“You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”
– Christopher Robin to Pooh Bear
I’ve been struggling to keep the faith lately. I’m not talking about religion, but rather faith in myself. I am my own toughest critic, and when my lizard brain gets activated, it spits out all sorts of negative talk.
Fortunately, I know that I am more than my brain and its crazy thoughts. I can choose which thoughts I want to believe. Before I got immersed in coaching, I remember hearing or reading people talking about the importance of choosing your thoughts, but it didn’t make sense to me. I hadn’t yet learned how, as Eckhart Tolle says, to be the watcher of your thoughts. Tolle realized he could just notice his thoughts as if they were running at the bottom of a TV screen like closed captioning.
I now understand a little more about how the brain works — although much of it still is a mystery — and I have enjoyed learning from teachers like Tolle, Byron Katie, Jill Bolte Taylor, and Martha Beck. I know now that the left brain, predominant in most of us in our culture, always seeks evidence to prove itself correct. So if we have a thought of “I can’t do it,” we will find the evidence to support that thought. However, if we consciously change the thought to something that serves us better, like “I can do it” — and seek to find as many pieces of evidence to support the new thought…well, that’s how we can rewire our brain to work FOR us instead of against us.
So today, I’m choosing to believe I can do it. I can accomplish things I once thought were impossible, like a triathlon, or moving to a city where I know no one, or starting my own company. And just like the triathlon, which I always want to mistype “triathlong” — and it does seem impossibly long at times! — I will make it to the finish line if I just keep putting one foot in front of the other. And you know what else? I believe in you, too.