What is limiting our abilities?

Over the past years, I’ve come to realize that we are often limited by our habits. Limitations can be physical, emotional, and intellectual. As a movement educator, I often witness my clients beating their body when they run into physical challenges. What most people tend to do in that situation is that they try to force themselves to overcome the obstacle by will power with their “no pain no gain” mindset. Their mindset is such that if they can’t overcome the obstacle, they’re not trying hard enough; therefore, they will try harder. They may achieve their goal but not without a cost. Or they may fail and give up. This mindset is very common in many cultures. Truth is that “obstacle” is created by our habits. We can ignore this fact and keep driving ourselves with will power and keep exercising our habits until our body can’t keep up anymore. I think it’s our habits that make us move, feel, and think in very limited ways and that make us feel old. We can also make the obstacle disappear by recognizing our habits and creating new habits. This is where movement intelligence comes into play. Learning to create new movement patterns/habits isn’t something we (adults) often do when facing what I call “movement puzzle” or daily situations that challenge us physically.  Instead, we usually try to exercise our old habits and hope to break through the obstacle with strengthened old patterns. This works to some extent, but soon we’ll hit the wall again because we still haven’t realized that our habit keeps creating obstacles.
I’m not saying that habit is devil. Habits are very useful. In fact, if it weren’t for habits, it’d take us too long to do simple daily activities such as brushing teeth, or getting dressed. However, many habits are not serving us well anymore, yet we hold onto them because we’re not even aware of most habits.  I think habit can become our enemy when it’s invisible (we’re not aware) like silent cancer because we cannot recognize what is happening.  If we cannot recognize, we won’t be able to take any actions.