was the righteous path. We had very little extended family around. I only ever met one of my grandparents and didn’t really get to know her because the visits were brief. Naturally, most of my friends were in the same lower-middle-class bracket, which made it easy for us to understand one another and relate to each other’s experiences, especially in elementary school. As our world became larger in middle and high school, the influencing factors and the lens through which we viewed the world began to shift. There was a whole other place outside the little neighborhood where we could walk to one another’s front doors, school, or the pool in the summer. We experienced everything within a mile of where we slept until it was time to get on the bus for middle school, where we finally met and interacted with kids from all over town, no longer limited to our little bubble. But even as those influences within our microcosm grew, some things remained constant. We grew up in an agricultural state in a college town, surrounded by rural farmland. A border state that was on the side of the north in the Civil War, there were vast differences in culture between our state and the one next door that we would sometimes drive to for camping excursions. There were and are a lot of misconceptions about my state, Kansas, and to this day, when people ask where I’m from and I answer “Manhattan,” they assume I’m talking about New York. It blows their minds that someone like me could have grown up in a small town in Kansas, and it’s even more confusing to many how on earth my parents ended up there as immigrants from Iran, of all places. I grew up without religion; my parents were open to letting me attend church with my friends if I asked, but there was no particular reinforcement of any one belief system. Politically, they were liberal and highly engaged in politics, as they and their families had been greatly impacted by the internal and global politics that shaped the conflict and regime change in Iran.
My early experiences formed the backdrop and led to the formation of the limiting beliefs that came to shape my standard mode of operation. Limiting beliefs are the thoughts that keep you from moving forward by diminishing your belief in yourself and what you’re capable of. There are a couple of lenses through which limiting beliefs affect you. The first lens is that through which you view yourself and whether your capabilities are enough. The second lens is that through which you view the world and how you see its limitations, and what impact those limitations have on your own life.
The following represent common limiting beliefs with regard to the self:
•I can’t pull that off.
•This is all I know.
•I’ll never be able to [fill in the blank].
•I never say the right thing.
•This always happens to me.
•I don’t have what it takes.
•I didn’t finish school, so I’m not smart enough to [fill in the blank].
Add these up, and what you end up with is “I am not enough.”
This next list details some thoughts that represent limiting beliefs with respect to the external world:
•The world is a terrible place.
•It’s scary to go out in public not knowing what may happen.
•The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
•It’s all falling apart, and it gets worse every day.
•There’s not enough [fill in the blank] to go around.
The general theme with limiting beliefs regarding the external world is “There is not enough,” whether it be enough money, food, compassion, sense, etc. It paints a picture of an unfriendly place, one that
