The Primary Question That Prevents Your Growth

The questions you ask consistently become a roadmap for your thoughts. Thoughts are responses to questions.

Thoughts repeated often enough become beliefs. Beliefs lead to actions. Actions lead to patterns of behavior. Patterns of behavior create our lives.

The Primary Question That Halts Your Growth

If you’re asking yourself what’s wrong with me? then you’ll go off in search of answers that validate the question.

It’s how the mind works.

If you’re asking whats wrong with you? to or about someone else, you’ll search for things wrong with them. And you’ll plant that question in them.

Notice what the impact is of this question.

How does it feel to live with the belief that something is wrong with you?

How does it impact your relationships when you’re asking yourself what’s wrong with others?

The Impact

Every day we are exposed to messages that reinforce the belief that something is wrong with us. Most of the personal development industry wants to sell you a solution to “fix” your problems.

The problem is that when we believe that we need to be fixed, we don’t grow.

Growth only comes from a place of wholeness.

To grow, we must shift the belief that something is wrong with us.

Shifting the Pattern

Shifting this pattern, like any hardwired habit, takes time and practice.

Rewiring thoughts is not an overnight process. Especially deeply-embedded thought patterns, which tend to resurface in times of stress.

With practice, however, we can develop greater awareness and learn to see these patterns.

With awareness, we can pause to ask a different question.

Awareness creates a small crack, a space to breathe and remind yourself:

Not everything needs to be fixed. Maybe there’s nothing wrong at all.

Philosopher Alan Watts observed that when we look at trees, clouds, stars, and other phenomena of nature we see them as they are.

We don’t see flaws in clouds or stars, we don’t see problems in the constellations.

So why should our view change when we look in the mirror?

We, too, are phenomena of nature.

If you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water… You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all. — Alan Watts

One of my favorite inquiries to sit with comes from Tara Brach:

Who would you be if you didn’t believe something was wrong with you?

To be honest, I don’t always have a clear vision around this.

The belief is strongly hardwired into my system.

Even if we don’t yet have a footing in the new belief that “nothing is wrong with me,” the willingness to sit with this inquiry — just remembering to ask, to consider the possibility — is enough to interrupt the pattern.

It’s a step.

And sometimes a step is all you need.