Myths You Believe

The myths you’ve adopted, consciously or not, are powerful. They reflect who you are in the world. You own them so TEST them. After all, your success depends on it.

This week’s podcast episode introduces a version of the SOB exercise I use in my workshops and coaching. This blog further expands on it.  Furthermore, the newsletter explores feedback I received through a unique 360 experience and an explanation of how I recognized a myth unfold from within. It may be more difficult to follow the story I share on the Instagram Wednesday video (December 5th on my IG feed). It’s about a hurtful message I perceived from my mother. I’ll offer more about it in the testing your myths section, below.

How Your Myths Define

Wondering how the myths you carry around with you, define you? 

Messages received as a child, if repeated frequently in various forms and originating from people you admire or love, will lock-in beliefs until they form a picture of who you are. Ultimately, these pictures determine how you see the world and your place in it. You carry the picture around, perhaps fine tuning it in various ways until potentially, you experience a big insight that shakes the foundation of this belief.

A client story…

A client recently shared a perfect example of this with me. Struggling with communication in the work place and not feeling heard or respected by a team of men with whom she was collaborating, she felt angry and disrespected. She’s typically a straight-forward communicator. In this case, she felt uncomfortable pushing back so she slowly lost her voice in the project. The project ultimately failed. During the postmortem, she realized many of the problems came directly out of concerns she’d anticipated. What had caused her to resist raising her concerns for discussion. She came to me wanting to unpack what had happened and her frustration at having allowed it.

As we looked at what she was feeling and telling herself in the exchanges with these men, she started to see her biggest myth rise to the surface. She grew up with three brothers who fought among themselves for attention. The dynamics of the project team we were exploring replicated that feeling of overwhelm she had with her brothers. The three men on the team were all fighting for their vision and my client felt pushed aside. As we unpacked it, she realized her limiting belief. No matter how logical or thoughtful her concerns were, she’d be wasting her breath and time. This, it turns out, is a common theme for her.  This most recent situation was just the most dramatic example of how it reduced her effectiveness in the workplace. She consciously began seeking and parsing related feedback to help her shift her thinking and her reactions in similar situations. See the exercise below to help you do something similar.

The SOB exercise Explained

Often people blindly accept the beliefs that form over time. They become comfortable with them even when they’re undesirable. Do you remember the story of the frog in the slowly boiling water? For example, a client once told me she was impatient and difficult. It was an off-handed comment, which is how many myths come to light in a coaching conversation. I noticed and asked if she saw value in digging into that belief. As I recall, she was perplexed. “It’s just part of my charm”, she said. We decided to dig into the source of these beliefs and the impact they have on how she behaves. Soon thereafter, she realized how it generated a great deal of self-judgment, second-guessing and self-doubt. It had, in fact, made her hyper-sensitive in many situations. 

The SOB exercise helped us assess how her “impatience” and “difficult” nature showed up in her life. We realized some of the behaviours she linked to these judgments were the very reason she was a great leader and a superb strategist. She also began recognizing how, by expecting to be shot-down and minimized in these moments, she reacted by putting on armor to mask her self-doubt. It was this defensiveness that fueled her reputation as a difficult person. After our own exploration, she used the following three steps to both self assess and solicit feedback from others.

The Steps:

1. She identified a situation each week where she received feedback, directly or indirectly, from others or her own inner critic. Choosing to focus on feedback related to being impatient, stubborn (she added this myth to the list for the exercise) or difficult, she began to find patterns. Finding she had more than one related experience a week, she chose to focus on situations where she had the most dramatic, even unreasonable response. For example: losing concentration; lacking composure; or costing valuable sleep.
2. Once she chose the situation worth unpacking she would ask herself, “what is the evidence of my impatience, stubbornness or difficult personality?” In other words, what’s the evidence in this situation that suggests I need to change my behaviour? 
3. Thirdly, she took time to lay out the specific behaviour related to the feedback whether coming from others or her inner critic. This step reveals behaviour that can be change and that which is simply based on erroneous conclusions related to limiting beliefs.

Taking it yet another step…

The client I use in the story above decided to take it to another level by engaging her team in an exercise to help her move past limiting beliefs. She wants to understand what her direct reports are concluding or experiencing with her. It was so helpful, she now includes it in her annual environmental scan with the directors who report to her.

As part of the meeting, they’re invited to share three observations from the year ending. As happens with most people, they often mistakenly offer a conclusion they’ve drawn. With practice she’s learned to quickly pulls them back by asking, “How do you know THAT to be true?” For example, if one of them says, “you’ve been really critical this year.” She will stop them and say something like, “That’s interesting, what have I specifically done that made you feel criticized or what situation can you point to where I was critical of you or others?” This way she’s able to get to the specific behaviour which informs her in a meaningful way AND allows her team to witness the value of digging below the beliefs to understand how they’re manifesting into behaviours that are not always experienced as they are intended.

Testing Your Myths

Using the exercise above you can start to test the myths that have been defining you. In addition, learning to focus on specific observable behaviours will become a means of digging beneath the feedback that’s triggering or fueling the beliefs. Following this, you can build habits that encourage you to question the conclusions you draw.

For example, when you hear something that stings, ask yourself what the other party may really intended. AND, when you hear your own inner voice challenging you or expressing doubt, get curious. Consider whether there’s truth in the conclusion or it’s an old myth that you’ve allowed to plague you.

When you’re willing to test the myths – the limiting beliefs – they’ll begin to lose their power. It will require hard work and diligent practice for it to change long term. Even when you have discovered how to test and adjust, you’ll need to be constantly vigilant. Old habits die hard, as they say. These are deeply embedded within you and you may be surprised at how readily they reappear when left unchecked.

My Mother Myth

In the Instagram Wednesday Story (December 5th) I share about how I felt hurt by my mother when she didn’t seem to be supporting me with an invitation to perform at a gala. I was 13 or 14 years old and the local music festival launched a new class at the annual event for musical theater. Choosing to compete in the class inviting costume and creative performance, I was totally stoked and worked hard on my staging plan and costume. I won my class. 🙂 The experience of acting on stage was thrilling. 

The music festival committee (my mother was then past president) met to discuss the final night gala which raised a lot of money for the committee’s budget. The performer list was never an issue; only those winning awards performed. There was no award designated for musical theater BUT they wanted to capitalize on all the buzz about my performance so they voted on making a special invitation for me to perform. They believed it would help them sell tickers. My mother didn’t want this; she felt they were using me.

The committee voted her down and I was thrilled for the invitation. ALL I CARED ABOUT WAS FEELING AGAIN WHAT I’D FELT THE FIRST TIME I’D PERFORMED. I couldn’t care less about the award. When I heard my mother had tried block it, I was crushed. Some member of the committee felt it was appropriate to tell me this! I didn’t confront my mother at the time. For years, though, I just didn’t trust her to have my best interests in mind. As a young adult, we discussed it one day and she shared her perspective. THAT changed everything. The spell of the myth was  busted!

How We Can Walk together…