"Until you make your unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." ~ Jung

Of all your framing stories, your shadow belief is the most destructive.

When I’ve asked people what their mission is in life, it’s usually murky. Often it doesn’t exist at all.

But EVERYONE knows their shadow belief.

It’s the belief about yourself, usually negative, that your subconscious tells you over and over again.

Mine is that I’m lazy.

Growing up school was pretty easy for me. And so I’d do enough to get good grades and pass the test, but wasn’t studying for hours like my classmates. Which sounds nice, but I believe in hindsight fed this belief.

As an adult, I can get more work done in a compressed time than most people I’ve worked with. I can’t keep it up all day, but the output is frenetic and (usually) pretty good.

But I’ve been surrounded by people who are exceptional at grinding - folks who can make steady sustained progress for hours at a time. My stepdad. My wife. My sister-in-law. My business partners. I admire all of them, probably at least in part because of my shadow belief. They’d probably tell you that I have a very warped definition of lazy. But it’s there nonetheless.

It leaves me always feeling like I should be doing more. It makes me feel shame when I sit and read a fiction book or take a nap.

Over the holidays I had coffee with one of my mentors, someone I admire tremendously. I was telling him about this program, and mentioned the shadow belief. He immediately said, “Oh I know mine. I’m stupid.”

No one who has met this man for 5 minutes would say he’s stupid. He’s wise, and winsome, and incredibly accomplished. But that’s what his shadow belief tells him.

Usually our shadow belief sounds stupid to other people when you say it out loud. And the rational part of us knows it’s not true. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there, nagging us. Especially when we screw up.

I’m not sure you can kill the shadow belief. I’ve not been able to. Most people who’ve told me theirs haven’t either.

But what you can do is try to neuter it of some of it’s power. I think you do this by naming it. By laughing at it with people you trust. By noticing when you feel its presence and both countering it with more positive self-talk, and by designing rituals to avoid some of the situations that might trigger it.

Some people use it to give them power. To prove it wrong. And while this can be an effective way to achieve, you want to be measured here.