Have you ever bought a new car and then started seeing that exact model everywhere?
You go months without noticing it. Then you drive one home and suddenly they're on every street, in every car park, sitting at every set of lights.
Growing up in Australia we used to play a version of this on long drives. Spot the combi van. And the moment that game started, the road filled with combi vans.
The cars were always there. What changed was your attention.
There's a name for it: frequency illusion. Once your brain decides something is relevant, it starts serving it up to you everywhere.
That's funny with cars. It's much less funny with the stories we tell ourselves.
The stories your brain learns to look for
We all carry stories about ourselves. Some of them help. A lot of them don't.
Maybe somewhere along the way you picked up the idea that you're not good enough. Maybe it's that you always mess things up, or that you never finish anything, or that relationships just don't work out for you. Maybe you'd love to go for the promotion but something in you has already decided you won't get it.
Sometimes a story starts with something someone said to you when you were young. Sometimes it comes out of one bad experience. Sometimes it builds so slowly you couldn't say when it arrived.
But once you believe it, your brain gets to work finding evidence.
If I believe I'm not good enough, I can find plenty of proof. The job I didn't get. The relationship that ended. The moment I still cringe about years later. The criticism I never quite shook off.
Piece by piece, those moments line up into a storyline. And the story gets thicker.
You start joining the dots
Picture every event of your life as a dot on a very large page.
There are thousands of them. Times you succeeded and times you fell flat. Times you felt brave, times you felt small. Moments you were loved, rejected, trusted, humiliated, completely lost.
When you form a story about yourself, you start joining the dots that fit it. You draw a line from one to the next until you've got something that looks like proof.
The rest of the page doesn't go anywhere. You just stop looking at it.
Then it goes a step further. You start behaving in ways that keep the story true.
If I believe I'm bad with people, I'll find a reason to skip the party. If I believe I can't succeed in business, I'll never really commit to trying. If I believe I never finish anything, I'll walk away from a project the second it gets hard.
The story shapes the behaviour. The behaviour hands the story more evidence. Round and round it goes.
One question interrupts the loop
Here's the question I come back to more than any other when someone's stuck in a story like this:
Was there ever a time when you didn't feel this way?
I know. It sounds far too simple to do anything.
Sit with it anyway.
If you believe you've got no confidence, when was the last time you felt sure of yourself? If you believe you never finish anything, what have you actually finished? If you believe nobody supports you, who has shown up for you before?
You're hunting for the dots the dominant story trained you to walk straight past. Nine times out of ten they're sitting right there.
Map the other story
Take whatever you're feeling right now and write it down. Then ask: was there ever a time this wasn't true?
Then go looking. Properly looking, with a pen, not just a quick scan of your memory.
The moments don't need to be big. Small ones count, and honestly they count more, because those are the ones you've been dismissing.
Maybe you spoke up when you'd normally have stayed quiet. Maybe you finished something hard. Maybe someone trusted you with something that mattered. Maybe you handled a bad day far better than you expected to. Maybe you just had a week where you felt nothing like you feel today.
What I find when people do this properly is that there are about as many events pointing to a different story as there are propping up the old one. They were always on the page. Nobody had joined them up.
And if you can't find the evidence, go and make some
Sometimes a story has been with you so long that you genuinely can't find an exception. That's alright.
Then you create new dots.
If the story is "I never finish anything," pick something small and finish it today. If it's "I'm no good at meeting people," have one conversation. If it's "I can't do this," take one action that proves otherwise, however small it looks.
You're building evidence on purpose.
And then the car thing kicks in. Once your brain registers the new story as relevant, it starts finding support for that one instead. You catch yourself doing something well. You notice you reacted differently than you would have a year ago. You remember something you'd forgotten for fifteen years.
The dots start connecting in a different direction.
Why I call them false stories
I call these false stories, because they're only as true as you decide to make them.
That's not the same as pretending the hard things never happened. They happened. Some of them still hurt. And this isn't about swapping one unrealistic story for another one that's just as selective in the opposite direction.
It's about seeing that a handful of chosen events don't get to define who you are.
There's almost always another story sitting alongside the one you've been telling. Sometimes finding it starts with one question:
Was there ever a time when you didn't feel this way?
Ask it the next time an old story turns up. Then look for the other dots.
And for what it's worth, peeling back a story you've carried for years isn't easy, and most people never attempt it. If you're doing that work, I think it's a courageous thing. I'd love to hear how you go with it.