The stories you learned about yourself and how they’re still deciding for you

My high school classmates weren’t entirely wrong about me.

I want to start with something I’ve never said out loud on this show.

My high school classmates weren’t entirely wrong about me.

In my senior year in high school, we did one of those classroom exercises where everyone anonymously writes what they think about you. And when my results came back, almost everyone had written the same word in the column for what they didn’t like.

Miedosa. Fearful. The person who holds back.

And here’s the uncomfortable part. They weren’t entirely wrong. The evidence was there. When I was 6, I chose not to learn to ride a bike because of fear. I switched from the hockey team to the volleyball team because of fear of getting hurt. I didn’t get my driver’s license at 16 because of fear. Let me repeat that... because of fear...

So this episode is not about a label that was wrong. It’s about what happens when a partial truth becomes the whole definition. And how that definition quietly decides what you think is possible for yourself.

Before we go there, stay tuned because I’m going to leave you with a short writing practice at the end of this episode. Three sentences. Stay for it.

Welcome back to Unscripted, a Momtoring podcast. The show for the ambitious working mother who is everyone’s default and is finally ready to hear her own voice again. I’m Andi Salcedo. I’m a coach, a working mother, and the founder of Momtoring, which is the coaching brand and community for working moms behind this show. If you end up wanting to go deeper after listening, momtoring.com is where you’ll find me.

We spent our first six episodes asking who you are underneath all the roles. Today I want to go one layer deeper. Because before you can answer that question honestly, there’s a harder one sitting underneath it. Where did the story about who you are come from in the first place? And was it ever the whole truth?

So. High school. Buenos Aires. I’m sixteen, maybe seventeen. And the results of this exercise land on my desk, and I look at the column for what people didn’t like, for some reason that’s where we always start, right? Anyways, I scan the didn’t like column and I see the same word, over and over, in different handwriting.

Miedosa.

And I want to be honest with you about something, because I think it matters for everything that comes after. Part of me knew they weren’t wrong. I knew about the bike. I knew about the hockey team and the driver’s license. I knew about the things I’d talked myself out of before anyone else got the chance to weigh in.

So I didn’t argue with it. I filed it. In the place where you file the true version of yourself.

And that’s where it gets interesting. Because the problem with that word, with any label we receive at a formative moment, isn’t that it’s false. Sometimes it’s not false. The problem is what we do with it next.

When a partial truth becomes the whole definition, no nuances, no exceptions, it starts silently running in the background. Shaping what is available for you and what isn’t. I stopped reaching for certain things before anyone else got the chance to say no. I made decisions from inside the label without ever deciding to. I treated one real part of myself as if it were the whole story.

The label wasn’t a lie. It was a partial truth being treated as the whole story. And a partial truth in the wrong place does the same damage as a lie.

Now. I’m talking to you, working mom. And I know you have your own version of this. It might not be one word from a classroom exercise. It might be something you absorbed so gradually you can’t even point to where it started.

But it’s there. And it isn’t just describing you. It’s deciding for you.

What you reach for. What you don’t bother trying. What you automatically write off. When you define yourself, you define what’s possible. And that definition has been running a lot longer than you’ve been paying attention to it.

Here’s what it looks like.

Some of you absorbed that your drive for excellence was outstanding. So you’re the one staying up at 9:30 finishing something that wasn’t yours to fix, because correcting it yourself felt easier than asking someone else to do better. And you’ve been doing that for so long it doesn’t even register as a choice anymore.

Some of you absorbed, from your culture, your family, the particular world you grew up in, that you had to work twice as hard to deserve to be in the room. So you never stop. Not because you love the volume. Because somewhere in the back of your mind, stopping feels like proof. And you have spent your entire career making sure that proof never arrives.

And some of you carry the “good girl” label. The one that tells you that wanting things for yourself will take from other people, and that is selfish. Sharing is caring. So you put everyone in your family before you. You stopped applying to that dream job that might ask for extra time. You stopped asking. Stopped imagining out loud. You tell yourself it’s just temporary, there will be time later. And later keeps moving.

Different origins. Same structure underneath: I must prove something. Or I’ll lose my place.

The label doesn’t just sit there. It sets the perimeter of what you think is available to you.

So what do you do with that?

And I want to be very honest here, because I think a lot of coaching leadership skips this part. Telling yourself the label is wrong will not move it. You can know intellectually that the story is partial and still live from it completely. You can have all the evidence in the world that you are capable and courageous and enough and still feel the label running every time something important is on the line.

Because the belief that label is anchored in isn’t a thought you can correct. It’s a survival strategy. And survival strategies don’t respond to logic.

What creates the urge to move away from them is cost. When the cost of staying inside the belief becomes higher than the cost of challenging it.

I didn’t learn to drive at 25 years old because someone convinced me my fear was irrational. I learned because depending on another person to get where I wanted to go became unbearable at some point. The motivation arrived first. The action followed. The belief updated somewhere much later, slowly, imperfectly, maybe not completely even now.

And I decided to learn how to ride a bike. At 45 years old.

Not because the fear is gone. It’s not gone. I worry I will break a part of my body, and I can’t afford that with little kids in my life. But I want to be able to travel as a family by bike. I want to ride to the beach in summer instead of driving in circles looking for parking every single weekend. The thing I want on the other side finally became bigger than the thing I was afraid of. And that changed the equation.

I work with women on this all the time. And there’s this one session that comes to mind. This woman, a working mother, a woman of color. She came to me asking for more balance. She wanted more time at home, more presence with her family. And she kept ending up overworking. Session after session, she’d set intentions and then come back having crossed every line she’d drawn for herself.

