Many times what’s stopping us is not the situation itself, but what we have already decided about the situation. We think it’s too late, too risky, complicated, or even too far off. We tell ourselves, “I could never do that,” or “That kind of thing doesn’t happen to me.” And this slowly starts to feel like fact. If you step back and reflect on past experiences, you’ll find that most of the time, it’s just a story we have repeated long enough for it to sound true.

Assumptions are simply beliefs you’ve picked up over time based on how things used to be. You can never seem to forget how tired you were when you gave up the first time, for example, or how no one backed you when you needed support. Yes, those things happened to you and it only makes sense that you would form certain beliefs around them. But you have to start reminding yourself that things are different now. That just because something felt impossible then, doesn’t mean it is impossible now. Your circumstances have changed, you have definitely changed, so why are you still making decisions based on old beliefs?