Mary Shiller argues you can't actually hold yourself back because your true self is an unstoppable force with built-in confidence and creativity. She recovered from PTSD and chronic anxiety while earning advanced degrees and building a career, showing that self-doubt is just mental chatter, not a real limit. The work isn't fixing yourself downstream but recognizing your identity upstream.
Hello, hello, it's Mary Shiller, author and coach of MaryShiller.com, coming to you once again today from Oxford in England where it is very blustery and snowy and windy outside. The trains are still canceled, many of them, between here and Paris, so I'm hoping that my train on Sunday will happen because I really do need to be back that day for something very important. In any case, I'm hoping that this Facebook Live keeps going. I was doing one recently and it cut off, so if it does, I'll try to reconnect myself. I wanted to talk with you about something that I saw in my Facebook feed today. There is a pretty famous person in the self-help world, and she had, I think it was probably a sponsored ad, And in big bold letters it said, "Don't hold yourself back." And then the rest of the message was something about, you know, learn how to break the habit of self-doubt and something else, I forget. But I just thought to myself, there's no way you can hold yourself back. I mean, that whole idea now seems so weird to me. Because I'll give you a very clear example that will illustrate this, I think. So, you know, over the years that I was dealing with so-called post-traumatic stress disorder, I saw a lot of different professionals. And the last person that I saw literally said to me one day— you may have heard me say this before— but she said, you know, I'm really surprised that you've been able to achieve pretty much anything in life considering what you've gone through. You know, you got remarried and you have had some good career, made some good career choices and you've gotten two advanced degrees and you know, you're a pretty stable person and all these things and she kind of listed them all off and she said, you know, I'm really surprised that you've been able to do all of those things considering you know, the state of mind you've been in and all the things that happened to you in your 20s and 30s and early 40s. And I just thought to myself, well, you know, I don't know if I should take that as a compliment or what. But at the time, I didn't really know how to take it. It wasn't until after I discovered this whole 3 principles conversation that what she said totally made sense to me. Because of course, there was always and has always been a me, capital M-E, me, that has nothing to do with whatever experiences I've had or whatever thoughts I've had, that is powerful than, more powerful than anything I could even imagine. I can't even imagine my own power, think about that. And anything else is simply an illusion that's created by momentary thinking. So the idea that somehow these little personal thoughts we have could have any power over us or hold us back, quote unquote, just seems preposterous to me. And then that we would have to actually try to do something in order to get rid of self-doubt, oh, build confidence, that was the other thing she was talking about, is really absurd to me because all of those things, confidence, And, you know, all of those kinds of feelings and states of mind are all innate. We don't have to do anything to build them up or even create them. I mean, they're already a given. So the only reason we don't experience them more often is because sometimes we're listening to those buzzy thoughts in our head. But that doesn't mean that we have to do anything to create something like self-confidence or do anything to quote unquote erase self-doubt. You can't do that anyway. You know, I have tons of doubts all the time, every day, and it doesn't stop me from coming on here on Facebook and talking with you and sharing what I see and hoping that it will help you. It doesn't stop me from writing books even though every single time I sit down to write one, I'm flooded with thoughts about how awful it's going to be and how it won't help anyone, you know? And even when I look back on my past, like I started with, I was feeling pretty crummy a lot of the time. And I was still able to go get those two master's degrees and teach a lot of people how to write and create lots of incredible stories for the newspaper and all kinds of things. That feeling of stress and anxiety and fear that I was living with was coming from thoughts I was listening to. Had no connection to me and to what I, big I, capital I, am capable of. And so I find it really interesting that I used to think that I had to do something in order to make myself more confident or, you know, that I had to somehow stop holding myself back because now it's so obvious to me and I'm hoping it's becoming more obvious to you from listening to me and other people, that there's nothing that can possibly hold you back. You're a force of nature. You know, can you stop the seasons from changing? Can you stop the Earth from revolving around the sun? No, you can't. Well, there's no difference between you and the sun. So, you know, if you can't stop that motion, then you can't stop yourself either. You're continuing to move in this flow of life, whether it looks that way key phrase, to you or not. And so once you kind of get a glimpse of this, that there's really nothing for you to be doing to, you know, move yourself forward, and there's nothing you're doing that's holding you back, you're kind of free to experience more of your true self. And it's when you start to experience more of your true self that you start to feel this incredible momentum that's natural. You don't need to build that up either. This incredible energy that's available to you, this creative power that's available to you. So the only thing that, that has really been helpful to me is honestly seeing that I don't have to do any of that stuff anymore. Don't have to engage in any of that sort of self-development behavior because it's pointless. It's so far downstream as to be completely unhelpful. I heard Michael Neal one time make an analogy, you know, that's like trying to make the cookies unburnt after they've already come out of the oven. You can't do it. There's nothing to be done with that. The, the better thing to do, if you will, is to look at what's upstream, to see who and what you are way upstream from all of the thinking that you might be hearing in your head, because that is you. That power is you, and that is completely unstoppable, which means that you are unstoppable. So I hope that this has been helpful to you today. If you feel so inclined, I would love for you to share this video with someone who might need to hear it today. And also, you can invite them to visit my website at maryschiller.com where they can receive 2 free audios from me. And if you ever want to get in touch, please email me anytime, mary@maryschiller.com.
