Last Tuesday evening, 46 people attended The Clarity Room for a free coaching session on Zoom, which I host every Tuesday from 7 pm to 8 pm.
Some guests arrived early, while others showed up
exactly on time. A few arrived fashionably late, which is a polite way of
saying they intended to come at seven but were distracted by life, work,
children, traffic, dinner, WhatsApp, existential dread, or a mix of these
factors.
It happened to be my 43rd birthday.
Now, birthdays have a funny way of making a man
reflective. You start to realize that recovery takes longer than it used to.
Your knees occasionally send formal complaints after a run. And you begin to
notice that wisdom often arrives disguised as mistakes you swore you would
never make again.
Perhaps that is why the evening's topic felt
particularly fitting.
The Hidden Scripts Running Your Life.
As people settled into the Zoom room, I asked a
simple question.
“Where
do you feel stuck?”
The responses started appearing. Career.
Confidence. Relationships. Business. Money. Health. Habits.
One participant wrote:
“My
mind.”
I laughed not because it was funny but because it
was accurate. Most of us spend our lives believing our biggest challenges are
external. The difficult boss. The difficult economy. The difficult
relationship. The difficult market. The difficult circumstances.
Then one day, we discover something
uncomfortable. The most influential environment we live in is not around us. It
is inside us. And that is where the evening began.
Different Problems. Same Architecture.
At first glance, the participants seemed to be
describing completely different struggles.
One participant spoke about procrastination.
Another spoke about confidence. Someone else raised questions about
relationships and discussed the burden of expectations and responsibility.
Another explored the gap between how others saw her and how she saw herself.
Different stories. Different people. Different
circumstances.
Yet as we unpacked each challenge, a fascinating
pattern emerged. The presenting problem was rarely the root cause.
Procrastination was not about time management.
Perfectionism was not about standards. Low confidence was not about capability.
Relationship challenges were not always about relationships.
The visible problem was usually sitting atop an
invisible belief. And that belief was quietly directing traffic, like an unseen
screenwriter in the background of life.
Which is why I introduced the idea of hidden
scripts. The stories we tell ourselves. The assumptions we carry. The
conclusions we reached years ago. The beliefs we absorbed without ever
consciously choosing.
Most of us are reading from a script we didn’t
write. The question is whether we realize we’re reading from it.
The Software Running in the Background
Many people think change works like this: Problem.
Solution. Improvement. Life.
Unfortunately, life is rarely that cooperative.
Most behavior follows a deeper sequence: Experience. Meaning. Belief.
Emotion. Behavior. Result. Reinforced belief.
And then the cycle starts all over again.
Imagine a child who repeatedly hears criticism
whenever they make mistakes. Eventually, they conclude:
“Mistakes
are dangerous.”
That belief creates anxiety. The anxiety creates
avoidance. The avoidance creates underperformance. The underperformance creates
more criticism, which reinforces the original belief. The loop closes. The
script wins again.
This explains why intelligent people can remain
stuck for years, not because they lack information, but because information
rarely changes identity.
James Clear captures this beautifully in Atomic
Habits. Most people focus on outcomes. Some focus on processes. Very few focus
on identity. Yet identity is where the real leverage lies.
A person who believes:
“I
am trying to become disciplined”
Behaves differently from someone who believes:
“I
am a disciplined person.”
Identity drives behavior. Behavior reinforces
identity. The cycle continues.
The Productivity Trap
One of the most valuable moments of the evening
came when Mike (not his real name) described his struggle with procrastination.
Procrastination is one of the most misunderstood
behaviors in modern life. People assume procrastinators are lazy. In my
experience, the opposite is often true.
Many procrastinators are highly capable people.
They work hard. Think deeply. Care intensely. And spend enormous energy
avoiding the very thing they need to do most.
A procrastinator can spend three hours preparing
to start a task that would take twenty minutes to complete. They reorganize
folders. Respond to emails. Research productivity systems. Watch videos about
focus. Create color-coded plans. Refine the plans. Then refine the plan for
refining the plans—everything except starting.
The room eased because everyone recognized some
version of themselves.
But then we explored a deeper question. What
if procrastination is not laziness? What if it is protection? What if,
beneath the delay, lies a belief?
Eventually, the conversation led to something
many people quietly carry:
“I
am not good enough.”
