“I’m not a morning person.”
“I’m not good with numbers.”
“I’m not flexible.”
We say these like we’re reading out a lab result. But nobody ever tested us. We said it once, it got a laugh or it let us off the hook, and we’ve been quoting it ever since.
The trouble is the sentence starts doing your deciding for you. You don’t skip the thing because you can’t — you skip it because it wouldn’t be very you. That’s a quiet way to get smaller.
You’ll hear it in here. “I’m not a squatter.” “I’ve got rubbish shoulders.” Said by people who, if you pull up their numbers from March, are plainly wrong. The body moved on. The sentence didn’t.
This is a deload week, which makes it a good week to notice. When the weight is light and there’s nothing to prove, you get to see what you actually do — not what you’d do if you were being watched, or graded, or timed.
So this week, catch one of your sentences. Just one. Say it out loud and ask when you last checked whether it was still true.
You might find you’ve been quoting someone who doesn’t exist anymore.