The problem is never the problem, the problem isn’t even what you think about the problem, the problem is how you relate to yourself and the problem.
From the time we’re born we start hearing stories. About who we are and about how we should be in the world. These stories become so compelling, so believable that they make up the foundation of our reality. They then become invisible. They shape what is normal for us, what is possible and what we think we can or can’t do.
None of this is a problem until we push against the boundary of that reality. This boundary is what creates our level of success, and when we want to push beyond that that we strike trouble.
As some stage in a journey of self-development most people become aware that their thinking plays a role in how well they can do. They work on values and beliefs in an attempt to free themselves from the limits created by their own thinking.
When I first dipped my toe in self-development, I heard the advice, ‘if you want a better result, tell yourself a better story’. It wasn’t until I was immersed in coaching that I had the insight, ‘If you knew it was only a story, why would you need to tell yourself a better one?’
But here’s the thing. Even a better story is still a story. We not only experience life through our own stories, we experience our life though Thought, there is no exception to this.
Forward Progress Starts in the Mind
Even though I understood the way I thought played a role in my ability to get things done and my level of success. I still held onto the belief that there were things outside of my control that were influencing my outcomes.
I’ve had a few insights about the role of thought along the way. Seeing that nothing outside of me could make me feel a particular way, or that while my feelings may seem real, the thing that make them seem real are made from thought.
Each insight stripping away what I thought was a fixed reality into something that is more fluid than rigid, more at the whims as to what was going on inside me that some event in ‘the world out there’. Each insight has led to a loosening of the world around me and what I thought was my place in it.
So instead of a fixed narrative that I had lived as the story of me, where I’m a character in a wider play and the script is already written, I’m now switching places. I’m becoming the author of my story. One where I get to generate the plot in real time, where my past isn’t an excuse, or my perceived future isn’t fixed in stone because of some perceived failure in my past.
When What is Holding Us Back is Hiding in Plain Sight
I mentioned recently to a friend that the older I get the I seem to have a greater ability to do the things I’ve always wanted, not because confidence or wisdom comes with age. Rather it seems, wisdom and confidence comes from having less ‘fixed’ ideas about how the world works or how I should be, or what I can do with myself and life.
“The unexamined life is not worth living” ~ Socrates
I’ll go one step further than Socrates. An unexamined life leads nowhere. An unexamined life keeps you stuck on the same track. And since progress starts in the mind, examining life should include examining what you believe to be true.
I’m shocked at how many times I’ve caught myself repeating something that I believed to be true, only to stop mid-sentence and realise this thought I’m expressing, this thing that had used to shape part of my life was no more real than the thought that made it. And that’s a trap we all fall into, never examining what shapes our experience, always believing that ‘because we thought it, it must be true’.
Where in your life are you playing out a story? One you thought was real but on close examination you can start to see the cracks forming in who you thought you were in relation to the story? I’ll give you a hint, it’s anywhere where you care to look.
