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Hey Subscriber First Name

I was stood outside a meeting room a while back, waiting for the people inside to finish, talking to a colleague who was fairly new to all this.

They said something like, you're experienced, you've got it figured out, I'm sure you'll be fine with it.

In my head I thought, not even slightly.

So I told them. On the outside it might look sorted. On the inside there's a list of things I still believe about this work that aren't true. That I should have the answer in the room. That asking makes me look like I'm struggling. That being busy is the same thing as getting somewhere.

They looked surprised, which is the part I've thought about since. Everybody assumes the confident ones have worked it all out, and most of us are quietly carrying something that holds us back.

Everyone is carrying beliefs about their work that aren't true, and the expensive ones are the ones that look like professionalism.

They don't arrive out of nowhere, and they're rarely anyone's fault.

Some you pick up early, learning the job by watching people who seem sorted. The only parts you can see are the confident answer, the full diary and the yes to every request, so you copy those. What you can't see is what any of it costs them.

Some come from being busy. Delivery doesn't leave much room to stop and ask whether the way you work still makes sense, and a belief that never gets looked at doesn't get updated.

And some arrive because the ground moves. New tools, new expectations, a role that doesn't look like the one you trained for. That's where "I'm too far behind" comes from, and I hear it more often than any of the others at the moment.

Whichever way they turn up, they stick for the same reason. Each one pays you back today. You dodge the awkward ask, the awkward no, the awkward "I'm stuck". The bill arrives later, and it's bigger than the awkwardness would have been.

Three I've watched do the most damage, and they're not the dramatic ones.

"I must have every answer." So you answer anyway, slightly out of your depth, and the room moves on with your guess written down as a fact. I held this one far longer than I should have. Letting it go made me quicker, and people trusted me more, not less. Your job is finding answers, and most of them live with somebody else.

"Asking for help looks weak." So you sit on the problem and give it one more week. Asking in week two is a professional raising something early. Explaining in week ten is a recovery conversation. Same problem, two very different meetings.

"I'm too far behind to catch up." Everybody feels behind on AI, including the people writing confidently about it. Behind compared to what, exactly? Pick one tool and one thing you actually do each week, and build from there.

I've put thirty-two of them on one page, grouped into eight areas, from mindset and stakeholders to risk, career and new technology. None of this is specific to project managers. Engineers, planners, commercial leads, anyone working around delivery will find their own on there, usually within about ten seconds.

Now the part the sheet can't do for you.

There's an idea in Steven Bartlett's book, The Diary of a CEO, that explains why they're so hard to shift. Your self-story, the running account you keep of the kind of person you are, decides what you'll attempt.

And what you attempt is the only place your evidence comes from.

It's a closed loop. The belief stops you acting. Not acting means nothing ever happens to contradict it. The story stays exactly as it was, not because it was right, but because you never gave it anything to argue with.

Say nothing in meetings for a year and you'll never find out what would have happened if you had. That silence can feel like proof. It's just an absence of evidence, which is a very different thing.

Which makes the way out smaller than people expect. Reframe the sentence, do the thing once, and you've collected something the belief has never had to face. Do it again. Keep going until it stops feeling like a risk and starts feeling normal, because by then you're not taking my word for it. You've got your own.

Mine, for a long time, was about writing.

I told myself I wasn't a writer. Not that I had nothing worth saying, more that saying it in public wasn't for me, and that people who had known me for years would wonder what I was playing at. Fifteen years of delivering complex work, and that one sentence still won.

The only thing that shifted it was doing it. I published the first one in mid-February, then another the week after, then another. After a few issues the replies started arriving. People telling me an idea had landed, or that a piece described the exact week they were having.

That's the evidence the belief had never had to face. Six months of it, and the story has changed on its own. I know I can do this now, which means other people's opinions carry a lot less weight, and it's become a normal part of my week rather than something I talk myself into every Sunday.

The growth has been the surprise. I've learnt more about my own thinking in six months of writing it down than in years of carrying it around.

And it works both ways, which is where a second idea from the same book comes in. To master something, you have to create an obligation to teach it. Whatever you take from these, I get the same back, because putting an idea in order for somebody else is what shows me where my own understanding is thin.

So thank you. To everyone who subscribed, replied, told me something had helped, or passed an issue on to a colleague. You're the reason it kept going, and you're the evidence the belief was wrong.

A belief is only limiting while you keep telling yourself the story. Get curious about it instead, test it once, and it stops being a rule you live by and turns into a question with an answer.

MAKING IT HAPPEN: Your Weekly Strategy

Open the sheet and read through all thirty-two. Pick the one that sounds most like you.

To sit with: where that belief came from. Something you copied early on, something you never had time to question, or something that stopped being true when the work changed around you.

To do: write down one action that would prove it wrong, small enough to do this week. Then do it three times before you judge it. Once tells you nothing, because one awkward moment proves very little either way. Three times gives you evidence, and evidence is the only thing that moves a belief. Most people find that by the third go the dread has turned into curiosity, and the belief has lost most of its grip.

THIS WEEK ON LINKEDIN

A few things I published this week, if you want more between issues.

The critical path runs through people

32 beliefs quietly holding new PMs back

Having the answers, or finding who has them

You don't need a mentor to rehearse

CHEAT SHEETS

The free cheat sheet library is here, and it keeps growing every week. Save the link and grab whatever helps.

Share this with someone who is early in their career and trying very hard to look like they have it all figured out.

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Hit reply and tell me which of the thirty-two you've believed the longest. I read every one.

Have a great week and speak soon,

Bilal