Thoughts Are Not Facts
One thing that prevents us from making progress or moving through our day with confidence is our tendency to mistake thoughts for facts. We often let thoughts that have no basis in fact stay top of mind for us all day long. And not only that - we often end up accepting these thoughts which have no basis in fact as true. In this episode we talk through how you can catch yourself mistaking thoughts for facts, and I’ll give you a simple way you can flip those thoughts to action steps that will help you move throughout your day with confidence.
Episode Transcription
Intro:
One thing that prevents us from making progress or moving through our day with confidence is our tendency to mistake thoughts for facts.
We often let thoughts that have no basis in fact stay top of mind for us all day long, and not only that - we often end up accepting these thoughts which have no basis in fact as true.
So in this episode I want to talk through how you can catch yourself mistaking thoughts for facts, and I’ll give you a simple way you can flip those thoughts to action steps that will have you moving forward throughout your day with confidence. Here we go.
Main:
When it comes to navigating the thoughts that we have, one of the things that trips us up over and over is our inability to distinguish between thoughts and facts.
We have a tendency to let thoughts that have no basis in fact stay top of mind for us all day long, and not only that we often end up accepting these thoughts which have no basis in fact as true.
Our brain is really good at bombarding us with thoughts that we turn into stories about who we are, and our brain does that in an effort to keep us safe and secure, and to keep us from taking risks or sticking out too much.
And what happens is we become so good at telling ourselves stories about what other people are thinking, and about our own inabilities, and our own limitations, that at some point we completely lose sight of the difference between what’s a fact and what are simply thoughts.
And if you look closely you’ll see that most of the things that you’re thinking about during the day fall into one of two categories:
The first category is thoughts about the past. We spend a good chunk of our day thinking about past experiences and things that have already happened, and we’re very good at replaying something that happened in the past and letting those memories of past experiences dominate our present thoughts.
The second category is thoughts about the future. We constantly are looking ahead and anticipating something that’s going to happen in the future, and in doing that we make a bunch of projections and we tell ourselves a story about how it’s going to turn out.
So here’s an example, think about a time when you decided to start working on something new. Maybe an idea for a project you have or a new opportunity that you want to pursue. And right at the point when you sit down and are about to get to work, you find yourself thinking not about the work itself but some point of anxiety or stress that’s related to the work.
So for example you might have thoughts that surface that originate from something in the past, like:
There was that one time I tried something like this and it didn’t go so well, or there was that one time that person commented on my work and it made me feel inadequate, or there was that one time it took me forever to get started because I couldn’t make a decision on what to do first and I ended up abandoning it altogether.
Or you might have thoughts that are rooted in the future: What if I do this the wrong way? What if the people who see me doing this don’t like it or disagree with it or don’t understand it? What if I flat out fail at this?
And at these moments where we’re looking backward and forward, we start to play out a highlight reel of all the ways that the things we want to do or are working on could go wrong. I say a highlight reel because it literally is like a projection of a movie and we cast the characters, we set the plot, we write the script, and we can see it so clearly, and it feels SO lifelike and so real that it ends up stirring up emotions and feelings inside of us.
And as we’re creating this projection of the future, and as we’re living it out in our mind, at the same time we’re using memories from our past to reinforce those future thoughts.
In other words we take our memory of a previous experience and we use it to justify and to back up the future projection, almost as if it was evidence that what we’ve just imagined about our future is actually going to happen beyond a doubt.
So effectively what we’re doing is using a memory of a past experience to legitimize a future reality that we’ve imagined that hasn’t even happened yet. And I would put “memories” in quotation marks because often times we actually misremember or have made up stories that are inconsistent with what actually happened.
Let me give you an example from my life that’s happened to me in the recent past.
A few months ago I sat down to create a presentation to an organization that I had never presented to before.
And I started working on the presentation and digging into the details and pretty soon I started to feel a sense of anxiousness around it.
I started to wonder: Is this the kind of content I should be including in this presentation? What if this won’t land with the group I’m presenting to? What if this is too basic? What if my ideas on this actually aren’t as great as I think they are?
And when I did this, I started to form a mental picture of reactions from the attendees related to the presentation.
I could literally see people shaking their heads and saying “hmmm, This wasn’t that great”, or I saw myself stumbling over one of the slides, and I envisioned a malfunction with the powerpoint, and I pictured myself not being able to answer a question that someone posed, and then I imagined getting negative reviews afterward, and then I imagined myself never being invited back again to present to this group, and then I envisioned the people who invited me feeling embarrassed and having to field all of these questions from their membership about why they invited this hack to present to them, and THEN I envisioned the person who hired me telling a bunch of other people who could potentially hire me that my stuff wasn’t that good.
And like I mentioned earlier, then what I started to do as I’m envisioning this future reality was justify and support this future version of events with things from my past - I basically treated my memory of past events as a confirmation and evidence that what I just played out in my mind is actually going to happen in the future.
So for example, I started to think about that one person who told me on a review a few months ago that they thought my presentation didn’t have enough actionable takeaways.
Or that one time when I fumbled over my words and felt embarrassed. Or the times when I submitted a proposal and it got rejected.
And even though these were random occurrences, my brain was more than happy to use them to legitimize a story I just made up about something that hasn’t even happened yet.
And before I even realize that my brain has taken me down this path, I’ve spent ten minutes watching a highlight reel of a future me failing at something that hasn’t even begun.
