The Rules That Hold You Back…

In 1903, The New York Times published an article claiming that human flight was at least a million years away.
They said it with full confidence — not as an opinion, but as a fact.

And yet, just nine weeks later, two brothers in a small bicycle shop in Ohio lifted a fragile flying machine into the air, and the sky opened forever - we now send flying machines to the moon and further.

It’s easy to laugh at that old prediction now, to shake our heads at how wrong they were, how much they underestimated the human mind.
But what’s worth noticing isn’t their mistake — it’s the power of collective belief.
For most of society, the idea that humans could fly wasn’t a theory.
It was a rule.

And that’s how rules work. They don’t feel like choices — they feel like reality.
They shape what we believe is possible before we’ve even begun to try.

The same thing happens inside the human mind.

From early on, we start absorbing “rules” about who we are and how the world works — not from science, but from relationships.
We learn them through the ways others respond to us, and how we learn to stay safe in return.
We build our sense of self in the reflection of other people’s eyes.

If those eyes were loving, steady, curious — we learned that we were safe to be seen.
If they were cold, distracted, angry, or absent — we learned to hide parts of ourselves, to shrink or to please.
Not because we were wrong, but because our young nervous system needed to survive.

And since we had nothing to compare it to — no alternative model of how love, belonging, or safety could feel — we treated those early patterns as truth.
They became our internal rulebook.

Rules like:
‘Don’t need too much.’
‘Keep others happy.’
‘Stay small so you don’t get hurt.’
‘Be perfect or you’ll be rejected.’

But here’s the quiet tragedy: most of these “rules” were born from other people’s dysfunction or lack of knowledge — not from truth.
They weren’t teaching us how to thrive; they were passing down how they coped.

And because those lessons were repeated — through words, reactions, and silences — they rooted deeply.
They stopped feeling like opinions or possibilities and started feeling like unchangeable facts.

Cognitive science has a name for this: the Illusory Truth Effect.
It describes our tendency to believe something simply because we’ve heard it many times.
Even if it’s false, repetition gives it weight. Familiarity feels like truth.

That’s how suggestions turn into rules.
And these rules can quietly run a whole life.

You might hear their echo in your mind:
“I’m not good enough.”
“People always leave.”
“Things never work out for me.”
“They’ll only love me if I try harder.”

It’s not that we consciously choose to believe these things.
They just hum in the background, shaping what we dare to ask for, how deeply we let people in, and how much joy we allow ourselves to feel.

We adapt around them.
We choose partners who confirm them.
We build careers that defend them.
We repeat them — not because they’re true, but because they’re familiar.

And familiarity can feel safer than freedom when you’ve spent years confusing fear with love.

But here’s a beautiful possibility:
What if these rules — about who you are, how lovable you are, what’s possible for you — were never rules at all?
What if they were just old suggestions that no longer fit the life you want to live?

Just as the Wright brothers refused to accept that human flight was impossible, you can begin to question the internal “laws” that hold you, stuck.
Because what holds most of us back isn’t reality — it’s what we were told reality is.

Breaking these rules doesn’t require rebellion. It begins with awareness.
With asking gentle but courageous questions like:
“What do I believe about myself — and who taught me to believe it?”
“Where did this rule begin?”
“Does it belong to me, or did I inherit it from someone else’s fear or stuckness?”

When you look closely, you may see that many of your limits were never truly yours.
They were hand-me-downs — clothes that were other people’s pain, internalised through repetition and love. That we now wear.

And when you see that, something in you starts to soften, become more flexible.
The rule begins to loosen.
The mind that once obeyed it can begin to imagine a new way of being. We can then move toward that.

The Wright brothers didn’t have fancy credentials or certainty.
They had curiosity — and the humility to test what everyone else assumed was unchangeable.

You can do the same.
Test the “rules” you live by.
See which ones still serve you, and which ones keep you small.

Maybe you discover that love doesn’t have to be earned.
That you can rest and still be worthy.
That needing help doesn’t make you weak or a burden.
That you can speak your understanding and still belong.

It can feel disorienting at first — to realise that so much of what you believed about yourself was never true.
But that’s how freedom begins: not with certainty, but with the willingness to question.

And maybe, when you start to challenge those invisible rules, you’ll feel the same way the Wright brothers felt on that December morning —
the moment your old limitations lift from the ground,
and you realise you were built to fly all along.

You just believed you couldn’t… and it wasn’t true.