Excerpt

A crucial step in becoming who you are is bringing to the conscious level the “not good enough” messages you’ve internalized. Only then can you change your inner dialogue, which in adulthood occurs at lightning speed largely out of awareness.

At one point in your life, that dialogue was quite conscious. Rick was one of those fortunate kids possessed of good coordination, high energy, and a love of competition that made him a standout in youth sports. The dialogue he had with himself was, simply put: “I’m good!” He looked forward to each new season and played several sports with great success. Family and friends admired his talent. The conscious decision he once had made regarding his physical prowess gave him confidence. With better luck, this self-image might have been a positive, life-long companion.

But circumstances changed. When he was 13, having lived his entire life in one community, Rick moved with his family to another town. Unknown to his new peers and coaches, suddenly small in relationship to other boys who had hit their growth spurts early, Rick languished on the bench. Hurt and angry at what he perceived as coaches’ writing him off without seeing what he could do, he quit sports altogether, refused in spite of parental encouragement to try out for teams, and began to tell himself he was never all that good anyway.

His earlier confidence-inducing dialogue became a negative stream. By the time Rick came to see me, he was struggling to stay in college after changing majors several times. Each time he moved to another field, he soon questioned whether he could succeed and moved on to something else. As we talked about how he came to doubt his abilities so consistently, he told me about his experience in sports.

"After you moved," I asked, "was there any particular occasion that prompted you to decide you really didn’t have much promise as an athlete?"

"Well, mostly it was just the whole business of feeling like an outsider,” he responded. “After we moved, it was hard for me to get to know the other kids. They’d all known each other for a long time and I felt like nobody liked me. And when you're trying to prove yourself, you know, you get more nervous and then you really screw up.

“Then after one of our Pop Warner football games I overheard the coaches talking, and one of them said something like, 'I don't think Rick's ever going to be very big. He might have been competitive when he was younger, but now the other guys are just too far ahead of him.' I sort of felt like I’d been socked in the gut when I heard that. I decided I was second rate, and that's when I just quit sports altogether. It wasn’t fun any more."

Stories like Rick’s are all too common. He seemed securely launched as a happy, confident kid. Then during puberty, a tumultuous time in and of itself, the trauma of a move to a new town was compounded by one of those elements none of us can control, the genetics that determined he would be a late developer. Add to this a situation in which he perceived, (whether accurately or not is immaterial) that coaches weren't giving him a fair shake, and you have the ingredients of a new and negative script for Rick's chats with himself. He soon questioned not only his athletic ability, but his personal value as well.

As a young adult, Rick attributed his low opinion of himself to what had happened during this critical time. Gradually, however, he came to see that it wasn't what happened that changed his attitude towards himself; it was what he said to himself about what happened that made the difference. The meaning he ascribed to his experience produced sadness and left him discouraged.

The Downward Spiral

What happened next, however, was crucial in Rick's downward spiral. On the basis of those thoughts, spurred by painful feelings, he made a decision: "I just quit sports altogether." From that point on, Rick reinforced his negative beliefs with giving-up behaviors. Giving up became acceptable. Physics too hard? Drop it. The girl you really like won't give you the time of day? Walk away. Nervous speaking in front of a group of people? Don't run for class officer. Each time Rick gave up, he hardened that response into a potentially lifelong pattern of avoidance and reinforced his belief that he was not good enough.

The sequence in which you form beliefs about your self and establish habitual patterns of behavior on the basis of a specific incident goes like this:

1) You interpret what the incident means; your thought produces

2) An emotion, leading to

3) A decision, leading to

4) Subsequent behaviors, leading to

5) The firming up of that belief about your self

While every step in this sequence is important, the pivotal step early in your life, the one with the power to change your relationship to yourself for a lifetime is Step 3, the decision. But what perpetuates that shift is Step 4, the subsequent pattern of behavior based on that decision. That behavior reinforces and solidifies your belief about yourself, and that belief becomes the filter through which you view yourself in your world.

The way you handle your first serious adversity will most likely be the way you handle the next one, the one after that, and the one after that. But there’s an important difference between the first incident and those that follow: In the initial episode, you’re much more aware of what you’re thinking. As you figure out what to do, you converse with yourself about options. Later, having already established your modus operandi, your internal dialogue accelerates. Eventually, it moves at warp speed, and you don't think; you simply do. Your response solidifies into a pattern as predictable as sweat in Death Valley.

We can't change the past. But it's not too late to change the future, and that has to begin in the present.