Your Life Already Proves Your Capability

When faced with complexity and stress, we ask ourselves two questions:

1. 1How do I respond to what's expected of me?
2. 2Do I have the personal resources to handle what's in front of me?

What if plenty of evidence from your life has already demonstrated that you're well resourced?

Here's how I changed my mindset from scarcity (I'm not enough) to abundance (I have what I need to figure this out and thrive).

At first, I couldn't shake the self doubt

At Google, I was working on the biggest project of my career when I hit a wall. It's because I had many fear-based thoughts on a loop, one of which being, "This will fall apart and you'll lose everything you've built."

Despite years of being coached in a leadership program, reading countless books, and seeking inspirational content, I couldn't get rid of the self-doubt. I was running into a performance ceiling I could feel but not name.

Self-doubt had an emotional hold

I was frustrated because my decision making was affected by fear-based thoughts that I knew were not fully rational. I had the credentials, the track record, and the evidence that I was capable. But knowing something intellectually and having your nervous system actually believe it are two very different things.

I tried using affirmations, but to no success

I needed to try something different to stop the fear-based thinking. I spent time doing yoga, breathing deeply, and reciting affirmations I had memorized. "I am courageous. I am adaptive."

But my mind rejected the words immediately. Not because they were false, but because they floated in the air with nothing underneath them.

Instead of aspiration, I used evidence

My mindset shifted when I stopped writing aspirational statements and started writing proof.

Here's the three step process:

Something felt tangibly different when I used this process. My mind couldn't reject it the same. The evidence was real. My life had already happened. Even the strongest seeds of self-doubt could not argue with facts I had lived.

My mind tried pushing back, at first

The discomfort didn't disappear immediately. My mind was accustomed to self-critical language, not language that was encouraging of and acknowledging my own strengths. At first, reciting evidence-based affirmations felt unfamiliar — but it was a good thing. The discomfort was a sign that my system was being exposed to something new.

And then it accepted the evidence

After much repetition, the initial discomfort was replaced with self-acceptance. The affirmations stopped feeling like statements I was trying to believe. They became things I recognized as true and inherent to my identity.

I believe three things made it work:

1. 1The examples had to be real, specific moments from my actual history — not hopes.
2. 2I had to sit with the initial discomfort rather than avoid it.
3. 3The old model doesn't go away overnight. Repetition of reciting the evidence-based affirmations started rewiring my mind to operate from a place of abundance.

My inner capacity dramatically expanded

I've experienced 5 benefits from rewriting my narratives: