What lies are you telling yourself now? This is a hard question to ask, but I want you to consider it. I want you to consider what lies you are telling yourself now. Some of these are going to be easy to identify. Hopefully you've listened to previous episodes of Developer Tea, where we talk about things like Imposter Syndrome. So hopefully you know some of those lies that you tend to tell yourself. There are other lies that you may be telling yourself right now as well. And in today's episode, we're going to talk about how you can be more truthful with yourself. And a better way of looking at it is, how can you identify these things that you believe? These are beliefs that you have that are wrong. And hopefully you start to shift those beliefs about yourself. And really this is a principles episode. We've talked about doing principles, practices, and purpose on this show. And if you're feeling like your purpose is uncertain, then it may be because you have this particular principle out of whack. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and this is Developer Tea. If you haven't subscribed to the show yet and you enjoyed this episode, then I want you to prepare to subscribe to the show. That will be kind of our contract. If you like this episode, then subscribe and check out the next couple of episodes. We do three episodes a week on this show. And there's new people that are picking up this show all the time because the topics we cover on this show are pretty broad in nature. We talk about all kinds of things, talk about business, we talk about technology. But we most of the time are talking about figuring yourself out. I'm talking about introspection and understanding your own motivations and understanding your own purpose, your own plan as a developer. And this is really where everything starts. It starts with you and it starts with understanding the way that your own mind is working. So this isn't just about developers. This isn't just for developers. This show is crafted for developers in mind, but it certainly is applicable to others. And that's why we have new people coming to the show all the time. So if you're one of those new people, then I highly suggest that if you like this episode that you subscribe because we do have new episodes coming out all the time. Okay, so what are some of the lies that you may be telling yourself? I'm going to go through a list of lies that you may be telling yourself right now. I will never be good enough to be a good developer. I will never be skilled enough to be a great developer. That is a lie that a lot of Developer Tell themselves and one that I've told myself as well. Something terrible is destined to happen. Something terrible is destined to happen. This is a much more common thought, not just limited to developers. It's something that a lot of people deal with this underlying anxiety of something terrible that is destined to happen. And we have this sense that we may have a premonition or we may be able to predict or we are going to be the statistic or there's a whole list of things that gives us this feeling. That something terrible may happen and then we reinforce that belief with the emotions that come along with it. So this is another lie that we often tell ourselves. And I'm not a psychologist and I certainly suggest that if you are dealing with something like this, specifically if you're dealing with anxiety or depression or another mental health issue that you seek professional help specifically talk with a qualified expert. I'm not a qualified expert. But one thing that has helped me when I have these kinds of thoughts is to recognize that the power of my imagination is incredibly strong. And so we weave these stories about a situation because terrible things are possible. These horrible situations are possible. And so we tell ourselves this lie that the horrible situation because it is possible that it's unavoidable. And if anything bad will happen or if anything bad can happen, then it will. And so we envision this terrible thing happening and then we create all of the detail and our imagination becomes stronger than reality. So we'll talk about a way that you may be able to start combating that in just a moment. That's another lie that we tell ourselves. Another lie that we tell ourselves is that everything will always stay the same as it is today. This is an unfortunate lie because it seems to be a reasonable thing to believe. On its face, we shouldn't expect things to change drastically from the way that they are right now. And unfortunately that's just not the case. Sometimes things change drastically. And those changes are difficult to avoid. From time to time we experience change in the marketplace. What people are demanding out of web developers or out of software developers, front end developers. We experience change within our workplace. Experience change within our own lives. And so change is a constant thing. And this is a lie that we often tell ourselves or something that we want to cling to. The idea that change is not occurring around us. The last lie that I want to outline today is the idea that I am guilty for every bad thing that happens. I am guilty for every bad thing that happens. I'm guilty for the bug that's in the code. I'm guilty for a mistake that I made in the past or a bad behavior that I had in the past. I'm guilty for this litany of things that have occurred, whether they were a direct result of my action or not, that I actually am guilty for them. And this is an unhealthy and unfortunately persistent lie that we tell ourselves. And we like to think about ourselves in this static perspective that our mindset now is what we have had, what we have been armed with our whole lives. This is simply not true. Our mindset is changing. In fact, hopefully by listening to this show, your mindset will change and it will change for the better. So these are a variety of lies that we have told ourselves that we may be telling ourselves now whether we're telling those on purpose or if it's a belief that we have that we're trying to fight against these lies that we have that make up our experience. And we're going to take a quick break and then we're going to talk about ways that we can hopefully come back these lies on a day-to-day basis. Today's episode is sponsored by WooCommerce. WooCommerce is certainly something that you've used, perhaps without knowing it. As long as you are shopping online and you've shopped at more than three stores, then you've probably used WooCommerce. 