What are all the other possible stories that don’t say I’m not good enough?
After what felt like a long day I can still remember the excitement I felt knowing that it would end with something I was looking forward to, something that only in hindsight I realise was the thing that helped me through an otherwise overwhelming day: rugby practice.
The day was my first day of secondary school, everyone in my class was new and the school was much bigger than my old one. It was also a very good school for rugby, to be in the team meant you were good. At the time all I wanted was to be a rugby player and to do that meant I had to be good and to be good I had to be in the top team.
Training did not go to plan. It wasn’t as fun as expected, it all felt unfamiliar, new coaches, different expectations, more new people. It became so overwhelming I ended up sitting some of it out.
What did I take away from that story, that I realise two decades later?
For me it was a story fit into a wider pattern of stories I have collected (no doubt before and certainly after) to support the belief that I am not good enough.
And how true is that story?
Writing this it is easy to say it is not true.
It is illogical and certainly unfair to say that it is true.
Yet with hindsight I can trace the beliefs that made that story true.
I identified with my aspiration to be a professional rugby player. To be that I have to be good, if not one of the best, or at least feel like I am progressing towards that aspiration.
In the story I am doing none of that, I feel like I’m drowning in the thing I should be good at and that I should be enjoying, so much so that I need to step out of it. So clearly I am not a very good rugby player, because I would have excelled in that situation. Then maybe I am not as good as I thought, maybe I’m simply not good enough.
What may be other stories I can tell about that moment?
I had a fight/flight/freeze response to feeling overwhelmed when the thing that was getting me through an already overwhelming experience did not go to plan. A very human response.
In fact, until I had to step out I was beginning to pick things up and adjust to the new approach to training and expectations. I even remember receiving praise. So in fact it didn’t even go as ‘badly’ as I thought.
The day after, we had training again. Now I had a second day of a still very new environment without the thing I was previously looking forward to as my way through the day. And I showed up to training.
So another story is one of adaptability, of being more resilient than I gave myself credit for.
If we fast forward a week I am in fact dropped down a group. It was much more comfortable in that group, and with hindsight it certainly reinforced a fear of being out of my comfort zone, of being found out not to be good enough.
If we fast forward a few years I have made my way back to the top team. I remember finding the training and the higher expectations daunting and nerve-racking to start with but, injuries aside, I slowly got used to it, I kept showing up.
All this is to say that the stories we tell ourselves and can carry for years can run patterns we are barely aware of.
And that these may not be the only or most useful stories for us to have about us and the world.
No doubt a far more useful set of stories from this experience would have been that I am adaptable and resilient and that naturally I can find the new and unfamiliar overwhelming at times and that things don’t always go to plan to start with. These no doubt would have helped me respond in a way that is likely more personally uplifting than I am not as good as I think and I don’t want to feel that again.
Because the stories we choose to tell ourselves reinforce the patterns that make up our beliefs about us and who we are.
Now this is not to say we should create a total fiction but rather to consider there may always be more than one way of seeing a situation or experience and ourselves in that experience and situation.
It is likely that one story we could tell of almost every scenario is that ‘I am not good enough’, what would it be like to know we can choose a different story for the same thing?
What then becomes possible?
No doubt it is useful to think about how the story we choose, even unconsciously, serves us, otherwise why else would we choose it? But we also do not need to know that in order to choose another story right now.
With the perspective of multiple stories we have more options for how we choose to move forward.
And if we knew we could always choose how we wanted to move forward, no doubt that is what will best inform the stories that enable us to more easily do so.
For example, what may be an experience that didn’t go to plan for you? What are all the possible stories that you could tell about that experience? Which stories would serve you best to take forward into future experiences?
What would it be like to see the range of possible stories in a given moment?
What would it be like to know that more than one story can be true?
What would it be if we chose and lived the stories that remind us that we are always more capable, resilient and worthy than we often believe and than some of our stories may suggest?
