What If You’ve Been Seeing Yourself Wrong?
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
I was listening to Michael Pollan’s Fresh Air interview recently, where he was talking about his new book A World Appears and exploring how consciousness actually shapes the world we experience.
One thing he said jumped out at me: the mind tells stories about ourselves, and those stories trap us in loops that are genuinely hard to escape.
I knew exactly what he meant. I see it all the time with my clients and I recognize it in myself.
For longer than I care to admit, I ran my business wearing two very specific beliefs like a pair of glasses I never took off:
I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not cut out for this.
Not exactly a recipe for confidence.
Those thoughts colored everything. Something didn’t go as planned? See, I don’t know what I’m doing.
Confusion or discomfort showed up? I guess I’m not cut out for this.
Even as my client roster grew, I discounted my own role in making that happen. It felt like luck, like wishful thinking, because obviously someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing couldn’t have actually created that.
These thoughts feel like facts. But they’re not.
They’re unconscious choices, habits of mind that run the show so quietly and automatically that we don’t even realize they’re there.
What Pollan is pointing out is that our consciousness doesn’t just passively observe the world. It actively constructs it.
And when the stories running in the background are painful ones, we end up living in a world that confirms them, over and over again.
What Happens When You Begin to See Clearly
A client had a profound breakthrough around one of these unconscious beliefs recently.
Her belief was that as a stepmother, she was somehow less than. It shaped the choices she made. She felt she had to constantly prove herself, and she literally could not take in how much her stepchildren valued and loved her, even when they told her explicitly. It just didn’t land.
When she realized she had been looking through those disempowering lenses and made the choice to take them off, everything shifted.
She could finally see clearly what had been there all along: a unique, irreplaceable relationship with people who love her and see her as important in their lives.
It was profound. The ripple effect on her relationship with her partner, her stepchildren, and most importantly herself, is something she is still discovering.
And by becoming aware of her unconscious thoughts and how they shape her perspective, her relationships at work are shifting too. In just the first six weeks of us working together, she’s experiencing more success and satisfaction at work than she had all of last year. It’s all connected!
Some Beliefs Live in the Body, Not the Brain
For me, seeing myself differently wasn’t quite as simple as taking off a pair of glasses. Trust me, I tried. But my stories didn’t live in my brain. They lived in my body, in my nervous system.
Having my own business forced me to reckon with deep questions about my sense of power and authority.
There were old “good girl” stories in there, around shame, safety, and belonging, that had protected me once but were no longer serving me. They were quietly keeping me small.
It wasn’t until I began working with my sense of power through my body in my Ishtara movement practice that I started to actually release and rewire those stories.
Not think my way out of them. Release them. It was a devoted practice, not an overnight shift.
But I can genuinely say now: I have taken those glasses off.
I see myself differently. I feel myself differently.
I still experience nervousness, disappointment, uncertainty. That’s just being human, and entrepreneurship practically guarantees a steady supply of all three.
But I no longer avoid the hard stuff. And I don’t make things being hard mean anything definitive about me.
I can feel nervous and do it anyway, because I’ve set down “I’m not cut out for this.”
When things don’t go as planned, I look for solutions and learn from them, because I’m not shutting myself down with “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
So What Are Yours?
What beliefs do you hold about yourself that feel completely, unquestionably true?
How do those beliefs shape your leadership, your career, your relationships, your relationship with money?
Maybe you’ve built solid coping strategies around them. Maybe you muscle through in spite of them and get results anyway. But feel exhausted and overwhelmed.
Here’s the thing about these lenses: they’re almost impossible to see on your own.
You can’t see the glasses when you’re the one wearing them.
This is where a coach comes in. Not to tell you what to think or who to be, but to reflect back what you can’t quite see yourself. Your thoughts. Your patterns. The beliefs that have quietly been running the show.
When someone holds up that mirror, something shifts. You go from being inside the story to being able to see it. And from that awareness, you get to choose.
You can keep the lenses on, or you can decide to take them off. But you can’t choose something you can’t see yet.
Imagine the same circumstances, the same life, the same challenges, with thoughts that are actually working for you instead of against you.
Imagine being able to embody the energy of these empowering beliefs.
It’s possible. And it can change things in ways you probably cannot see right now, because of the lenses you’re currently looking through.
Your perspective isn’t just one factor in your life. It’s the filter through which you experience all of it. Your career. Your relationships. Your sense of what’s possible. Every decision, every risk, every moment of joy you let yourself receive or push away, all of it runs through the lens of what you believe about yourself.
Shifting that lens doesn’t just change one thing. It changes everything.
If any part of this landed for you today, that’s worth paying attention to. That little nudge is your own wisdom trying to get your attention.
I’d love to help you see what you can’t yet see. Let’s talk.