Your Brain Loves to be Right

I have spent an extraordinary amount of my life wishing that I was smarter than I am.

I’ve been self-conscious about this for as long as I can remember.

It comes up often, especially when I try to convey facts and data and cannot quite convey the information concisely.

When I try to recap a book or podcast episode that I love, my retelling is jumbly and confusing.

Or if I’m sharing something personal or vulnerable and I get interrupted by someone anxious-excited to share their perspective or change the subject, my brain immediately makes that mean that I’m not interesting to talk to…because “I am not that smart.”

I’ve gotten really great at proving to myself that I am, indeed, not smart because I look for this evidence to confirm this everywhere.

The other night, my husband and I were solving the NYT app puzzles together, and I was breezing through the answers.

He started teasing me about how smart I am. I asked him if he was serious, and he said, “Yeah, you’re super smart. Why are you asking me that?”

I shared with him how believing that I’m “not smart” is the thing that makes me most insecure in the world.

If you could have seen the look on his face.

He was very, very confused.

I get it.

I talk to clients every day, and they say things about themselves that are also very confusing.

For example, one client tried to convince me last week that nothing was working in her business, and yet she had signed two new clients last month.

Another client told me that she needs more qualifications to be taken seriously as a coach. Trust me when I tell you she has everything she needs. She had just forgotten.

Our brains LOVE to be right.

Once they are captivated by a thought like “I am not smart,” “Nothing is working,” or “I am not qualified,” our brains will make it their full-time job to prove it true.

As coaches, we can see these painful thoughts and point them out to our clients, then invite them to choose an alternative thought that propels them in a more positive direction.

It’s an amazing part of the coach-client relationship.

As the coach, we benefit from perspective…being outside of the client’s brain!

Not so easy to have this same perspective with our own brains.

Sometimes, we forget to challenge our own thinking.

I certainly did.

I’m so grateful that my husband told me that he thought I was super smart.

It opened a new awareness in my brain that thinking, “I am not smart enough,” is optional.

I knew it, and I didn’t know it at the same time.

Can you relate?

With my stickiest thought…I didn’t consider that it was possibly not true.

Instead, my brain was trying to be right, prove it true…for decades!

So good for me to learn this lesson again.

The old painful thought isn’t completely gone yet, but it is on its way out.

Its grip on me is dissipating.

I can feel the shift.

I’m starting to see evidence of how smart I am (which was probably always there and just unseeable before).

And…

When I’m speaking, sharing data and facts, recapping podcasts, sharing vulnerable moments, it’s with a little more confidence and certainty because I FEEL differently.

I feel less insecure.

More secure because I am starting to claim the truth in the thought that “I am smart.”

With immense appreciation & gratitude. Always.