500 Words a Week - Don’t Believe Everything You Think

After unpacking from a recent trip, I couldn’t find the charger for my watch.

I rifled through my bag, turned every pocket inside out, scoured the floor, even asked my wife twice if she’d seen it. Nothing.

Frustrated, I began doubting myself, I was sure I packed it, maybe I’ll need to order a new one.

In a last ditch attempt to find it, I opened my running drawer. And there it was, neatly placed, exactly where it should be. I had already unpacked, I just forgot.

This small moment reminded me, our brain’s aren’t always the most reliable. Not just with lost chargers, but also with the stories we tell ourselves every day. We often default to the negative. We say we can’t do something for reasons we’ve never challenged.

And if we aren’t careful, these stories begin to leak into our identity. We start to see ourselves as someone who is a failure, who lacks confidence, who just isn’t good enough. Not because this is true, but because we’ve repeated this story so many times it starts to feel like it is.

We tell ourselves these stories, because at one point they served a purpose. They were our brain’s way of protecting us from risk, making sense of pain, or trying to keep us accepted by others. But we hold onto these stories when we no longer need them, they become mental shortcuts, patterns within that we fall into when we are uncertain, afraid or doubtful. And the longer we leave them unexamined, the more tightly they cling to us.

We can’t stop these stories overnight, but we can start trying to unlearn them, or rewrite them. Beginning with noticing the pattern of our stories. Not with judgement, but with an awareness. “Ah, there’s that voice saying that I’m a failure again”. We can then ask ourselves, whose voice is this? Where did it come from? Often, this voice isn’t even our own, and understanding the origin of it, helps us loosen its grip.

We then challenge the stories we are telling ourselves. Is what I’m saying really true? Is it actually true that I’m a failure? What evidence do I have against it? And often we will be able to come up with a whole host of reasons why we aren’t what our stories tell us we are. We’ll find we are being unfair to ourselves.

The last and most difficult step is choosing a new story and practicing living with it. We must be honest in picking our new story, and it must be something we can grow into. A reframe that’s helped me is that I’m not failing, I’m just beginning and in the beginning everything is messy and uncertain.

These inner shifts take time, but they start when we move from judgement to curiosity, from shame to compassion.