At this point, failure is no longer an event. It
becomes an identity threat. When failure threatens identity, avoidance suddenly
makes sense. The behavior was logical. The belief beneath it was the real
story.
The Child Who Became the Adult
One of the most profound discoveries people make
in coaching is that many adult behaviors began as childhood adaptations.
A child learns that approval follows achievement.
Achievement becomes a matter of survival. A child learns that mistakes invite
criticism. Perfection becomes a form of protection. A child learns that
vulnerability is unsafe. Distance becomes a form of protection. A child learns
that conflict causes pain. Avoidance becomes a form of protection.
The behavior persists even after the environment
changes.
This is where the work of Bessel van der Kolk
becomes especially useful. Experiences don’t simply disappear with time. They
become embedded in memory, emotion, physiology, and patterns.
Bruce Perry asks a question I wish more people asked: “What happened
to you?” rather than “What’s wrong with you?”
The difference is profound. Many behaviors that
seem irrational become perfectly understandable once we understand their
origins. The challenge is that what helped us survive at age ten may limit us
at forty.
The Stories We Inherit
During the session, we explored where beliefs
come from, including parents, school, religion, culture, success, failure,
relationships, trauma, and repeated experiences.
The list was long. If we’re honest, most of us
inherited beliefs long before we could question them.
Some people inherited:
“Money
is scarce.”
Others inherited:
“You
must always be strong.”
Others learned:
“Do
not trust people.”
And others learned:
“You
must earn love.”
These beliefs often feel like facts, yet many are
simply conclusions. And conclusions can be revisited.
This is one reason I find Adam Grant’s
work in Think Again so refreshing. Many people assume that intelligence
is the ability to defend existing beliefs. Grant suggests something different:
the ability to rethink may be one of the highest forms of intelligence. Which
means growth often begins not by learning something new, but by questioning
something old.
Maya’s Question
Toward the end of the evening, Maya (not her
real name) asked a question that elevated the entire discussion. What is
the difference between self-esteem and self-worth?
It is one of the most important questions a
person can ask because we unknowingly build our entire lives around
performance.
When we succeed, we feel valuable. When we fail, we
feel worthless. When others approve, we feel worthy. When others criticize, we
feel diminished. Life becomes an emotional stock market, constantly rising and
falling.
Brené Brown’s work has deeply influenced my thinking here. Worthiness is
not earned. It is recognized. Self-esteem is how you evaluate performance.
Self-worth is the value you possess before performance enters the conversation.
One fluctuates. The other should remain stable.
The distinction is why people who confuse the two
become prisoners of achievement. No accomplishment ever feels sufficient. No
success ever feels complete. The goalposts keep moving. The hunger remains.
The Five Mirrors
One of the frameworks we explored was what I call
the Five Mirrors of Self-Awareness: thoughts, emotions, behaviors,
relationships, and habits.
Most people spend their lives looking only into
one mirror: behavior. Yet behavior is often the final expression of deeper
processes. Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence reminds us that
awareness precedes change.
The participants discovered something
interesting. Most people had a mirror they avoided. Some avoided emotions,
others avoided relationships, and some avoided thoughts.
That avoidance itself became useful information
because the mirror we avoid often holds the lesson we need most.
The Work Ahead
By the end of the evening, people were
identifying new beliefs. Not magical affirmations. Not wishful thinking.
Beliefs grounded in evidence and action.
“I
am capable of growth.” “My past does not define me.” “Growth is always
possible.” “I am capable of change.”
These may appear simple, but simple does not mean
insignificant. Every new belief creates the possibility of a new action. Every
new action creates evidence. Every piece of evidence strengthens identity, and
identity eventually changes behavior.
That is why coaching is rarely about fixing
people. People are not broken. The work is helping them see the scripts they
unconsciously follow and understand where those scripts came from—helping them
decide which ones still serve them, as they write better ones.
Every recurring problem carries information.
Every habit protects an identity. Every behavior serves a belief. And every
belief can be examined. The goal is not to become somebody else. The goal is to
become conscious.
The evening ended. People logged off. Birthday
messages arrived. The Zoom room emptied.
But I suspect the most important part of the
session happened afterward, in the quiet moments, when people started asking
themselves a question they may not have considered before:
What
story have I been living from?
And perhaps more importantly:
Is
it still true?
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