where your beliefs come from

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,

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who you are when no one’s watching

Dear Reader,

There's a version of you that may have never been seen by anyone. It operates during the hours when nobody's around: the drive home, the shower, the walk to the car, the stretch after everyone's gone to bed. Add those up across a week and it comes to a meaningful portion of your life.

Think about what actually goes on in there. Some people talk to themselves, whole arguments, rehearsed or replayed. Some people cry in the car and are completely composed by the time they walk inside. Some people put on music that would surprise everyone who knows them. Most of it is fairly ordinary to us, and most of it has simply never come up in conversation with anyone.

Which puts us in an odd spot. We've spent weeks now looking at things other people can see, our pace, the way we come across, what we say about ourselves. All of that is real and worth knowing. But most of the people who've formed an impression of us were working from a partial view, since hardly any of them have been in the car. 

What I find harder to shake is that we may be in a similar position ourselves. Those hours tend to be so ordinary that we barely register them, which can leave the least examined stretch of the day as the one where we're most ourselves and least on duty.

So this week, if you can, pay a little attention to what you're like in those gaps. Just enough to see it clearly, since there's a chance you never really have.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive

what you reach for

Dear Reader,

A client told me once that she never remembers picking up her phone. She remembers putting it down, twenty minutes later, without much sense of what she'd been looking at. The picking up doesn't register at all.

I hear versions of this constantly. The wine that gets poured at 5:15 whether or not the day was hard. The refrigerator opened three times in ten minutes when nobody is hungry. The house that gets cleaned when there's a difficult conversation waiting. Someone will describe it and then say they don't really know why they do it, and often that's true. It was already happening before there was anything to decide.

What strikes me is how few of these we have. You'd think comfort could come from anywhere, but most people have two or three and that's the whole list. Ask someone what they used to do with a hard evening fifteen years ago and it's usually close to what they'd do tonight. The wine might have been cigarettes. The scrolling might have been the television. The habit itself hasn't moved much.

These are among the most private things about us. Your pace shows up in your calendar and other people can see how you come across, but almost nobody knows what you do at nine o'clock on a bad Tuesday. The kitchen at that hour is usually empty except for you.

So this week, see if you can name yours. Just the one or two you'd go to if this afternoon turned hard. There's nothing wrong with having a way to get through a rough hour, and you don't need to give anything up. It's enough to know what it is, and to catch yourself the next time you're already halfway through it.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive

the stories you tell about yourself

Dear Reader,

A woman I worked with told me she was terrible at keeping in touch with people. A few months later, in a completely different conversation, she said it again, and I noticed she used exactly the same words both times. Not the same idea, the same sentence. It came out smooth, the way a line does when it's been said a lot.

Most of us have a few of those. Short descriptions we reach for when we need to explain ourselves quickly, and they tend to be about our limits. I'm not a morning person. I've never been good with money. I'm the one who takes a while to warm up to people. They arrive fully formed because we've said them so often, and after enough repetitions they stop sounding like opinions and start sounding like information.

They also shape what you notice, which is easy to miss. Once you've settled on being bad with names, the times you blank on one stand out and the times you remember don't register. The story keeps gathering support for itself, and we're the ones doing the gathering without much awareness of it.

The useful thing about these lines is that you can actually catch yourself saying them. So much of what we've been looking so far has to be pieced together from the outside, but this one comes out of your own mouth, usually in the middle of an ordinary conversation, and if you're paying attention you can hear how practiced it sounds.

So this week, just listen for yours. The sentences about yourself that come out smooth, that you've clearly said before. Whether they're accurate is a question for another time. For now it's enough to hear how quickly they arrive, and to wonder how long you've been saying them.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive

borrowed beliefs

Dear Reader,

A couple I worked with once spent a good ten minutes of a session on whether you're supposed to bring something when you go to someone's house for dinner. He thought showing up empty-handed was fine with close friends. She thought that was unthinkable. What got me was how much heat there was in it, and that when I asked where each of them had picked up their position, neither one could tell me.

I think a lot of what we believe came to us without us ever really choosing it. We took a position from whoever was around at the time, and it settled in, and now it doesn't feel like an opinion at all. It feels like just how things are. That's why we get so worked up when someone does it another way. It doesn't seem like a difference between two people. It seems like they're doing it wrong.

A belief you actually worked out has some history to it. You can remember the conversation that shifted your thinking, or a stretch of years when you believed the opposite. A borrowed belief has none of that behind it. You've just always been sure, and when you go looking for a reason, there's nothing there.

So it's worth catching yourself the next time you feel that flash of certainty about something small. The right way to load a dishwasher, when a thank-you note is required, what counts as being on time. See if you can trace it back. Some of it you'll be able to. And some of it will turn out to be a rule you've been following for thirty years without ever once asking who made it.

Yours in the journey,

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