"I'm cheap," and other things we say without hearing ourselves

A friend of mine, a physician and a very good coach, pitched herself to speak at her state medical group's conference for women physicians. She was thrilled about it. She had the talk half-built in her head before anyone said yes.

And while she was telling me about it, she said, "and I'm so cheap."

She didn't hear it. I did.

What she meant was reasonable and true. She lives locally, so there's no airfare and no hotel to cover, and she hadn't set a speaking fee yet because she'd never charged one. What she said, out loud, to an organizer and to herself, was that her value is low.

That's the thing about the sentences we repeat. They're rarely lies. They're usually a true fact, arranged in the shape of an argument against ourselves.

Words are not just definitions

A word is a definition plus every experience you've ever had while saying it.

Think about "fine." Think about how many times you have said "I'm fine" with your jaw locked, in a hallway, at 6:40 in the evening, with charts still open. Say it that way enough and "fine" stops meaning fine. It gets welded to tightness and resentment and having no other option. And then someone who actually loves you asks how you are, and you reach for "fine," and there's nothing in it anymore. You used it up.

Or think about what happened to "wellness." Ten years ago it arrived and some of us hoped it meant something was about to get easier. Instead it became one more thing on the list. Same workload, or more. Fewer resources. Less support. Plus a module. You cannot tell a room full of exhausted caregivers, people whose entire expertise is the care of human bodies, that they should take better care of themselves while you increase what you're asking of them. The word went toxic. Most of us can't hear it now without something in us going flat.

Nobody sat down and decided that. It just accumulated.

What actually changed for my friend

I offered her a different sentence: "I'm the obvious choice."

Every fact stayed the same. She's still local, still lower cost, still without an established fee. But the argument moved. It stopped being about their budget and started being about her.

She came back to that phrase all day. And that night she went to her hotel room, which was not the plan, and built the proposal and sent it. The next day a text came in: they were adding her as a second keynote, they were buying copies of the book she'd referenced, and the organizer had written "you are the answer to my prayers."

I want to be precise about what happened there, because it would be easy to sell you something dishonest.

The words did not create the talk. They did not write the proposal or the slides. What they did was put her in a state where she was willing to do the work when she was tired and could easily have gone to bed. That's the whole mechanism. Not manifestation. Just this: the sentences you rehearse about yourself decide what feels available to you when you're depleted.

Start with sorry

I'm not asking you to audit every word that leaves your mouth. That sounds exhausting and I'd never do it.

Pick one.

If you want the easiest one with the highest return, start with "sorry." Sorry for keeping you waiting. Sorry to bother you. Sorry as pure throat-clearing before you ask for something you're entitled to. Every time, you are placing yourself in the wrong, and you're doing it so often and in such small amounts that you never see the total.

Swap it. "Thank you for your patience."

Nearly identical length. Takes the same three seconds. One of them says I owe you. The other one says I see you, and leaves you standing upright.

Why the small ones are the ones that matter

You did not walk into medical school thinking "I am a doctor." You practiced the thought, in tiny unglamorous repetitions, for years, until by graduation there was at least a smidgen of it in you. Nobody starts residency believing they're a neurosurgeon. They get there the same way.

That works in both directions. Which means the sentence you've been repeating about yourself since some tired, unkind attending said it to you in 2009 has had a very long time to work.

Go find one. Look at what it costs you. Then choose something equally true that argues for you instead.

If you want help with this, it's the work I do with physicians one to one. Schedule a free discovery call: https://calendly.com/healthierforgood/coaching-discovery-call