One of the things that my mind invites me to believe is that I need to remember things to be able to do them.

Whenever this relates to something I’ve learned to do and become trained in, my mind is at risk. It fears that I might forget something. For the mind, it is as if it experienced it often enough that something didn’t work out as it wanted. It assumes I didn’t remember and thus makes a drama out of forgetting.

It’s how doubt enters our mind. It’s how the learning we’ve done is being discounted.

The trick our mind plays on us is that it wants us to succeed every time. It assumes that what worked well once and created satisfaction needs to be repeatable. It wants the satisfaction back. It wants to avoid the discomfort of failing.

It assumes that what worked needs to be repeated as it happened. And thus, it tells us that we need to remember what we did.

What it doesn’t realize is that it is too slow. Pulling out the memory of its storage and acting on it is way slower than letting whatever we seek to do happen by itself. Trying to repeat is cumbersome for our brain and slows it down. Having a doubt slows it further down.

Adding the task of dealing with our doubt and trying to repeat a previous process confuses our brain as it finds itself receiving mixed instructions.

Given that state of confusion, the expected outcome doesn’t happen on a consistent basis. For the mind, this is enough confirmation to strengthen the belief that we’ve forgotten what we did well once. It blames us for not remembering.

Luckily there are a few exceptions: breathing, eating, drinking, and movements learned in our early childhood. Which ones do you add to the list?

It’s the list of things we trust ourselves to do naturally.

The other are the things we hope to do well.