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So we're talking about the lies that we tell ourselves today. And this is probably uncomfortable, probably uncomfortable for a lot of people because these are things that really dig up a lot of difficult realities for us. Some of the realities are that we're better off than we think we are. And some of the realities are quite the opposite. For example, if you tell yourself the lie that if only you had an app in the app store that you would finally be a successful developer, well, this isn't accurate. It's not a rational way to believe. So how can we combat some of these lies that we tell ourselves? Well, first we need to recognize that our thoughts are not something that happens to us. Our thoughts are generated by our brains. They're generated somewhere inside of our minds. And they are not observations of reality around us. Our minds are generating thoughts that may be a conglomeration of information. Some of it may be a reflection of reality around us, but some of it may not be at all. And a lot of it is going to be due to our own experiences and our own personality and things that certainly we can't cover on this podcast because I'm not a neuroscientist. I'm not a psychiatrist. And the way the mind works is still largely difficult to understand. But we do know that our mind is not transparently representing to us a reality that we see in the world. We are filtering things and generating new things and imposing them on the world. So we create our own lenses essentially. The second piece of this is that we have created beliefs for ourselves. We've created beliefs for ourselves that we often use to decipher our thoughts. So in this way, we're taking the thoughts from our mind and we're using our kind of setup rules, our associative rules in our mind to understand those thoughts, to see what they mean. An example of this may be that you have a belief that is instilled by maybe you met a really good programmer one time or maybe you watched a movie that depicted a great programmer. And they were able to write in 20 different programming languages and they were able to understand code very quickly and they were able to build apps 10 times faster than the next person. And in your mind, you've created this rule that that is what a great programmer looks like. And a great programmer necessarily shares those traits with that vision, that belief is what you've set up. And now, as you have a thought about yourself, you're judging yourself based on your own abilities or skills or experience, you take the thought that, you know, I really barely know one language or I only know one language very well even, right? Or maybe I know three languages, but I'm not very fast. And you take that thought and you push it through that belief. You apply the belief to understand the thought. If I believe that great programmers should be able to code very quickly and I have the thought that, you know, I'm not really a very fast programmer, then the outcome of that, the resulting thought or the resulting new compounding belief, the state of my mind is convincing me that I'm a bad programmer. And I do want to take a moment and recognize that this can be very difficult to escape. It can be a very difficult thing to recognize that your perception in your reality are kind of fused. When your perception and your reality are fused, it's extremely difficult for you to separate those two. To recognize that your mind is re-imposing those things onto the world around you, taking those beliefs and imposing them on the thoughts. And as you attach yourself to these thoughts and this belief thought kind of interplay, as you attach yourself to it and as you give it more weight over your mental state, your perception and your reality become even more overlapped. They become more confused or a better way of putting it maybe they become more one in the same. And your reality, your experienced reality is in line with whatever that perception was. So it's very difficult to separate yourself and say, oh yeah, that was just my perception. It's not really what is actually true. So one way to combat this is to start recognizing those thoughts and those rules. To understand when you have a rule that is constructed based off of maybe an experience you had, our minds are constantly looking for shortcuts and they're constantly looking to protect us. So if you, for example, you have an anxious thought or if you have a label that you've placed on something and it's a shortcut for your understanding of that thing, it's important to recognize those things. So when you do recognize a lie that you're telling yourself, start by understanding what rules and thoughts are actually going into that lie. What rules and thoughts are you using to come to a conclusion? Now, if you have the rules and thoughts outlined, then you can look at your rules and say, what is that rule based on? What kind of information am I using to inform this rule? What kind of information is that thought based on? Where is it coming from? How realistic is that thought? These ways of looking at your thoughts and your rules and the way that your brain is actually processing the world can start to give you the option of elevating above that. Your thoughts no longer will control your behavior. Your thoughts and your rules no longer control your perception as much. Now are you going to be able to escape all of these? Absolutely not. But what you will be able to do over time is build an awareness of those thoughts, build an awareness of those rules, and start replacing them with better thoughts and better rules. This is a very heavy episode and I want to open up to everyone and let you know this is based off of my own experiences with anxiety. I've dealt with anxiety myself and this is essentially an outline of cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT. This is something that's really powerful. And even this basic understanding that's probably filled with a lot of kind of broken misunderstandings, even this can be helpful to the average person. I highly recommend if you're dealing with anxiety, depression, any other mental health issues that you contact a professional, don't try to take my advice and apply it right away. First go and talk to your to a professional. But if you're an average person, if you aren't dealing with mental health issues, serious mental health issues right now, then these ways of thinking can actually just work to increase your mindfulness, they can help you become a more mindful person. And that's a very important part of your experience as a developer. It's a very important part of your experience as a human. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I know this is a little bit of a heavy episode, but I hope it's helpful for those of you who are experiencing similar things. And if you have experienced this feeling of lying to yourself, hopefully you can turn that around a little bit with some of these behaviors. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you again to WooCommerce for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. Such a wonderful thing to have these incredible sponsors. WooCommerce is providing Developer Tealisteners with 20% off if they use the code Developer Teaat checkout headboardwoolcommerce.com slash Developer Teato get started today. Thank you again for listening. And if you like this episode, remember go ahead and subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes of Developer Tea. Thanks so much and until next time, enjoy your tea.