Are you bad at it? Or does it just feel bad to do it?

There’s a thought error that I see in a lot of my clients, and I’m guessing it might be one you experience too. It looks like mistaking your level of comfort with an activity, with how good you are at that activity. 

So my clients will tell me that they are not good at this thing at work like giving presentations or taking depositoins. And they will tell me in a very authoritative manner, like it is an indisputable fact. 

And then I’ll ask them, Why? Why do you think you're not good at this? 

And the response is usually, it's really uncomfortable. Or it felt really bad. Or I was really nervous. Or something like that. 

And then I’m like whoa, whoa, hold up a minute. The fact that you are uncomfortable doing something has zero bearing on whether you are good at that. 

What's happening instead is it's the thought “I'm not good at this” that is creating the discomfort, or it's the thought “I'm gonna fail,” or “I can’t mess this up” that's what's creating the discomfort. 

The discomfort isn't evidence that you aren't good enough or that you aren't good at something. It's just evidence that you believe that you are not good at something.

And here's why this matters, because it's a really vicious cycle. You tell yourself, I'm not good at this, then you feel uncomfortable when you're doing it, and your brain is like, Ha, see, that's evidence that we aren't good at it, when, in reality, you're never even looking at how good you are the thing, or even decided what metrics you’re going to use to decide how good you are the thing. 

And it just keeps feeding this belief that you aren't good enough, and it keeps you from looking at the real problem. 

The real problem is that thought “I'm not good at this” or “I’m going to fail.” That's the one that needs to be examined, that needs to be maybe debunked, that needs to be shifted to a thought that serves you better. But it is really hard to do that if you’re busy telling yourself that the emotion that you're having (nerves, anxiety, shame, or fear) actually proves that thought true when that is not the case at all. 

So next time you notice yourself using your emotions as evidence that a belief is true, I want you to stop and I want you to focus on questioning that belief. Instead, your emotions are never evidence. That's something you're thinking is true, they are simply evidence that you are having that thought.