where your beliefs come from

Sep 17

Dear Reader,

Tell someone they'd be good at something and watch how fast they correct you.

It's one of the more reliable things in my work. A person will describe a limitation they have, you offer a small piece of evidence against it, and they come back immediately with three reasons you're wrong. It's like they're helping you get the facts straight. They know themselves, and they'd hate for you to be operating on bad information.

I used to read that as low self-esteem, and sometimes it is. But there's something else going on that took me longer to see. Those beliefs are doing work. As long as you're not someone who leads, you never have to find out whether you'd be any good at it. As long as you're bad with people, the friendship you let go of wasn't a failure of yours, it was just how you're built. The belief comes with a way out attached, and after enough years, you'd miss having it.

Which changes what it means to ask where a belief came from. Part of the answer is the obvious one, that something happened early and you drew a conclusion. But part of it is that you've kept it. Beliefs about ourselves don't survive on their own. They survive because we maintain them, and we maintain the ones that spare us something.

It's easier to think we absorbed all this from other people, because that lets us off the hook. This is harder. Nobody handed you the argument you make when a friend says you're better than you think you are. You wrote that yourself, and you've been rehearsing it a long time.

So this week, notice what you defend. Not what you believe about yourself, but which of those beliefs you'd fight for if someone questioned it. That's usually where something is being protected, and it's worth knowing what.

Yours in the journey,