Daily Practice ·
The practice of your own lamp: verify a belief today
A fifteen-minute practice to review an idea you take for granted and check, through your own experience, whether it deserves to keep governing your day.
By Pedro J. Pérez
We all carry ideas we never checked: about money, work, love, or what we believe we are capable of doing. They came from home, from school, from someone who spoke with confidence, and we adopted them without examining them because they came wrapped in authority or affection.
Today you are going to do something different with one of them: look at it closely, ask yourself where it came from, and put it to the test with your own life. It is not about doubting everything for sport, but about keeping only what you can sustain with what you yourself have lived. What withstands that test truly stays with you; the rest was an outfit that was not yours.
The practice Duration: 15 minutes
Choose a single idea
Take paper or your phone and write in one sentence a conviction that guides how you act today. For example: “I am not good at speaking in public,” “money is always scarce,” “if I say no, people drift away.” Choose the one that carries the most weight in your day today, not the most abstract one. Two or three minutes.
Trace its origin
Ask yourself who taught it to you and in what circumstance. Did it come from an experience of your own or from someone else’s mouth? Was it said from fear, from anger, or from provable evidence? Write down what you remember, without judging yourself. Three or four minutes.
Separate what you have lived from what you have heard
Draw two columns. On the left, note what you have directly observed about that idea: concrete facts, dates, situations you remember in detail. On the right, what you have only heard, repeated, or assumed. Leave the right column as it is, without defending it. Five minutes.
Make a small test today
Design a minimal test you can do in the next few hours: ask something you always keep quiet about, send that message, check a fact you take for granted, make a call. Let it be small and safe, without exposing yourself to anything serious. Beforehand, note what you expect to happen and afterward what actually happened. Five minutes of preparation and however long the gesture takes.
Decide what to keep
At the end of the day, return to the sentence from the beginning. With what you have seen, decide whether you keep it, correct it, or let it go. Rewrite it if needed in your current words, the ones you can already sustain. Three minutes.
To reflect on today
What idea have you held today only because someone told it to you, and what has your own experience shown you when you dared to look at it closely?
To finish
No one can believe for you, not even the one who speaks with the greatest confidence. When you examine what you carry inside and keep only what you have verified, you stop leaning on other people’s crutches. That confidence built by hand is the only one that does not fall when the storm arrives.