Believe in yourself without believing yourself

I’ve been noticing an important distinction: Believing in yourself vs. believing yourself.

Believing in yourself means trusting yourself.

It means knowing you’re the author of your life—100% responsible for your experience, and capable of handling whatever comes your way.

I’m a fan of this.

Believing yourself is something else. It’s being convinced, without inquiry, that your unconscious, auto-pilot thinking is accurate.

This does not serve you.

Believing in yourself creates possibility. Believing yourself creates stuckness.

Little preposition. Big difference.

A strange truth about humans is that most of our thoughts are inaccurate and unhelpful. They’re momentary—often repetitive—impulses grounded in past conditioning and/or future fears.

Rarely do our thoughts have anything to do with what’s happening right here, right now. Which makes them pretty irrelevant.

A thought is probably not serving you if, when you have it:

• You feel like you can’t stop it from looping.

• Your muscles contract or your breath gets shallow.

• You reflexively pick up your phone or turn to another distraction.

• You withdraw from people or things that normally energize you.

• You are less willing to take action.

If you notice a thought leading to one or several of these responses, I invite you to run an experiment where you assume the thought is untrue.

One of the best ways to start believing in yourself more is to stop believing untrue thoughts.

Don’t even worry right now about letting go of the thought or replacing it with something more supportive. Start with acknowledgement: You don’t have to believe everything you think.