Looking for Thoughts

What are you missing in your own brain?

I don’t mean the thoughts you already know you have. I mean the ones you haven’t recognized as thoughts at all. The ideas you absorbed through your upbringing, education, and culture that now seem like reality.

Those thoughts are creating feelings and influencing actions, whether you’re aware of them or not. Finding them gives you an opportunity to decide how you want to show up in the world.

In Episode 323, I shared work I was doing to uncover my own internal biases. I had hired a coach to help me learn about diversity, inclusion, and equity. The process was powerful and painful, and it made me excited about how much more there was to discover.

When a belief hides inside a compliment

One way I began understanding this work was through my experience with sexism in business.

I was talking with a woman who had a successful business. We were enjoying a conversation about our businesses when she told me that some of my tendencies were like a man’s.

She didn’t specify exactly what she meant. I thought she might be referring to my ambition. My response was that I was like a woman. This is what a woman is like.

I’ve heard versions of that idea many times: a successful woman must have masculine energy, be different from other women, or become more like a man as she makes more money.

In groups where I was the only woman, people sometimes described me as an exception. They meant to include me, but the underlying belief was still that women generally weren’t like that.

I am a woman. Other women have the potential to do what they want to do, too. My success doesn’t make me less of one.

These comments can seem subtle. Looking underneath them reveals beliefs about women, men, money, and possibility. Some of those beliefs had been internalized in my own brain as well.

Use awareness to look inward

I know men who are loving people and who say sexist things without recognizing them as sexist. I can see that hurting me isn’t their intention. I can also see the belief that is showing up in what they say.

That helped me turn the question toward myself. Where might I be doing something similar? What had I learned that I hadn’t questioned?

As a white woman, I hadn’t experienced racism. Listening to Black women coaches about their experiences helped me recognize things I hadn’t been aware of. My experience of sexism gave me a way to start listening with a different lens.

The question became: What am I missing here?

Our thoughts create our feelings, which drive our actions and results. Unconscious thoughts are part of that process. If I don’t recognize them, I can contribute to something I don’t consciously want to perpetuate.

Having a good intention doesn’t erase the impact. Not being aware of a belief doesn’t mean I’m not responsible for how it affects my behavior.

As a coach, this matters deeply to me. If I haven’t uncovered a bias in myself, I may not recognize it when a client brings it into a session. I want to be able to hold space and help people find their thinking. That requires looking at my own.

Expect the discomfort of competing thoughts

When someone points out something you hadn’t seen, you may feel defensive. A belief you’ve always accepted is meeting a new thought that contradicts it.

That cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable. You may want to pull back rather than consider what you’re hearing.

You may also move into shame. You recognize that a belief has caused harm, decide you’re a bad person, and start beating yourself up.

Processing pain is important. Adding self-loathing doesn’t help you uncover a thought, change it, or take useful action.

Allow the pain. Find the thought. Look at it consciously. Then decide what you want to believe and how you want to act.

This is the same discomfort we encounter when changing other results in our lives. We have thoughts creating our current results. To create something different, we have to be willing to question them and, for a while, hold competing ideas.

What you were taught as a small child wasn’t something you chose. Looking at what is in your brain now is a responsibility you can choose to take.

Learn without blindly agreeing

Start by exposing yourself to information that helps you see what you haven’t been able to find. Read. Listen. Work with someone trained in the area you want to understand.

As you do, write down the thoughts and feelings that come up. Be honest about what you recognize in yourself. Be equally honest about what you don’t yet understand.

I have found thoughts I could immediately acknowledge. I have also encountered ideas I couldn’t yet see in myself. I wrote those down for later rather than pretending to agree.

Critical thinking matters to me. So does recognizing that my critical thinking can contain biases. I want to remain open to understanding something without accepting it blindly.

The goal is to internalize new thoughts, not memorize the right things to say. Memorizing can become a performance that feels disconnected from what you actually believe.

When a thought becomes something you believe, it creates an emotion. You begin showing up from that belief. Getting there can take time.

The Model still works the same way

Put a specific circumstance in the circumstance line. Put the thought you have about it in the thought line. Look at the feeling, action, and result that follow.

The Model doesn’t need to change because you are increasing your awareness. You are finding thoughts you didn’t know were there and then examining what they create.

A coach can help because they may hear you say a thought you don’t hear yourself saying. Someone with knowledge you don’t yet have may recognize an idea you’ve accepted as fact.

Questioning your education, religion, or upbringing can feel disorienting. You may wonder who you will be if you question everything.

You can question and redecide without changing anything in your life. The point is to make your beliefs conscious so you can choose which ones you want to keep.

Make your life deliberate

Acknowledging harm doesn’t require making shame your identity. Acknowledging something that happened to you doesn’t require staying in a mentality that keeps you from moving forward.

Look at the experience and the thoughts you have about it. Decide whether those thoughts help you evolve or encourage you to hide.

I expect to keep finding layers of thinking throughout my life. Every thought I uncover gives me another opportunity to be more conscious and more deliberate.

Go into your brain with courage. Let it be uncomfortable. See what you find, and decide who you want to be on purpose.