Why Aren’t We Awesomer? (Spoiler: We’re the Problem)
Let’s get one thing straight: you’re basically standing between yourself and greatness. I know, I know—you thought it was your boss, your bank account, or the fact that you’re “just not a morning person.” But plot twist: it’s you. You’re the villain in your own origin story.
Transformative coach Michael Neill dropped this truth bomb in his TEDxBend talk “Why Aren’t We Awesomer?”, and honestly, it’s both the worst news and the best news you’ll hear today.
The worst because, well, we can’t blame our problems on other people anymore (RIP, convenient scapegoats).
The best because if you’re the problem, you’re also the solution. No waiting for your circumstances to change, your luck to improve, or Mercury to exit retrograde.
Thought Crimes: Your Brain Is Making Stuff Up
Here’s the deal: you’re living in a world created by your thoughts, not your circumstances.
This is what Neill calls the “inside-out” understanding of life, and it’s basically the plot twist nobody saw coming.
We all walk around thinking (pun absolutely intended) that our feelings are caused by external events.
Bad traffic makes us angry.
The big presentation makes us nervous.
Monday mornings make us want to fake our own deaths.
But here’s the kicker: none of that is true.
Our feelings are generated moment-to-moment by the power of thought, like some kind of emotional 3D printer that never stops churning out experiences.
The really sneaky part? Physicist David Bohm nailed it when he said, “Thought creates our world, and then says ‘I didn’t do it.'”
Your brain is basically the world’s worst roommate—making a mess and then pointing fingers at everyone else.
It creates your entire reality so seamlessly that you’re absolutely convinced you’re responding to “what’s really happening” instead of your own mental commentary about what’s happening.
This is like being mad at the movie screen instead of recognizing you’re just watching a film. Except the film is being produced, directed, and narrated by your own brain, and you forgot you’re holding the remote.
External Threats: A Horror Movie of Your Own Making
One of our favorite ways to sabotage ourselves is believing that our feelings come from outside sources.
Spoiler alert: they don’t. That presentation isn’t making you anxious—your thoughts about the presentation are making you anxious. Big difference.
When we misunderstand this, we become prisoners of our circumstances. We think we need to control everything “out there” to feel okay “in here.” We try to arrange the entire universe to suit our preferences, which is both exhausting and has about the same success rate as herding cats through a car wash.
Neill brings up the spider example, which is perfect. For someone with arachnophobia, a harmless spider becomes an eight-legged harbinger of doom. But the spider is just over there living its best spider life, completely unaware it’s been cast as the villain. The terror exists entirely in the thought-generated experience, not in the actual spider (who, let’s be honest, is probably more scared of you).
We’re basically walking around being terrified of our own projections. It’s like being scared of your shadow and then spending your whole life trying to run away from it.
Newsflash: it follows you everywhere because it’s attached to you.
The Meta-Fear: Being Afraid of Being Afraid
If getting in our own way were an Olympic sport, this would be the gold medal event: being afraid of our own thoughts.
We worry about having worried thoughts.
We fear our fear.
We’re anxious about being anxious.
We judge ourselves for being judgmental.
It’s like Russian nesting dolls of suffering, and honestly, it would be impressive if it weren’t so exhausting.
When we don’t understand that thoughts are just thoughts—mental weather that comes and goes like clouds, or like your motivation to go to the gym—we take them way too seriously. Every anxious thought becomes a five-alarm fire. Every self-critical thought becomes The Absolute Truth. Every “what if” becomes a documentary about your inevitable failure.
This fear of our own thinking causes us to:
- Avoid situations where we might have uncomfortable thoughts (because apparently we think thoughts are contagious)
- Try to control or suppress our thinking, which works about as well as trying not to think about a pink elephant (congratulations, you’re now thinking about a pink elephant)
- Identify with our thoughts, believing “I think it, therefore I am it” (Descartes would be so disappointed)
- Spend mental energy arguing with our thoughts like they’re actual people instead of just letting them float by like annoying pop-up ads
The Self-Concept Prison: Locked Up by Our Own Story
William Blake wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
Translation: we’re all living in self-imposed caves with terrible views, and we installed the bars ourselves.
We create these ironclad definitions of who we are: “I’m not good at public speaking.” “I’m not creative.” “I’m not a math person.” “I’m not the kind of person who eats kale without gagging.” These statements feel like facts, but they’re actually just thoughts we’ve been thinking for so long that they’ve set up permanent residence in our brains and refuse to pay rent.
Here’s the truth: every limitation you believe about yourself is made of thought. Not truth. Not fact. Thought. Which means it’s about as solid as cotton candy and about as permanent as your New Year’s resolutions.
