Now that he’s nearly 13, he’ll deny that he ever said it but I swear it happened.

My son Michael was ten and we were in the backyard tossing a ball. He paused just before tossing to me, laughed, and shrugged.

“What?” I asked

“It’s funny,” he said.“Thoughts are like puffs of air. They come and go. Poof.”

He was ten and he’d already figured out that we’ve all got Monsters in our heads.

The Buddhists teach a story about a man who walks into a darkened room, looks down and is startled by a coiled snake. He lights the room only to discover that the frightening snake is nothing more than a coil of rope.

Monster.

The Buddhists teach another story. This time of a man lazily enjoying a sunny day on a lake, napping in a slowly drifting rowboat. Suddenly, the boat is rocked by another boat slamming into it. Furious, the man leaps up to throttle the oblivious rower who failed to avoid his boat. When he does, he sees the second boat is empty. The wind had pushed the boat into his. The rower he was going to kill doesn’t exist.

Monster.

In coaching, we talk about limiting beliefs. Things we believe to be true about ourselves which, umm, limit us. I was in the eighth grade at Sts. Simon & Jude R.C. school in Gravesend, Brooklyn.  I was in the “smart kids” track and, as we’d all delightedly anticipated since seventh grade, the “smart kids” got to study ninth grade algebra in eighth grade (thereby yet again confirming our superiority).

But that year, the school had hired a new eighth grade math teacher: Ms. Babejko. Ms. Babejko loved math and thought everyone should love math. Even more she thought that everyone could do math, everyone could do algebra. So gathering all three eighth grade classes in the auditorium, she proposed that she teach ninth grade made to all of us. Well we “smart kids” were outraged. It’s unfair, we said. We deserve this, we said. And it fell to me, as one of the more outspoken members of the group (I’d been elected student body president), to articulate our position. I’m embarrassed to repeat the horrendous, elitist arguments I made. Trust me though; I was obnoxious.

But I prevailed and she proceeded to teach only the “smart kids” algebra. And one by one we dropped like flies until, in the end, there were only three kids in that section and the rest of us had fallen into “regular” math.

I’m grateful to Ms. Babejko for that lesson. BUT the experience also implanted a limiting belief that plagued me for years: I’m not good at math. Up until that experience, I’d gotten all A’s (except for my second grade penmanship class). Nevertheless, from then on, I became one of those folks who self-defined and self-selected away from math. It became, ultimately, a Monster in my head—a puff of air, a coiled rope, an empty rowboat—that defined me, scared me, and trapped me.

Sometimes the Monster is a specific fear such as, I’m going to get fired. I was working with a client the other day and we were discussing just how infuriatingly dependent her boss is on her. She’s constantly picking up after him, cleaning up his messes, making him look good.

“But that’s what you told him when you took the job, right? You told him that you saw your role as making him successful.”

“But I didn’t sign on to be his mother,” she said.

We laughed and there was a pause and then she asked the burning question:

“Do you think I’m going to be fired?”

Monster.

After outlining all the ways this boss needs her, her mind still said, “Be careful. You can be fired.” I know she was once fired and that experience, like my time in eighth grade, still haunts her, defines her, throws shadows on the wall.

Just yesterday, talking with another client, a CEO, about a staff person who is undermining his authority, I asked:

“Why do you allow it?”

See the non-coaching, friendly supportive response would have been to cluck my tongue and say the staff member is a terrible person. Or, when I was an active board member, I might have said, “Fire them.”

But neither of those statements would have served the CEO.

“I suppose I’m a nice guy,” he answered. I let that hang for a moment in silence. He continued, “I’ve always had a problem with having to be the nice guy.”

And we took a deep look at the monster and saw that there was a way for this CEO to be true to himself—that is, to NOT be an asshole—while not allowing his staff person to destabilize the company.

Limiting beliefs, puffs of air, coiled ropes, monsters we create and carry around in our minds; they’re all worth examining deeper. Byron Katie’s The Work can be a powerful antidote.

She offers four questions that often times puncture the entire belief system:

1)   Is it true?

2)   Can you absolutely know it’s true?

3)   How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?

4)   Who would you be without that thought?

To her list, I’ll add a fifth question: What’s the Monster in your head?