I spot this beautiful little moth high up on my kitchen wall, and I reach for my camera. There might not seem to be anything particularly awesome in that reaction. But it’s a moth, and I think ‘oh pretty’ and calmly point my camera at it taking shot after shot, trying to get one that’s actually in focus. I fail. Holding the camera at arm’s length above my head doesn’t help. And when I look at the pictures I realise that, as moths go, it isn’t even that pretty. It is plain and brown but does have these lovely contour stripes. I rootle around on the internet but can’t identify it. It might be a Fox Moth.
The point is not what it is or how beautiful it is. The point is purely and simply that it is a moth – and I thought pretty and picked up my camera.
I’ve always had a thing about moths. For years they have completely freaked me out. I wouldn’t call it a phobia. I’m not afraid of them. It’s not fear, but something close to panic – and just as irrational.
I would freeze, go into a cold sweat, NEED TO HAVE THAT THING GONE.
I have avoided rooms for days at a time, in the hope that they would find their own way back out. When that didn’t work – what is with insects that they can find their way in but not out again? – I developed my own bug-catching method to get rid of them as quickly as possible. A beer glass and a post-card, seeing as how you’re asking – and yes they have always been released unharmed – but using it was a breath-held act of will, requiring the escape route to be pre-planned and the release point to have lights other than those in the house if at all possible. Speed, naturally, was of the essence. Like I say…something akin to panic.
So the second amazing thing, is that the moth was still there, when I sat down to start writing this.
I’ve acquired quite a few new mantras during the last two-and-a-bit years. The one that seems to be having the biggest impact at the moment is “Who says?”
As in…
…who says I don’t drink coffee at breakfast?
…who says I don’t like eggs?
…who says I’m not a forgiving person?
Obviously, the person who has habitually said all of those things is me. It’s no great revelation. Any decent coach will tell you that not only do we say what we believe, but more importantly we tend to believe what we say. Say it often enough and it becomes ingrained, we cease to question it. That same coach will also tell you that if you want to change anything in your life the first thing you have to do is challenge your beliefs about yourself.
You’ll be led to believe that it is easy: simply switch a limiting belief for an empowering one.
If you’ve ever tried to do this, you’ll know it’s not easy. One of the reasons it is not easy is because we are not the only person to have heard what we say about ourselves, and therefore we are not the only person to have come to believe it. The people around us, including those who love, like and respect us, tend to think we know ourselves better than they do. They reflect our negative self-talk back to us, they reinforce it in their kind, concerned, attentive way of protecting us from the things we fear. They allow us to stay small, rather than encouraging us to grow.
The people who love us do this not only because they love us and would protect us, but because they have irrational fears and negative beliefs of their own and trust us to protect them. Co-dependence of the worst kind – and believe me, we’re all into it...at least until we spot it for what it is.
Another reason it’s not easy to change our belief system is that we start from a position of no personal evidence that it can work. Even worse we might start from a position of having tried it and watching it fail. Belief is a hard thing to nail. Telling yourself something ten times a day doesn’t make you believe it. An affirmation isn’t a belief: it’s a wish or a hope or maybe a begging letter to the universe, but it isn’t belief.
Belief isn’t faith. Faith is trusting that something you want to be so, is or will be so, without evidence, just because you want it to be so. We choose our faith.
Belief is “a given”. Belief is recognition that some actually is so, whether you want it to be or not, whether it is helpful or not. That’s the problem with the advice to switch one belief for another. You cannot do that. You cannot choose what to believe. The only way to make the change is to look at the foundations of that belief…the evidence behind it. Why is that such ‘a given’ in your life? What underpins it…and what happens if you start removing those pins, and putting in different ones?
Let me just chuck in a warning at this point. Some “limiting beliefs” might be well-founded. The one that says I really cannot sing in tune and therefore shouldn’t stand up at a karaoke bar, never mind get on a stage, is definitely limiting…but sadly also true. Some limits are there for a reason. I want to keep my friends and not humiliate myself in public any more than is strictly necessary. It might be necessary for my personal well-being to be able to walk out onto an empty dance floor and strut my stuff; it is counter to my well-being and everyone else’s for me to sing in any place someone might actually be able to hear me.
