Martha Beck writes about her experience reading Katie Byron (who I haven’t read yet) and how a small exercise changed her life — a simple, word switching manoeuvre.
It starts with taking a statement that causes you fear, anxiety, or pain. A belief that is no good. In her case, it was a fear following a book she’d published about leaving the Mormon church. It was being received with violent backlash and after multiple death threats she feared that “something terrible was going to happen to me because I’d written the book.” (Which sounded pretty possible).
This thought lurked beneath everything she did, a tense soundtrack to every interaction and public appearance. It was making her life a nightmare.
My thought that surfaced was “I’m never going to be a great writer who makes meaningful work.”
The first step in the process is to question the statement. Can you know it’s true? And if you’re unsure, can you absolutely know it’s true? The answer to this is going to be no, unless the terrible thing is currently happening to you, in which case you have bigger problems at the moment.
Then you reverse the statement, turn it around, play with it in as many iterations as you can. For Martha, the reverse, “Nothing bad is going to happen to me”, didn’t feel true, but she eventually settled on a statement that did resonate: “I’m going to happen to something terrible because I wrote the book”.
At first, this seemed nonsensical, but the more she thought about it, the clearer it seemed. “I’m going to happen to something terrible”. She felt that she was going to make a difference on a system that had done terrible things to her and others. And with this thought came a strong sense of peace.
My reverse statement isn’t as life-changing, but I must admit it felt good to stumble upon it. For me, “I’m going to be a writer who makes meaningful work when I’m a great me,” immediately resonates.
The work I’m most proud of always comes when I’m being my best self. This looks like stories where I write about my challenging times and self-improvement aspects, or when I’m helping others with a project that we both believe in. Or it’s when I’ve learned about something that fascinates me and I want to share it forward. The best stories come out of the best me.
Discovering this statement is nice because it takes the pressure off of me a bit and helps guide my projects. Maybe I shouldn’t be worrying about being a great writer, which is something I apparently can’t control, and instead I should focus on being a great me, which I can (to an extent).
Which is why I chose this topic for my morning writing. Perhaps this will inspire someone else out there to play around with their limiting belief and see what can come out of it. Maybe it’ll result in a cool realization like this one. Or maybe you should all go read Martha Beck’s book — I highly recommend it!