In high school, my favourite subject was English Literature. 

I loved stories. I loved the worlds they opened, the questions they provoked, and the possibility that a few words on a page could change the way you saw yourself and the world around you. 

I also admired my friend Vijay for her brilliant cognitive abilities, reflected in her outstanding grades in both English Language and Literature. While preparing for the CXC exams, my private tutor pulled me aside during one of our after-school sessions. 

Looking back, perhaps that’s why I stopped paying her tuition fees for an entire year. Maybe I should have focused more on classics like The Young Warriors, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Cow Called Boy instead of indulging in my personal favourites like Goosebumps and Shivers.

To add to my childhood trauma, my school automatically dropped me from pursuing English Literature at the Caribbean Examination Council. 

At the time, these experiences felt like judgments about my ability. 

Years later, I can see something deeper.

What happened was not simply that someone made a decision about me.

I began learning how easily an external perception can become an internal identity.

A teacher’s opinion.

A school’s decision.

A peer’s judgment.

A family’s expectations.

A culture’s definition of success.

A difficult experience.

A rejection.

A comparison.

These things can become stories through which we begin to see ourselves.

And eventually, we forget that they are stories.

We begin to think they are who we are.

The Invisible Hand

This is where beliefs become powerful.

Not because our thoughts magically control reality, but because beliefs influence what we notice, what we expect, what we attempt, what we tolerate, and what we consider possible.

A belief can quietly become an invisible hand guiding a life.

If I believe I am incapable, I may stop attempting things that could reveal my capability.

If I believe I am unworthy, I may interpret neutral experiences as rejection.

If I believe I don’t belong, I may spend my life performing for belonging.

If I believe that success is reserved for other people, I may never give my own possibilities enough attention to discover what they could become.

And this is where the human mind can become particularly interesting.

We have a tendency to notice what confirms what we already expect.

My aunt Pam could invite 300 people to her son’s wedding and spend the entire summer thinking about the one person who didn’t come.

The 299 become background.

The one becomes the story.

This is the power of attention.

And I have come to believe that attention may be even more fundamental than belief.

Because before a belief becomes an identity, something has to repeatedly receive our attention.

From Self-Belief to Self-Knowing

For years, my work revolved around helping people strengthen self-belief.

I believed—and still believe—that self-awareness, self-trust, and disciplined practice can radically expand what we consider possible.

But my understanding of human potential has changed.

I no longer think the deepest transformation is simply replacing a limiting belief with an empowering one.

Because even an empowering belief can become another identity we have to perform.

“I am powerful.”

“I am abundant.”

“I am limitless.”

“I am my highest self.”

These can be useful reminders, but they can also become another version of striving.

So I began asking a deeper question:

What happens when I become aware of the story without becoming the story?

What happens when I can notice the belief, feel the sensation beneath it, and become curious about what exists before the interpretation?

This is where self-belief begins to give way to self-knowing.

The question changes from:

What should I believe about myself?

to:

Who am I when I become intimate with my actual experience?

And eventually:

What remains when the story becomes quiet?

Attention as Participation

This realization has changed the way I understand potential.

What has our attention becomes increasingly available to us.

If I repeatedly notice beauty, I become more perceptive of beauty.

If I practice noticing moments of love, I become more sensitive to love.

If I attend to wonder, ordinary life begins revealing more occasions for wonder.

If I recognize belonging, I begin noticing the places where life is already welcoming me.

This does not mean that attention creates reality through magical thinking.

It means that attention shapes our experience of reality.

We are constantly filtering an enormous amount of information.

What we practice noticing becomes easier to notice.

And this means attention is not passive.

Attention is participation.

We are participating in life through what we choose, consciously or unconsciously, to see.