How Limiting Beliefs Keep Women Small (and How to Break Free)

In 1989, Dr. Fay had 50 cents in her bank account.

She had four kids under 18, an abusive husband who had drained the family finances, and a job as a dean at a university in Lebanon. During the Civil War. Meaning she went to work in an active war zone every single day. Her mother had just died of breast cancer.

She looked at all of that and made a decision. She was going to start a business.

Not because she felt ready. Not because she had a safety net or permission or support. She simply decided failure wasn’t an option, and then she did it. She built a consulting firm, put all four of her kids through Ivy League universities, survived cancer herself, and at 78 just published her first book.

And here’s what she’ll tell you was the hardest part. Not the war. Not the cancer. Learning to trust herself, because the limiting beliefs she’d accepted about who she was supposed to be were lies she had to consciously stop believing.

I sat down with Dr. Fay Niewiadomski on the podcast this week, and friend, I didn’t ask a single question I had prepared. That’s how good this conversation was. This post is the recap, but I’m telling you now, go listen to the whole thing.

Women Don’t Have a Confidence Problem, We Have a Limiting Beliefs Problem

That’s the claim Dr. Fay builds her whole body of work on, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

She took me all the way back to bedtime stories. When a parent reads to a child right before sleep, that child slips into a naturally hypnotic state. The story is coming from the most trusted source in their world. And what are the stories telling little girls?

Cinderella never fights back. Snow White is traded away, poisoned by a cruel old woman, and only comes back to life when a prince kisses her. You never hear these girls speak up. And when girls in fairy tales do misbehave, like Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks, they face mortal danger.

Over and over, the pattern repeats. Girls are praised for being beautiful, silent, and compliant. Never for wisdom. Never for courage. The evil characters are almost always women who have aged naturally. The rescuer is always the prince or the woodcutter with an axe.

We were conditioned into our limiting beliefs before we could even read.

And it doesn’t stop at storybooks. I shared a statistic on the episode that I first heard through Junior League, and it stopped me cold. There are more statues dedicated to dogs in the United States than to women.

Dogs, friend. So when a woman achieves something extraordinary and people react with astonishment, Dr. Fay says to listen for the underlying assumption. If it’s more notable because she’s a woman, the belief underneath hasn’t changed. The limitation just got more subtle.

Which brings me to the rooms we’re actually sitting in.

How Limiting Beliefs Show Up in Real Rooms

I just went through an interview process where I got a lot of questions about my capabilities as a woman. How are you able to be a mother and go back to graduate school? How are you juggling all of this?

Would you have asked my husband that? Probably not.

I’ve also lived the less polite version. At my last corporate job, grown men threw a legitimate tantrum and graffitied all over my office because they didn’t like what I had to say. Dr. Fay laughed when I told her, because one of her favorite lines is that she’s seen plenty of people who call themselves CEOs behave like three year olds.

Here’s where she took it somewhere I didn’t expect. She believes the greatest leadership lessons we learn come from parenting and home management. Conflict resolution, budgeting, supply chain, time management under pressure. And yet when a woman takes a year or two to parent, she comes back to a resume gap she’s expected to apologize for, as if her brain atrophied.

One of the chapters in her book is called competence is genderless, and she argues we should be recognized for that experience, not penalized for it. I did a whole episode recently on using volunteer and life experience to explain career pivots, and this is the same principle. If you’re handling the budget for a nonprofit, you have real skills. Lead with them.

Competence is Genderless

Dr. Fay Niewiadomski

The conditioning says shrink, apologize, explain the gap. The truth says you’ve been training this whole time. So how do we actually break the pattern?

Breaking Free from Limiting Beliefs: Competence, Courage, and Compassion

Dr. Fay’s book is called Decisions That Matter, and she draws a line I’m still chewing on. A decision is strategic. It’s about who you are and who you want to become. A choice is tactical, left or right. We confuse the two constantly, and we let other people make the strategic ones for us.

Her framework for real leadership has three pillars.

Competence. Actually know what you’re doing, and never stop learning. She calls learning a superpower you cultivate at any age, and she published her first book at 78, so she’s not just talking.

Courage. You can know exactly what’s right and still not do it because you don’t want to be rejected. Dr. Fay was blunt about the cost of that. When you constantly comply against your own values, you become an unhappy, misaligned person, and your body keeps the score.

Compassion. Starting with yourself. This is where she went after perfectionism, and friend, she did not miss. Perfection is a moving target you can never hit, so every day you chase it, you log another failure. You’re eroding the very confidence you’re trying to build. She even called out the interview answer where we claim perfectionism as our “weakness” while secretly showing off. Guilty.

And when you’re in a room where your voice isn’t valued? She doesn’t defend and she doesn’t attack. She asks questions. Someone once dismissed her ideas as “elitist thinking,” and instead of arguing, she asked them to explain the opposite of elitist thinking. No sarcasm, no counterattack. Just a question that person is probably still turning over.

That’s the move. Attacking someone’s beliefs only confirms their bias. A powerful question stays in their mind and does the work for you.

But the line from this episode I’ll be repeating for months is this one. No one can give you power, because no one has it to give away. You already hold the power of choice. The prison is cognitive, the beliefs are the bars, and you have the key.

There’s a phoenix on the cover of her book. She chose it because she has had to recreate herself after disaster more times than most of us can imagine, and she wants you to know it’s possible.

FAQs About Limiting Beliefs

Q: What are limiting beliefs?
A: Limiting beliefs are assumptions you’ve accepted as fact about what you’re capable of, what you deserve, or what’s appropriate for someone like you. Most of them were installed by family, culture, education, or media long before you could question them. Dr. Fay calls the result a cognitive prison, and the walls feel real until you examine them.

Q: Where do women’s limiting beliefs come from?
A: Conditioning starts early, from fairy tales that praise girls for silence and beauty, to school systems that reward getting it “right,” to workplaces that treat a caregiving gap like a competence problem. The messaging repeats until it feels like truth instead of training.

Q: How do I identify my own limiting beliefs?
A: Look at the places where you’re waiting. Waiting for permission, readiness, or someone to validate you. Then ask which belief is underneath that waiting, and whether you actually chose it or just absorbed it. If it doesn’t serve who you’re becoming, it goes.

Q: How do you overcome limiting beliefs?
A: Dr. Fay’s framework is competence, courage, and compassion. Build real skill, act in alignment with your values even when rejection is possible, and forgive yourself for being human instead of chasing perfection. It’s conscious, repeated work, not a one-time breakthrough.

Q: Are limiting beliefs the same as a lack of confidence?
A: No, and that distinction is the heart of this episode. Confidence is the symptom. The belief is the root. You can’t affirmation your way out of a belief system you’ve never examined.

Your Limiting Beliefs Are Not the Truth

Three things I want you to walk away with today.

You were conditioned into smallness before you could read, and that conditioning is the lie, not your capability. Your unpaid and caregiving experience is leadership training, not a resume gap to apologize for. And nobody is coming to hand you power, because you already have it.

Leadership is a holistic practice, friend. That includes leading your own mind.

Go listen to the full episode, because Dr. Fay’s delivery is something a recap can’t touch. Then grab her book, Decisions That Matter, and actually read it. Most of you listening are women, and this one was written for you.

And if this hit something in you, forward it to the friend who’s been waiting for permission. She’s not going to get it. She’s going to have to decide.