Is one belief secretly running your life?

In my last blog, I promised to show you what it looks like when one unexamined belief shapes far more of your life than you'd ever guess.

So let's do that properly.

I’m going to take something you might think is mild. It’s something a lot of us carry in one form or another, without it ever being dramatic enough to notice. For this blog let's say the belief is, "I'm not quite good enough." It’s not huge or overwhelming but it’s a quiet hum sitting somewhere underneath everything else. You might recognise a version of it as imposter syndrome, though it doesn't need a big stage or a big promotion to show up. It's just as happy sitting quietly in the background of an ordinary Tuesday. 

The annoying thing about a belief like that is that it doesn't stay in one lane. It doesn’t even know how to do that. It shows up everywhere, and it wears a different costume depending on where you're standing.

As an individual contributor

It looks like always being the one who says yes. Always being the first to take the extra task, cover the extra shift and pick up the thing nobody else wants. "I don't mind," you say, and everyone believes you, because you're so reliable, so easy, such a team player. You’re great! Unfortunately, what’s happening underneath is a bit different. You’re trying to build a defence. So every yes is a small piece of evidence against the belief. Every extra task you take on is proof you're worth keeping around. You are good enough. Nobody else sees it, because from the outside, it just looks like you’re being a helpful team player.

As a leader

It looks like rescuing. A team member struggles, and instead of letting them sit with it and find their own way through, you swoop in and fix it. It feels supportive. It even feels like good leadership, in the moment. This time the belief underneath is something like "if my team struggles, that means I've failed". Rescuing them isn't really about them at all, it's about protecting yourself from watching them struggle or the reflective non-glory of them failing. The cost of that is real as your team never develops the capability to solve their own problems, because you keep solving them first, and then you get frustrated that they lack initiative. You’ve never quite seen your own hand in creating exactly that.

As a business owner.

It looks like never switching off. This is the one I know best, because I've lived it. In business ownership, there's nobody to hand the belief to. Nobody to moderate the story you're telling yourself about what you're capable of. So you carry it all yourself. You don't delegate, because delegating means trusting someone else with something you're secretly not sure you're doing right either. You work the hours, not because the hours are strictly necessary, but because stopping feels like admitting you can't cope, or worse, that you were never really cut out for this in the first place.

As a parent.

It looks like never being able to say no. This one comes dressed as love, which makes it harder to spot. Disappointing your child feels unbearable, so you smooth the path, remove the obstacle, give in before they've even had time to properly want the thing. It looks like devotion, and often it is but sometimes, underneath, it's less about them and more about protecting yourself from the discomfort of them being upset with you. The tricky part is, kids need to be disappointed sometimes because that's where a decent chunk of their own resilience gets built.

Same belief, different costume

So, that’s the same belief wearing four completely different costumes, depending on where you're standing when it shows up.

Most of us go looking for the problem in the place we happen to be standing. We think the issue is our team, our workload, our kids, our clients. Rarely do we step back far enough to notice the same pattern is showing up in every single one of those places, wearing a slightly different outfit each time.

If any of this landed a little close to home, I’m cool with that, that's not a bad thing. That's the beginning of paying attention to what's really running the show.  And, like I said last month, with awareness comes choice.

There's also a role that stress plays in all of this. It doesn't create these patterns, but it has a habit of making them louder, harder to ignore, impossible to keep pretending you can't see. I’ll talk about that more in my next blog. 

Do you recognise yourself in one of these scenarios? That's not a bad thing, in fact it’s the most useful moment there is because it’s the moment right before you decide what to do about it. If you want support working out where a belief like this came from and how to loosen its grip, that's exactly what my development programmes can help you to work out. Take a peek  at what's on offer, or if you'd rather talk it through first, drop me a message at johanna@wavesofpotential.com.