Why I no longer say cannot

How your language influences your life

As adults, we internalise stories about what we can and cannot do. These stories arrive through the words of others, realisations, our beliefs and we form a dialogue that supports the truth of the story. This dialogue contains mantras, quotes, and conversations about the reasons why we cannot do these things. And we even find little pieces of evidence to support the ‘facts’.

Eventually, we form coping mechanisms based on enabling the beliefs and the story becomes legend.

No matter what way you look at it cannot is always limiting. It is a different beast to choosing not to, delegating our asking for help. Cannot is throwing our arms in the air in despair and succumbing to invisible boundaries, boundaries which cannot be crossed.

Cannot makes us incredible vulnerable to the more manipulative characters that we may stumble across in this life, particularly when the things you cannot do are the holes that the other person can fill.

I was well into my 40s when I finally realised I can undertake basic home maintenance tasks in my home. Yet I’d carried the cannot story around for most of my adult life. Why? Because the story had started through observation (it’s what the men do best), it continued via conversations with ‘trusted’ information sources (“you cannot garden/paint/use a hammer”) and then I made it rational (“I’m too busy to do that anyway”, “my time is better spent elsewhere”, “I can always pay…