The tape that's been playing
If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my Podcast & connect with me on YouTube / Twitter.
We turn your favorite newsletters into podcasts at 10minmindset.org
The voices in your head aren’t yours. Most of them are recordings. And you’ve been hitting play so long you forgot you didn’t write the script.
I’ve been doing something strange for about a year now. Whenever a limiting thought shows up, something like “you’re not ready for this” or “who’s going to care about that,” I stop and try to trace it backward. Not in a deep-therapy way. Just a quick check: whose voice is that actually? When was the first time I heard it? Who benefits from me believing it?
The answers are almost never me. I grew up in Ottawa, which is a government town in every sense. The entire city runs on federal jobs, pensions, and a very specific definition of what a good life looks like: get a degree, get a stable position, retire with a full pension. That script isn’t written down anywhere. It’s just in the air.
My mom is one of the most supportive people in my life. But supportive in Ottawa looks like encouraging you to do well within the system, because the system is all anyone around you has ever known. When I started talking about building something online, she didn’t shut me down. She just asked the kinds of questions that people from government towns ask: “But is that a real job?” “What’s your backup plan?”
She wasn’t being cruel. She was being Canadian. There’s a specific brand of risk aversion that runs through the culture up there, and I absorbed it completely. For years, my internal voice when I considered doing anything ambitious sounded exactly like a reasonable person from Ottawa explaining why it probably wouldn’t work out.
The moment I actually saw this clearly was a phone call with her a couple of years ago. I’d been thinking about starting the newsletter for weeks. Had ideas, had things I wanted to say, could feel the pull toward it. But every time I sat down to begin, a voice in my head would say: “That sounds interesting, but are you sure people would care about that?” It felt like my own common sense. The sober, rational part of me keeping me from embarrassing myself. I listened to it for months.
Then one Tuesday night I was on the phone with her, telling her about the idea, dancing around the edges of it the way you do when you’re not sure how someone will react. And she said, in a completely loving way, “That sounds interesting, but are you sure people would care about that?”
Word for word. The exact sentence I’d been saying to myself.
She was being protective. She always is. But hearing the words come out of her mouth did something I wasn’t expecting. It was like finding the source of a song you’ve been humming without knowing where you learned it. The voice I thought was my own judgment was a recording of a conversation I’d absorbed so thoroughly I forgot it came from outside me.
