The stories we tell ourselves

She's been coming to me for a while now.

There was a story she'd been carrying since before she walked through my door.

The story was this: she couldn't get up from the floor without the fear of making a fool of herself. Not just the physical difficulty of it. The embarrassment of being seen trying and failing in front of someone else.

Here's the thing about that story.

It wasn't something I'd observed. It wasn't something written in her notes. It wasn't based on anything that had actually happened with me.

The only person telling that story was her.

So we didn't attack it directly. We just worked. Built her physical confidence, quietly, over months. And as she started telling me that something was shifting, I started moving the bar. Gently. Keeping pace with where she actually was, not where she thought she was.

This week, she did the movement.

And the moment she completed it, she started to cry.

I didn't say much. Sometimes the right thing to do is let a moment be what it is. What I did tell her was this: I didn't do that. The framework, the environment, the relationship, yes. But the work? That was entirely hers. Coaches don't get to claim victories that belong to the client. What we get to do, if we're fortunate, is be in the room when it happens.

What struck me afterwards, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since, is how suffocating those stories become.

Not because they're malicious. Not because we're weak for carrying them. But because they're so quiet about what they're doing. They don't announce themselves as limitations. They present as facts. As just the way things are. As who you are.

And if you're not careful, you stop questioning them entirely.

I've carried versions of that story my whole life. Most of us have. The story about what we're capable of, what we deserve, what's available to someone like us. The story that was written in circumstances that no longer exist, by a version of us that was doing the best he could with what he had at the time.

The question worth sitting with this week:

What story are you telling yourself that only you believe?

Because there's a reasonable chance the prison has a door. And you have the key, because you built it yourself.

Paul

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