06/01/2026
There’s a phrase I used often when I worked with youth. Anytime they said the word “can’t” I would respond with “can you take the ‘t’ out of that please.”
If “I can” seemed too hard, then my next request would be to remove the apostrophe (in “I can’t”) and repurpose the letter T to the word “try” (from “I can’t” —-> “I can try”).
Most of the time, that was all it took to see a child go from not doing something to putting forth effort, and eventually doing the exact thing they thought they couldn’t.
As a behavior change specialist, this is a key aspect of my work, and it functions well in almost every setting. That’s because most of the time, the phrase comes down to belief. I once had an octogenarian paratrooper tell me a story about the first time he jumped out of a plane. The words on his mouth and mind were “I can’t.” It took a superior officer forcefully convincing him he could. That man told me this story after singing his ABCs backward to me in the lobby after our Parkinson’s class. It was a task he didn’t believe he could do, but he had me bothering him for weeks in a way that got him to try. After that, he said “thank you for helping me do what I didn’t believe I could.”
Building self-efficacy (belief in yourself) requires trying it anyway. It’s taking the apostrophe out of a word and showing up to a task ready to try. The more you do it, the more you believe it. And if you can get a cheerleader (or two or three), it gets amplified even more, so that one day maybe…just maybe you’ll catch yourself right in the act of doing what you didn’t think was possible.
If you need a cheerleader, sign me up. I believe in you. Now it’s your turn to believe in you, too.
❤️