Think for a moment about a time when this has happened to you? Can you relate to this? Can you pick out a time when you went down this rabbit hole and did this to yourself - basically playing out a future scenario where everything turns out terribly or the client you want to sign says no or you don’t get picked for the new opportunity or your boss is disappointed in you or a new venture you want to start fails?
I’ll bet that everyone listening probably has a bunch of examples that immediately come to mind.
And guess what: this mini cycle that I just explained happens ALL DAY LONG. We play out these future scenarios all day long, with differing degrees of intensity, and most of the time we don’t even know we’re doing it or have the awareness to catch ourselves doing it.
And the result of this is incredibly destructive because we end up talking ourselves out of opportunities, avoiding making changes to our workday or our career, or holding back our true intentions and don’t pursue our desires because we’re afraid.
So what’s at the root of this? If you look closely here at what’s going on, and you really analyze the nature of the thoughts that you’re having, what we see is that what we’re actually doing is mistaking thoughts for facts.
Our brain is so skilled at storytelling and at trying to keep us safe that it tricks us into thinking that the projection about the future that we’ve just seen and played out in our mind and that felt so real is actually based in fact.
But even though it felt real and we used memories of past experiences to justify and confirm the realness of it, when we look closely we realize that there’s usually little if any actual facts to confirm those beliefs.
What we just saw was a projection of a future scenario that was not based in fact. What we did was we created a story and used past experiences to fill in the details around the story - but those are thoughts that we’re having, they’re not facts.
The vision that we’re having about us messing up or fumbling the project or losing the client or failing at a new career or a new venture - THOSE ARE ALL THOUGHTS, they’re not facts.
So I want to give you something actionable here that you can use to start to address this in a constructive way.
Here’s what I want you to do. The next time you encounter a stressful situation or you catch yourself having anxiety about your ability to perform or deliver on a project, or the next time you want to take on on a new responsibility and you’re having some hesitancy around it, here’s what I want you to do and there’s 4 steps.
Step 1: I want you to take out a piece of paper and write down every single phrase or belief that’s coming to mind for you that’s related to this topic.
So they could be phrases like:
I’m going to embarrass myself
My client will be disappointed in me
I don’t have the ability to do this
I’m not going to deliver work that meets expectations
I’m not good enough
I’ll never be able to get clients for the new business I want to start
Just get them all down on paper.
Step 2: I want you to go line by line and ask yourself: is this a thought or a fact? What evidence do you have to back up this statement? And I want you as you’re going through just to write a T or an F by each one of these - is it a thought or a fact.
And I want you to be REALLY hyper vigilant about what you call a fact. A fact is something that you can PROVE to be true. It’s not a suspicion you have, it’s not an inference you’ve drawn, it’s not reading between the lines, it’s not you using an example of one situation to project what could or might happen in another situation, it’s none of that. You actually must have real EVIDENCE or PROOF.
And what I think you’ll find as you go through this exercise is the overwhelming majority if not every single thing you write down is really a thought or an assumption that you’re making that has very little if any basis in fact.
Step 3: When you come across a belief where after you examine it further, you realize it has no basis in fact and it’s actually a thought, I want you to write down next to that thought a few facts that support the opposite of that thought - in other words examples based in fact that you can point to that support the opposite.
So going back to my presentation example, when I started having a thought that no one was going to like my presentation, I eventually, after 10 minutes of telling myself a story about something that hadn’t even happened yet, I identified that as a thought because I could find zero factual support for it, and in fact when I thought about it I actually had lots of examples that confirmed the opposite:
At that point I had given well over 150 presentations over the years so I’m pretty well practiced
I’m an adjunct professor at a few law schools so I’m presenting all the time
I regularly get positive feedback
I certainly do make mistakes when I’m presenting, but when I looked back at my experience I rarely make the kind of big glaring mistakes that I envisioned when I was projecting into the future, and even when I have made mistakes I’ve learned to just make a joke of it and move on and that’s that. I’ve never fallen off stage, or done something nearly as embarrassing as the thing my brain was telling me I was going to do.
These are the facts. This is the truth about this particular scenario.
And finally Step 4 is a way to address beliefs or things from the past that you want to change.
If you come across something that you want to change, then what you do is ask this question: What’s within my control? In other words what actions can I take to address this?
In my example, let’s say I just gave this same presentation a week ago and it didn’t go the way I wanted, maybe I got some feedback I didn’t like or I didn’t show up at my best when i was presenting, and so as I’m preparing for my next presentation I find myself using that past experience to project how I’ll do in the future.
What I do is I ask what’s within my control, and when I ask that I realize there are plenty of things within my control that can alter my belief about how it’ll turn out in the future:
I can start by asking a few people I know for some feedback
I can change the material
I can practice for a few hours more before I give it again
I can take a one-hour course on Coursera or Udemy on how to get better at presenting
There’s an endless list of things I can do
And by doing this what I do is move myself from being a passive participant and being controlled by my thoughts to someone who’s being an active participant in shaping what happens next.
All you can ever do is focus on what’s within your control and on the things you have the ability to influence, and when we actually step outside of our future thoughts and focus on actions we realize that we have so much more power to shape and influence the direction of where we want things to go than we think we do.
So I invite you to take some time in the next few days to really pay attention to what you’re thinking, and start to notice how often you’re mistaking a thought as a fact, and how much that is impacting your beliefs and preventing you from taking action and working and living confidently.
So walk yourself through the process I just outlined and that will help you not only catch yourself doing this in the moment, it will also give you a foundation to start to remap the way you think about yourself throughout the day.
Go have a great workday.