Are Your Assumptions Holding You Back?

“How do you know that is true?”

We heard this question in a recent podcast and it reminded us of how often we ask this with our coaching clients. In almost all our coaching engagements, we discuss limiting beliefs and assumptions with our clients. We check in and ask: “How do you know that is true?” Because so often, our brain in its quest for ultimate efficiency, remembers something that happened in the past and now embeds it as “truth”. Now of course this can be helpful if we are running from saber-toothed tigers! But it takes work to discern what is helpful and what is an outdated narrative. 

Our beliefs shape our world, and limit the data we take in and the meaning we derive from it. We seek limited data and confirmation that our “truth” is right. Our ladder of inference, or meaning-making, gets very linear very quickly! We take action based on our meaning-making, sometimes getting us the same results over and over. 

The challenge of doing this, however, is that we then close the aperture to other possibilities in similar circumstances. We seek limited data and create meaning from our selected data. Our assumptions and data gathering can become rigid, and thus hold us back from possibilities. Perhaps there is a different meaning-making that can be gleaned from that same data set? Perhaps there is more data and “evidence” that we have not seen that exists? These gentle challenges assist in finding new possibilities, evolution of beliefs, and perhaps a different outcome.  

Challenge yourself: How do you know that is true?