Why can't I think my way out of this?

I sat with someone recently who was stuck. Everything he told me in the first twenty minutes was about the outside: his numbers were down, his schedule had come apart, too many people needed him at once, and he wasn't sleeping enough to handle any of it.

I'm not a trained therapist, and I made sure he knew that up front. For some reason I keep ending up in these conversations with people around my companies, and I've learned to be grateful for them. So I did what I usually do and kept asking questions.

One more question

Why are the numbers down? Follow-up slipped. Why did follow-up slip? His mornings fell apart. Why did the mornings fall apart? He couldn't sleep. Why couldn't he sleep? He was afraid. Afraid of what? Of making the wrong decision and losing everything.

Then, after a few deep breaths, he finished the sentence himself. Underneath the fear was a belief about who he'd become if he lost everything, and he'd been carrying it since he was young, long before he had words for it.

Why working harder doesn't fix it

Let me explain why that matters.

A smart, driven person tries to solve a problem like this the way they solve every other problem. I'm 100% guilty of it myself. We work harder, build a better schedule, and think it through one more time at 2 a.m. The harder we try, the more stuck we get.

I've come to believe your mind can't solve a conflict that rests on something false. If the belief underneath says "if I lose everything, I'll become the person I never wanted to be," no schedule will settle it. Your brain keeps working the problem because it feels urgent, and it never finishes because there's no true answer for it to land on. That loop is what keeps so many of us up at night.

Going back to the belief

The way out is to go back and look at the false belief itself. Name it out loud, find the first time you felt it, tell the truth about it, and ask God what's true instead. Jamie Winship, author of Living Fearless, calls this process "identity exchange." Some people get there the first time. Most of us need a lot more than that. I told him that sometimes it takes me a few dozen times.

I'm preaching to myself

I'll confess, I'm preaching to myself here. Most of my life I've believed I'm not good enough. That belief has driven so many of my choices, and more than once it led me into some form of bondage.

One situation brings it back nearly every time: being invited to speak. I'm tempted to believe I'm not good enough, and that I'll only be good enough if everyone in the room likes what I have to say. I've walked through that one something like twenty times. I wrote about it in The Fear That Wasn't About Public Speaking, and about the bigger pattern in What if the things you chase to prove your worth are keeping you in bondage?

That belief is a lie. What an audience thinks of me doesn't change anything about who I am, and there's freedom in confessing the lie and receiving the truth.

The truth I come back to is the same every time. My value rests in God's eternal love for me, and nothing I gain or lose, and nothing anyone says about me, adds to it or takes from it.

When that truth sinks in, the conflict goes quiet. My mind stops trying to fix it, because there was never anything there to fix. Sleep comes back, new habits get easier, and I'm free to show up for the people in front of me.

A question to sit with

I'm not pushing this on you, I'm just challenging you to consider something. If you've been working hard on a problem for months and it won't move, ask what you'd have to believe for it to feel this heavy. Then ask whether that belief is true.

If you'd like someone to think it through with, that's what my Unstuck Calls are for.

-Dave Hooke.