Mr. Lutz was my broad shouldered, silver haired vice principal who had an affinity for John Wayne, and also, weirdly, Mariah Carey.

But he also had a propensity for spewing positive quotes, much to the chagrin of the entitled, snot nose teenagers who roamed the halls around him. For every quote he offered, we responded with at least two eye rolls and a bombastic side-eye.

His favorite quote, which was included in daily announcements and eventually painted on the wall of the high school cafeteria was “believe to achieve.”

As a high schooler, I thought it was stupid.

As an adult with a fully developed, though neurodivergent brain, I’ve realized that not only was he right, but believing in yourself is the foundation of all behavior change. Because as that old Henry Ford quote goes “whether you believe you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

I have worked with clients who struggle to believe that they can change because years of trying has led them to believe that they can’t. My response to those clients is always the same. I’ll believe it for you until you can believe it for yourself.

So even though you and I have never met (unless the only people who buy this book are friends and family), I’ll offer the same sentiment because I think it’s so important. As a coach, I believe that everyone is capable of doing what they want to do. So I’ll believe it for you until you can believe it in yourself.

When it comes to behavior change, we often mistake knowledge as the missing component of execution. If we could just figure out what to do, we’d be well on our way to saving more money, losing weight or managing our time better.

Then, we acquire the knowledge, and sooner or later find ourselves in that valley of despair from page 14. What follows is the phrase most of us know all too well.

I know what I need to be doing, I’m just not doing it.

What comes between the knowing and the doing?

Resistance. And resistance comes in many, many different forms, including a lack of self-confidence.

Research confirms* that when we don’t believe we have the capacity to change, we don’t make as much progress implementing the change. Too often when I ask people what is getting in the way of their progress, they say the same thing.

“Me. I am the problem.”

“I can’t get out of my own way.”

Of course you think that! For those of us who feel like a hot mess most of the time, there is never a consideration that the system is broken because everyone else knows something that we don’t and everyone else is right. The system isn’t the problem, you are.

Except that’s one of the big lies that many of us believe.

You’re not the problem, I promise.

However, if you believe that you are the reason behavior change isn’t possible, then it can be difficult to believe that you have the capability to solve the problem. After years of floating back and forth between the starting and the valley of despair, you might give up on the idea that you can ever make anything different than it is.

So before you can get anywhere in this journey of making sustainable change, you have to believe that you are not your own problem, but your own solution.

Unfortunately, I can’t wave a magic wand and suddenly make you believe in yourself. But there are a few places you can start.

1.     Make a list of things that you’re good at.

Recently, I heard the term borrowing confidence. While there are a lot of different uses for the phrase, in this context, I want you to take a long look at the things that you’re good at. As someone who always thought of myself as a train wreck, this exercise was really important. While I struggled with organization, time management and list making, I was good at creative thinking, putting clients at ease, and writing. So pull out a piece of paper and make a list. What are you good at?

Are you stuck already? I know – sometimes it can feel really difficult to come up with positive attributes about ourselves. We think it makes us conceited or uppity. You know, I thought I’d get an error message when I typed uppity, but I didn’t. Who knew? Anywho, if you’re really stuck, ask your closest friend to tell you five things you’re good at. Think about what people say when they pay you a compliment. Think outside of the box.

I never thought my ability to connect with people was a skill or an attribute. It’s just something that has come naturally to me, especially as I’ve gotten older. But the tricky thing about our skillsets is that we don’t think of things that come easily to us as attributes. Because we don’t have to work as hard as other people at some of these skills, if we are paid a compliment, we are mostly likely to shrug it off and say whatever, it’s just what I do.

Yes, it’s just something you do, but it’s a skill that not everyone can do. When you learn to recognize your skills for what they are, you can begin to tap into some of that confidence you’re looking for.

2.     Comparison is the thief of joy.

It’s also one of the quickest ways to minimize whatever it is that you are doing. We all have people in our lives who are overachievers. They were probably voted most studious in high school. You and I were likely voted messiest locker (ok, that was eighth grade…).

Making comparisons is natural, in fact, social comparison theory suggests that people value their own personal and social worth by assessing how they compare to others. But if you’re not careful, that comparison can rob you of your own confidence because nothing you do is ever going to be enough. Most of us don’t have to look far to find someone who is doing some part of life better than we are. In fact, that comparison is often a huge contributor to why we feel like train wrecks compared to the mom who makes birthday cupcakes from Pinterest for her kid’s birthday while we sent our kid in with runny no bake cookies.

