You carry a dangerous belief with you. One that impacts everything you do.
You learned it growing up, at school, at home, around peers.
With it, you take feel more anxious, risk less, and speak less.
What is it?
Wrong
“Wrong” gets used too often. It’s a shorthand for “incorrect,” “mistake,” “moral failure.”
Your brain overloads with the huge amount of information and context it’s exposed to every day. So trying to parse out what “wrong” means every time it gets used towards you becomes hopeless.
You learn that “wrong” is bad. And that being wrong is invalidating.
“Wrong” means you become less than someone who’s “right.” Even if that “right” someone is the version of you who had the “right” answer.
Your brain doesn’t want to deal with “wrong.” And when it has to, it often goes to Shame.
And you don’t even have to hear “wrong” to be limited and hampered. Because of the overload of “wrong,” any correction carries a feeling of invalidation.
You can’t be anywhere close to your most capable, powerful self when you believe that any error, any mistake, any failure is “wrong” and makes you “invalid.”
Resetting
You must be able to correct yourself without invalidating or condemning yourself, to accept results and improve upon them.
— Stewart Emery, Actualizations
To change your belief about “wrong,” the first step is understanding what you currently believe and how it doesn’t serve you.
Being able to correct without invalidating yourself removes fear and anxiety. You become free to act with incomplete information, and to learn more quickly.
It’s essential that you desire to become the version of yourself with a different belief in order to change. Wanting to “not” believe something won’t create the power and resilience needed to change. Your Intention needs to be clear and compelling.
Build Awareness of “wrong,” how you feel when you experience it and how you feel when you’re avoiding the possibility of feeling it.
Confront your anxiety when you feel the old belief. Challenge yourself to let go of what’s not serving you and embrace your new belief that you are not “less” when you err.
When you follow these 3 Keys (Intention, Awareness, and Confront), you stop coping and live in your power of Responsibility.
You can do this. I can help.