So yet one more problem is: it isn’t easy to tell the well-founded belief from the out-dated or never-true-in-the-first-place kind. As if it’s not already complicated enough, we then go on to tie beliefs together and if we have evidence to support the first part, we assume the second (third, fourth, ad infinitum) part(s) also hold. For example, I might believe that it’s raining heavily, looking set in for the day and this afternoon’s picnic is going to be a complete wash-out, I must therefore cancel it. The first part of that belief is absolutely true: it is raining, heavily. The second part is highly probably true: between my knowledge of local weather, the look of the sky, the met-office forecast, it probably will continue to rain for the rest of the day. The rest of it has no grounds whatsoever. Who says we can’t move the picnic somewhere with a more favorable forecast? Who says we can’t bring the picnic under cover or completely indoors? If it comes to that who says we can’t just picnic in the rain?
Who says?
That was my lightbulb moment. If we want to undermine a currently held belief, we have to start with the very simple question: who says?
I wasn’t thinking about picnics. I was thinking about tea and coffee and what I drink first thing in the morning. I was drinking tea, because I always drink tea first thing, and I was feeling slightly queasy again, and the early morning tea and the queasiness were becoming related. But I couldn’t swap tea for coffee to see if that felt any better, because I don’t drink coffee at breakfast.
Who says?
Generally speaking, it was true. My first drink of the day has always been tea. For a long time, I didn’t drink coffee at all – but that was because Mam bought rubbish coffee and I didn’t know what the better stuff tasted like. Even so, I asked the question. Who says I don’t…
Who says…? is one of those questions that drag a freight-train of other questions along behind. Technically, you could just answer I do, or My Dad, or [insert person of choice, real or imaginary, alive or dead] and you will have answered the question. Somehow it doesn’t work like that.
Somehow, having answered the question you’ve opened up the conversation. Why, is it true, if it’s true why is that, if it’s not true why do I just accept it, what if I want it not to be true? That last one is the important one, that’s the guards van at the end of the train. What if I want it not to be true, what if I want it to be different?
That holds for however big or small the belief is. Why not start small. Like I did. With what I drink first thing in the morning.
So I wondered if it was always true. What about those workdays, when I was up & out the door in a flurry at the crack of dawn, and my first drink of the day was on the train or in the office? On those days that drink would be coffee. What about those long slow breakfasts on the island looking out at the sea? On those days I made a conscious choice about whether I wanted tea or coffee. It could be either or neither, it might be juice, or water, or even milk. So, it seemed that my belief wasn’t entirely true. I don’t think it would have mattered if it had been, if the facts had shown that I absolutely never had coffee at breakfast. Because just asking the question raised the idea, that ok, maybe this isn’t a rule. If there is a question, there is a doubt, and where there is a doubt, there is room for change.
So now…sometimes I do still have tea first thing, but more often I have coffee. Mainly I think it’s because I journal first thing, the first cup takes a long time to drink and cold coffee tastes better than cold tea. The new belief that I prefer coffee first thing in the morning is underpinned by more evidence than the old one about tea…but also interestingly, note that word ‘prefer’. I have dismantled an absolute and replaced it with a preference.
The who says experiment isn’t all about change though. I’ve also discovered that it’s a good tool for general introspection, for just noticing and accepting who you already are. Negative perceptions of ourselves create all manner of difficulties, but sometimes we go on being who we are, despite who we tell ourselves we are.
One of the most pleasing reflections for me so far has been the realisation that I am quite a forgiving person. I’ve always believed that I am a grudge-holder, that I might forget but I don’t forgive. I now know that isn’t true. A friend was talking about someone who had hurt me. I was just chalking it up to experience, and explaining the hows and whys of it, when I realised that right from the beginning of the pain, even when I was going through it, I was already defending them. Not saying that what they did was ok, but looking for reasons behind it, trying to see it from their angle. Effectively, I was already forgiving them. Ah, right. OK. When I’m not over-analysing myself, I am kind, compassionate, forgiving. I think I like that.
All of which brings us back to moths. Who says they freak me out?
Apparently not true – or at the very least, not always, not if I stop to notice how pretty they are.
That’s the doubt, that’s the room for change. I read somewhere that many languages don’t have separate words for butterfly and moth, and the scientific distinctions between the two are also becoming a bit blurred. So if I’m delighted to have butterflies in my garden, why would I be so upset to have the occasional moth in my house?
My response has always been that tigers are also beautiful, but I wouldn’t necessarily want to share my living room with one. I had never been forced to consider that tricky word ‘necessarily’ in that sentence. A get-out clause, a room for ‘possibly’, a doubt, a room for change.
