Trust Your Cape, Part 2: Don’t Borrow Someone Else’s Ceiling

One of the things I love about The Cape by Guy Clark is the unapologetic belief at its core… Maybe I can.

There’s something powerful about that. Because somewhere along the way, most of us encounter people who tell us what we can’t do.

Sometimes they mean well. They’re trying to protect us from disappointment, failure, or embarrassment. Sometimes their assessment comes from their own experience. Sometimes they’re projecting their own inability to imagine doing something themselves onto us.

And sometimes, they’re right. But not always.

There are decades of research about self-efficacy, our belief in our ability to successfully perform a particular task or navigate a particular challenge. Our beliefs about our capabilities influence the goals we pursue, how much effort we invest, and how persistent we are when things get difficult. Those beliefs also influence our resilience to pick ourselves up and try again, if at first we don’t succeed.

However, that doesn’t mean believing you can do anything makes it true.

It means we should be careful about whose evidence we use when deciding what we are capable of.

Someone else’s experience of you is not necessarily an accurate assessment of your potential. Maybe you couldn’t do it five years ago. Maybe you couldn’t do it with the skills, resources, relationships, or confidence you had then.

But I couldn’t is not the same thing as I can’t.

One of the most important things we can do for ourselves is periodically reassess the boundaries we’ve accepted as fixed.

What can you do now that you couldn’t do before? What have you learned? Who have you become? What resources do you have today that you didn’t have then? And where might you be capable of stretching next?

I don’t think we should ignore other people’s wisdom. But we certainly shouldn’t automatically inherit their limitations, either.

Sometimes the first step toward growth is simply asking, Is this really my ceiling… or did I borrow it from someone else?

Maybe it’s time to test the edges. Maybe it’s time to trust your cape.