You have to focus on what is happening in your lane, and in your lane only.

3.     Be kind to yourself.

If you follow my brand, you know that my tagline is be strong, be kind. Most folks wonder what the hell being kind has to do with fitness. Well, self-compassion is an essential part of recognizing your human-ness. Self-compassion means that when you do make a mistake, and when you do come up short, that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with you and you are not broken.

For many of us, it’s habit to automatically shame ourselves whenever we make a mistake. And when it comes to making personal change with habit change, many of us have had periods of time where we’ve made progress, but we also have come up short. It can be very easy to let these previous efforts let us think in absolutes. That we will never have success, or that we can’t workout in the morning or learn to food prep.

Not true.

4.     Practice Positive Self-Talk

Ok, let’s just get this out of the way straight up. Everybody of my generation who had any access to Saturday Night Live in the early 90’s is permanently, at least somewhat, ruined on the idea of positive self-talk.

Al Franken’s brilliant character of Stuart Smalley, who spoke with a lisp and looked in the mirror while reflecting the daily affirmation of “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me” spawned a generation of people like myself, who struggle to take daily affirmations seriously.

However, the longer I’ve been in the coaching game, the more I’ve recognized negative self-talk as one of the primary reasons that people, and many women specifically, struggle to see lasting results.

Negative self-talk disrupted me and my progress for a long time. The thing is, I didn’t recognize what I was doing as negative self-talk.

Because humor.

Specifically, self-deprecation. Ain’t nothing that can crack a room full of people up quite like making fun of yourself. It’s a great way to break the ice, and it does make for an interesting title for a book.

But that humor comes at a cost.

And that cost is the ability to really, truly believe that you are capable of not always being a train wreck. Because while you might think it intellectually, you won’t actually be able to make change if you don’t truly believe in your bones that you are capable.

I watched the sailboats on Casco Bay as Sheila and I made our way home from Maine Medical Center this past Saturday.
 
I had cancer last time I drove this way and didn’t even know it (click here if you need to catch up on my story), I thought. Last time I was on this highway. Last time I was in my house.  I had cancer when I was sitting on my couch. When I was last at a restaurant. When I was at my cousin’s wedding in April.
 
It might sound weird, but these were the thoughts I was having as Sheila drove me home from the hospital after what turned out to be an 18 day stay. Basically, I was trying on the word cancer for myself.
 
It’s a new part of my identity.

I'm a cancer patient.
 
Years ago at my brothers’ wedding reception, he came up to me to ask if I’d seen his wife. Then he stopped.
 
“Feels weird to say that,” he said. “Wife. My wife.”
 
I find myself trying on the word cancer in a similar, though less exciting, way. I feel like it’s a shoe that doesn’t fit – that shouldn’t fit. And yet the more I say it to myself, the more it becomes mine. Because whether or not I want to own the reality, it is indeed mine to own.
 
If you signed up for this newsletter to follow my cancer journey, I hope you’ll forgive that I can’t help but think of habit and behavior change when it comes to everything, and that has been no different in walking the early parts of this new path.
 
Most good habit books will, at some point, discuss identity as a big part of making a habit change. Because aside from taking small steps, how we think about ourselves can play a huge role in our ability to make and sustain lasting change.
 
If you want to procrastinate work a little longer (procrastinator is part of my identity too), try this exercise: pull out a sheet of paper and write down all of the words that you feel describe you. Mine, for instance, might include: health and fitness coach, golfer, runner, Pittsburgh sports’ fan, gym goer, guitar player etc.
 
Another way to think about this is to finish the sentence “I am the kind of person who….”
 
Because sometimes we limit ourselves just in the way we think of ourselves. Take the guitar for instance. Have you ever wanted to learn to play, but told yourself that you're not musical? Basically, you're rejecting the identity and leaning, sometimes unknowingly, into self-limiting beliefs.
 
Is there something that you want to be doing, but you're telling yourself that you're not that person? Do you want to run a 5k? It sounds crazy, but go out and buy yourself a Nike t-shirt that says "Run" on it and wear it around. Do you want to surf? Buy a surfing t-shirt. Or a sticker that says "love to surf."

It doesn't matter how you do it - but if you truly want to make a particular change, find a way to own the identity - it's a great way to kick start the process.

No, habit change isn't necessarily that simple. But trying on the identity the way you might a new hat is a great way to start shifting your mindset. Right now, I'm thinking of myself not only as someone who has cancer, but someone who is fighting cancer, because the identity I most want is cancer survivor. That is my focus. That is my new hat to try on.

