It’s all in the resources

A few months ago I took a course called Change Your Mind offered by psychologist Dr. Rick Hanson. And something he said in one of the modules stuck with me.

Paraphrasing, he said that we have a tendency to overestimate the challenges and underestimate our resources.

Thinking back over the times I’ve gotten stuck in my own negative stories, I realized he was right. For example, when I first started coaching, putting my newly learned coaching skills to the test, my narrative was often “I suck as a coach. There’s no way I can do this. I should just quit.”

When that narrative was present, my skills, existing and new, went right out the window. Instead, I overestimated the challenge of starting a new endeavor and completely underestimated my resources.

Like the fires that I’d walked through that I could use to empathetically support another human in walking through their own. Resources like my heart and the passion that I’ve always had for being a facilitator of self-directed neuroplasticity (a.k.a mindset shifting and change). Or the numerous courses I’d taken, books I’d read, and experiments I had used to develop a more open, positive mindset.

Here’s the thing, it’s normal to overestimate the challenges while underestimating our resources. It’s part of being human. It’s also quite doable to shift the…