And after several sessions together, something cracked open. She realized that she had been overworking because she had spent her career trying to prove herself, because of the color of her skin. Because of the color of her skin, she had absorbed early that she had to earn her place over and over, in every room, on every project. And the overwork wasn’t ambition. It was armor.

She wasn’t working hard because she loved it. She was working hard because somewhere, a story had told her she had to keep proving herself to deserve to be there. And she had been paying that price every single day. In her energy. In her time. In the version of herself her family got at the end of it.

When the loop became visible to her, something shifted. Not because the belief suddenly felt wrong. But because she could finally see the cost clearly. And the cost had become unbearable.

And after the loop became visible, after the cost became real, she named a new belief to replace the old one. Not as a mantra. As a decision.

Her new belief was: my work is valuable. No matter what.

And from that belief she did something that changed everything practically. She stopped volunteering for projects that made no strategic sense for her. She stopped saying yes to prove something. She defined what value she actually brought and let that be the filter for everything else.

She became someone with clear priorities. Who delivered excellent work. Who had a clear understanding of what was strategic and what wasn’t worth her time. Not because a coach told her to set limits. Because she knew who she was now. And that knowing was the filter.

She didn’t work less. She worked from a different place. And everything from that place felt different.

There’s a second thing that helped me. And it connects to something I want to offer you.

When we define ourselves with a label, we search for facts that confirm it. Miedosa searches for evidence of fear and finds it everywhere. And quietly filters out everything else. That’s not a character flaw. It’s just how this works. The label decides what counts.

A few years ago I did an exercise where I drew my life as a chart. The X axis is time. The Y axis is how things felt: the peaks, the dips, the flat stretches. And you just draw it, without overthinking.

I expected to see mostly hard. But what I hadn’t been counting, what the label had been quietly filtering out, were all the peaks. Far more than the story had been acknowledging. Things I had done, built, survived, that the fearful version of myself apparently hadn’t stopped me from doing at all.

Something similar happened with someone I had just met. We were getting acquainted, sharing where we’d each come from and what we’d built. And at some point she said something I didn’t know what to do with. She said she thought of me as someone incredibly courageous. Whaaat???

She named things. My decision to move to the United States following love. Leaving a successful corporate career, not once, but twice, to follow my passions. Starting coaching from scratch. And I noticed this wasn’t landing the way a compliment usually lands, bouncing off, deflected with a thank you.

It landed differently. Because this was someone with no agenda. No history with me. No reason to be generous. She was just reading the evidence. The same evidence the label had been filing under irrelevant for twenty years.

A stranger who just met you has no reason to flatter you. Which means they’re just reading the evidence. The same evidence you’ve been filtering out.

So my point here is that the work isn’t to deny what’s true. The fearful part was real. The work is to stop letting the partial truth be the whole definition. To actively look for the counter facts. Because the perimeter you’re living inside was drawn from incomplete information.

And I keep redrawing the perimeter in my life. So, next Sunday I’m going for my first bike riding lesson. My daughters are going to be there cheering with my husband. Both. And my little one hasn’t learned to ride on two wheels yet either.

I know what might happen when I get on that bike and feel uncertain. I know myself. I’m going to go into control mode. I’m going to grip the handlebars too hard and place my feet on the ground with every wobble instead of letting myself find the balance. Because that’s what I do with fear. I try to control everything around it.

But I’m going anyway. Because I want to travel as a family by bike. Because I want the beach without the parking. Because the possibility on the other side is worth the Sunday morning.

But also, because my daughters are watching. And what I want them to see is not someone who isn’t afraid. It’s someone who shows up anyway. Someone who knows the fear, knows how it runs in her, and gets on the bike... filled with courage.

What gets modeled in that moment isn’t fearlessness. It’s that fear doesn’t disqualify you. It’s that fear and courage can coexist in you and you have to decide which one will lead the way.

The high school label said miedosa. And it wasn’t entirely wrong. But it was never the whole story and it will not be either.

So before we finish today’s episode I want to ask you: What is the label you’ve been living from? Not the one you’d say out loud. The one that runs underneath. The one that quietly decides what you reach for and what you don’t.

And what is it costing you?

I want to leave you with something you can do right now, or tonight, or whenever you have five quiet minutes.

Get something to write on. And write three sentences. Just three.

The first one: the story I’ve been living from is... Take your time with that one. Don’t write the polished version. Write the one that runs underneath. Brainstorm and stop when you feel something inside of you recognizing the truth, not the overthinking.

The second one: what this story has cost me is... Don’t be abstract here. The more specific the better. In your energy, your time, the things you haven’t reached for. What has the label been deciding for you? The more specific, the more sense of urgency it will create inside of you.

And the third sentence to complete: the counter fact I’ve been filtering out is... One thing. One piece of evidence the label has been leaving out of the definition. One thing you’ve done, or survived, or built, that the story hasn’t been counting.

You don’t have to resolve anything today. You just have to name it. Because you can’t find the higher motivation until you’re honest about the cost. And the counter fact has always been there. It’s just been waiting for you to let it count.

A rating on your podcast app takes thirty seconds. And it genuinely helps another working mother find this show. If this episode landed for you, that’s the thing to do.

You can also reach me at hello@momtoring.com or on Instagram @andi.momtoring. I read everything that comes in and your questions become future episodes.

And make sure you follow me so you don’t miss our next episode. Because even when we see the belief, even when we name it, feel it, understand exactly where it came from, there’s still this pull. A voice that says not yet, find more proof first, one more reason before you let yourself change. So, next week I want to talk about why that pull is so strong. And why more proof was never going to be enough.

I’m Andi Salcedo. This is Unscripted. And I’ll see you next week.