I am not a morning person. I am bad with names. I am not a details person. Most of us carry a small collection of these, repeat them regularly, and treat them as observations about our nature. But are these really true or these beliefs that have little evidence behind them? 

Look at where they came from and the foundations are usually alarming. The evidence base for "I am bad with names" is typically some embarrassing incidents from a decade ago, which we remember vividly because they were embarrassing, and several thousand unremarkable occasions on which we remembered someone's name perfectly and thought nothing of it. Then the story does its real work, which is to close off the possibility of change. The story protects you from the effort of changing and from the risk of trying and falling short, which is precisely why it is so comfortable to keep.

I am not suggesting we are infinitely malleable, because we are not, and some of these descriptions are accurate. The useful move is smaller: notice that you are stating a story as a fact, and ask what the evidence actually is and how old it is. Then try, as an experiment rather than a transformation, behaving for a month as though it were not true. Often enough it turns out to have been a description of a nineteen-year-old you have not been for a long time. So, as a reflection for today: which of your stories about yourself have you not examined in years? And what would change if it were not true?