Our minds are constantly generating opinions and stories, and then we move into those stories like they’re actual addresses. “I live at 742 I’m Not Good Enough Street, right next to the corner of It’s Too Late For Me Avenue.” Except that address doesn’t exist. You made it up. You’re essentially getting mail delivered to an imaginary house.
The Three Principles: The Instruction Manual We Never Read
Neill’s work is based on the Three Principles from Sydney Banks, which are basically the user manual for being human that nobody bothered to read (because who reads the instructions, honestly?).
Mind is the intelligence behind all life—the formless potential from which everything emerges. It’s like the Wi-Fi signal of consciousness. It’s always there; you’re just sometimes too busy buffering to notice.
Consciousness is what makes us aware. It brings our thinking to life and lets us experience our thoughts as reality. Think of it as the projector that makes the movie of your thoughts visible on the screen of your experience.
Thought is the creative principle that shapes our individual experience moment by moment. It’s the rudder steering your ship, except most of us don’t realize we’re holding the rudder, so we just blame the ocean when we end up somewhere we didn’t want to go.
When we misunderstand these principles, chaos ensues.
We think our well-being depends on getting the right job, the right partner, or the right number of likes on Instagram. We take our thoughts at face value like they’re news anchors reporting objective facts. We try to control our experience from the outside-in, which is like trying to change your reflection by yelling at the mirror.
The Plot Twist: You’re Not Broken (Just Confused)
Here’s the liberating truth: you don’t need to be fixed. You’re not fundamentally flawed, damaged, or defective. You just have an innocent misunderstanding about where your experience comes from.
It’s like spending your whole life trying to fix your TV because you don’t like what’s on the channel. The TV is fine! Just change the channel! (The channel being your thinking, in case that metaphor wasn’t obvious enough.)
When we recognize that we’re experiencing thought in the moment rather than objective reality, everything shifts. We stop taking our limiting thoughts so seriously. That voice telling you you’re going to fail? Just thought. The certainty that everyone is judging you? Also thought. The belief that you can’t handle something? You guessed it—thought.
This creates what Neill calls “freedom of mind,” which sounds like a hippie concept but is actually just the ability to recognize that your thoughts are not the boss of you. They’re more like spam emails—they show up uninvited, they’re mostly nonsense, and you don’t have to respond to them.
How to Stop Being Your Own Worst Enemy
The good news: you don’t need a seven-step program, a $5,000 seminar, or a life coach named Sage who only communicates in chakra metaphors (this doesn’t mean these programs don’t work or are unnecessary!). You just need to recognize a few things:
Thoughts are creative, not documentary. Your thoughts are creating your experience in real-time, not reporting on objective reality. You’re the screenwriter, not the film critic.
Thoughts are temporary. They come and go like bad fashion trends. That anxious thought that feels so important right now will be replaced by a different thought (probably about what you’re having for lunch) in approximately three minutes.
You can’t be broken. Your essential nature isn’t your thoughts about yourself. Beneath your thinking, you have access to clarity, wisdom, and resilience. They’re not skills you need to develop—they’re like apps that came pre-installed. You just forgot they were there.
Your certainty is suspicious. When you’re absolutely certain about how something will go, recognize that as thought-created fan fiction, not prophecy. Reality has a sense of humor and rarely follows your script.
Allow your experience. When you stop wrestling with your thoughts and feelings like they’re alligators, they lose their power. You can feel anxious and still do the thing. You can have doubt and still take the leap. Turns out, thoughts are terrible at actually stopping you—they’re just very loud.
The Punchline
So why aren’t we awesomer?
Because we’re standing in our own way, believing our own press releases, and taking directions from the least reliable narrator in existence: our own insecure thinking.
We think our limitations are real when they’re just thought-bubbles.
We think our feelings come from circumstances when they’re generated by our internal reality machine.
We think our negative thoughts are truth-tellers when they’re actually that friend who’s always predicting disaster and has never once been right.
The journey to becoming awesomer isn’t about self-improvement, grinding harder, or manifesting your dreams with vision boards.
It’s about seeing through the magic trick your mind is performing and recognizing that you’ve always had access to clarity, creativity, and well-being. They’ve just been hiding behind a wall of thoughts you mistook for facts.
The doors of perception are right there, ready to be opened. You don’t need a key—you just need to realize you built the door in the first place. Stop being afraid of your own thinking, stop believing your own stories, and stop trying to control the uncontrollable.
Get out of your own way, and you might just discover that being awesome was never the problem. You were always awesome. You were just too busy thinking you weren’t to notice.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go have some thoughts about lunch. Unlike my thoughts about my life, these ones I’ll actually trust.
P.S. If this post made you think “but my situation is different,” congratulations—you just demonstrated the entire point. That thought? Also just thought. You’re welcome.