I suppose there are words you never expect to hear in your life, or at least, words that I never expected to hear uttered to me. 

You have the list in your head, whether or not you know it: cancer, divorce, being let go, fired, incurable…..

But what they don’t tell you about those words, the big moments in which you hear those words, is the death by 1,000 papercut moments that precede. There are three and four second exchanges that do more than niggle at you…niggle is too nice of a word…but I’m going to go with it 

I had my first niggle in mid-June, while home for my niece’s birthday. I’d been coughing a lot at that point, and knew I had bronchitis. Then I felt like I had indigestion and just couldn’t swallow very well. It almost felt like there was something in my chest getting in the way.

Maybe it’s cancer, I thought, for the first time. The thought crept in the way it does in the movie Kindergarten Cop when Arnold Schwarzenegger tells a kid that his headache is not a tumor. 

My next niggle was in early July, while watching an ESPN special about Jim Valvana. It was about his iconic ESPY speech, and I watched it that night, still with this indigestion, still not feeling well, still assuming I had some form of long covid, but the niggle was there - a bit stronger - and I pushed it down.

July 26th, 2023 wasn’t the day I found out I had cancer.

It was the day of my third niggle. Ok, not a niggle exactly. This time, it was pure shock when the doc said I had an opaque structure in my chest cavity. My Primary Mediastinal, to be specific. I looked up at the ER doc and, for the first time, let myself absorb the idea that something was really wrong with me. Not like, bronchitis or long covid had turned into pneumonia, but that something was really, really wrong. 

July 26th was when I started to really hold onto the small pieces of….I don’t know, hope or denial, I guess? Your blood work is good so there’s that must mean no cancer. I’d been exercising about until a few days ago, I couldn’t do that with cancer right? Yes my heart was basically running at tachycardia, but that’s why I’m here and that doesn’t have to be cancer right?

Also, hey, this could be two other things that you can’t remember because the last thing the doctor said was that it might be a malignant lymphoma and anything mentioned before or after that doesn’t matter, because malignant lymphoma. 

I looked up from my laptop, where I had basically been knocking out work to pass the time, and barely gave the doctor a passing glance at the news.

Maybe she expected more questions. Maybe she expected some tears. Maybe she expected me to suck in my breath, as my wife did, gasping as she sat in the chair next to me. 

“Ok,” I said. And turned my attention back to my work. My insides were buzzing like bees, sure. But what could I do? I didn’t know what the mass actually was. There was no solid news to grasp onto, just a lot of maybes.

I spent the next 52 hours in the ER. And I write this post to you on day 14 of my hospital stay.

I haven’t been home since July 26th.

The actual cancer diagnosis came to me, but not until August 3rd. I was flattened at that point, not only by the news, but by two invasive chest tubes implanted in me in order to drain fluid around my heart and lungs.

There was a lot of hurry about and wait for the first five days, and then procedures happened so fast.

Everything has happened. So. Fast.

I don’t know how I feel.

My friends have asked. I don’t know yet. I’m ok. I always preferred playing the game to watching the game. This feels no different.

I can tell you that the first big LOL moment from a higher power was the thought that I was going to be upright and controlling the narrative and the way I communicated with friends and family members, when or if, I wrote a post like this.

The universe was like LOL M*** F*****!!!!!

You have zero control.

We know this. We’re told this. We learn this.

We quickly forget this.

The second LOL moment was any hope that my being as healthy as possible was going to be any kind of get out of jail free card. Being mindful of your health helps. It’s helped me get this far with a 7.5 inch tumor in my chest. It’s helped me during this hospital stay. It will continue to help me.

As I reflect on what I know to be true for me, right now in this moment:

I am in a safe hospital with an amazing care team at Maine Medical Center. My nurses and doctors and CNA’s are humans who treat me as human.

I have a wonderful network of friends and family, and I thank all of you who have texted, called and left messages. I read them at my lower moments and take great heart in them.

I am a personal trainer.

I have cancer.

My official diagnosis is Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I’m in the first of six rounds of chemo that started yesterday. I’ll deal with it in the way that I’ve dealt with most other personal trials – through journaling and being as open as I can about my journey, as much as I’m able and feel called to do so. There are many, many, many of you who may read this who have faced a similar journey and experienced, or are experiencing your own 1,000 papercut scenarios.

I have found in the past that sharing our stories can open up the hearts of others, and I can think of no better reason for allowing some of the inside stories out.