There are some words that can derail your whole life.
And those words are “Taco Tuesday.”
Okay, okay.
They’re “I can’t.” They also show up as “I shouldn’t,” “But if I do it, no one will love me,” “I’m not good enough,” “I’m too young,” “I’m too old,” “I’m not talented enough,” or “It’s too late for me.”
Anything you tell yourself that talks you out of doing something that sounds interesting or exciting fits the bill.
I’ve faced this A LOT in my life (uh, who hasn’t?). So how have I overcome it? How do I push through “I can’t”? There are three things I do consistently.
How to stop saying I can’t DO it
#1 Make a point to notice it’s your head, not your heart, spewing all the BS.
In the Intuition 101 class I teach, I spend quite a bit of time talking about the difference between messages in your head and messages that come from a deeper place (aka your inner guidance system or intuition).
Your head/mind/ego is going to tell you over and over all the reasons you can’t do it. That’s where the doubt comes from 100% of the time, no exceptions. Once you realize this, you can practice separating yourself from that never ending Debbie Downer of a voice. You’ll still have the negative thoughts, but now you know they’re not you and you can do something else with them (like ignore them).
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#2 Don’t push against the negative thoughts so much.
It’s easy to get sucked into the idea that if you try hard enough or work hard enough, you can overcome things. But fighting against a thought isn’t the best way to deal with “I can’t.”
Think about the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the battle to lose those last ten pounds. We use these words and set ourselves up for a challenge, to push against what wants to happen. To try to make things work with grim determination.
It isn’t fun to live life that way, and, as you can tell from those examples I just listed, it doesn’t work out all that well. My life is so much better now that I’m not constantly challenging myself to complete something in 30 days or beat this or that thing with my willpower alone. That includes constantly fighting against “I can’t.”
#3 Return to the present moment.
This is the sweet spot, and I had to do it just this morning. I was hit with a case of the “not good enoughs” yesterday and it was lingering this a.m.
The first thing I did when I realized those negative thoughts were still hanging around, gnawing away at my confidence and soul was to stop and get still. I returned to the moment. When I did that, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my daughter, who was eating breakfast. I took a deep breath. In that moment, everything was fine. I was healthy, my daughter was healthy. We were warm, we had electricity, we had food to eat. All was well.
When you’re in the present moment, you disengage from the fear that your mind is trying to create by worrying about the future. And that’s all “I can’t” is: worry about the future. Worry about whether or not you can do the thing you want to do.
When get step into the now, none of that stuff matters. When you worry about the future, you’re creating fear about a pretend situation that may or may not exist. In the present moment, though, it doesn’t matter. Can you breathe in and out? Focus on the now, not the negativity your mind is spewing. And that’s it.
That’s what I do. I know fear is going to keep rising, and sometimes I might give in to it, let it take me down a scary path. Eventually, though, I’ll always return to listening to my inner voice instead of my mind and going back to the now. Try it.
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