“If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.” -Thomas Edison
If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you know that inspiration often hits me on a spin bike. Sometimes I get a great idea or sometimes the instructor says something. Today it was the latter.
“Maybe instead of ‘don’t underestimate yourself,’ we should say, ‘overestimate yourself.’”
As a coach, this struck me. We’re often warned not to overreach, not to be too confident, not to expect too much of ourselves or others. “Be realistic.” Why do we even need to be warned about this? It is how we are anyway. It is a way to stay safe. But it is not a way to get what you want or show up as your true self.
I say yes! Overestimate yourself.
If you don’t stretch, how will you ever know? In the spin context it means, turn that knob farther than you think you can go. Worst case is you need to dial it back.
There are two ways to live: the first is staying safe, but there is no growth there. The second is risking, stretching, trying, failing. It is only when you say, “I don’t know if I can do this” and try it anyway that you learn what you are actually capable of. From decades of working with people, what I know is that almost no one knows what they can actually do.
When we underestimate ourselves, we play small. We stay in the known, the safe, the repeatable. We let our doubts dictate our capacity. We measure ourselves against old data, beliefs and fears.
But when we overestimate ourselves—something opens.
We try something that scares us.
We speak up when our voice trembles.
We go for the thing we “aren’t quite ready” for.
We show up big, messy, bold, and brave.
It doesn’t even have to be big. My whole life, I have never fixed things around my house. Recently I started googling what it takes to fix little things. And wow; it’s not that hard. It’s a silly example, maybe, but it is truly representative of things I did not think I could do. So much opened up for me when I realized this. But I did not realize it until I actually tried it!
The reason that coaching is so effective is that coaches are trained to see clients’ blind spots—not just in their thinking, but in their sense of possibility. So often, our job as coaches is to believe in our clients a little more than they believe in themselves. To hold them in a higher version of who they are becoming, until they can see it too.
What if we did that for ourselves?
Be our own coach. Overestimate ourselves.
Don’t just say it, try it. Today. Do something that you are wondering about.
Overestimate yourself.
See what happens.
(And maybe go take a spin class. You never know what you’ll hear.)
