The Story You Start Believing

When Anna and I had been working together for a while, she’d lost around nine kilos. More importantly, she’d relaxed. Food was quieter. She trusted herself more. Her body was responding in a way that finally made sense to her.

Then she joined a one-month “shredding” challenge at her gym.

Nothing dramatic happened on the outside. She followed the plan. Ate less. Exercised more. Lost a few centimetres. The scales, however, didn’t move.

And that’s when her mind did.

Thoughts began to appear:

I’m stuck.
This is as good as it gets.
If I stop controlling this, it’ll all come back.

They felt convincing. Urgent. Familiar.

But none of them were facts.

Nothing had actually changed about Anna’s body or her capacity to lose weight. What had changed was where her attention went. Her mind jumped ahead into an imagined future and treated it as if it were already true.

This is something human minds are very good at.

We mistake prediction for reality.
We confuse thought with evidence.
And once we do, we start living from that imagined future.

In Anna’s case, the moment she began believing she was “stuck,” she stopped trusting what had been working. She looked outward for answers again. She tightened up. She tried harder. And without realising it, she began recreating the very struggle she was afraid of.

Her fears weren’t true.
They were just compelling.

A self-fulfilling prophecy isn’t mystical. It’s mechanical.

You give a thought your attention.
It shapes how you feel.
That feeling influences what you do.
And before long, the result looks like proof the thought was right.

But there was another direction her mind could have gone.

She could have noticed something simple:

What she’d been doing before had worked.
When she listened to her body, things settled.
Nothing fundamental had changed.

Those were facts. Quiet ones. Easy to miss when fear is loud.

The future, of course, was still unknown. It always is. But her mind preferred certainty, even if the certainty was grim. At least then it felt prepared.

Seeing this is where things begin to loosen.

When you recognise that your distress isn’t coming from the future, but from the story you’re telling about it, you get a little space. And in that space, common sense has a chance to return.

The question isn’t, “How do I make the right future happen?”

It’s gentler than that.

It’s: Which thoughts am I treating as real right now?

Because the future you live into is usually the one you keep rehearsing. And that’s not because it’s destined, simply because attention is powerful.

And once you see that, you don’t have to force optimism or suppress fear.

You just stop mistaking thought for truth.

From there, things tend to find their own way forward.

Photo credits: Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash