149: Little Jolt of Joy – Believing is Seeing!

Believing Is Seeing

You’ve heard “seeing is believing,” but I want to flip it around, because I think believing is seeing carries just as much truth, and it’s rooted in something real: confirmation bias.

A minivan taught me how this works

Confirmation bias is our tendency to interpret new evidence as proof of what we already believe. After driving minivans for seventeen years, I started eyeing a different kind of vehicle, and suddenly I saw it everywhere. Every parking lot, every intersection, there it was, reinforcing that this was clearly the right choice. Once I actually bought it, I stopped noticing it nearly as often. I wasn’t trying to convince myself anymore. Marketers study this phenomenon closely because it works so well on us.

How this plays out in our homes

If you’ve convinced yourself you’re bad at finishing projects, you’ll find plenty of unfinished ones lying around your house as proof. “See, Joy, there’s my evidence.” But where’s your list of things you actually did complete? It exists, you just haven’t been keeping track of it, because you don’t believe it belongs there. Same thing with “I’m a lousy homemaker.” You catalogue every messy moment as confirmation and quietly forget every time you pulled the house together for company or made it through a hard week anyway. You’re not lying to yourself about the mess, you’re just only keeping half the evidence.

What if we started cataloging the wins instead

What if we praised ourselves for how hard we keep trying, for the energy we put into not giving up, even when the outcome isn’t perfect? What if we kept a done list instead of only ever adding to the to-do list? This is why not every episode of this podcast is about a tangible task or a three-step fix. We’re not just battling undone chores, we’re battling what we’ve trained ourselves to believe about our own capability, and that belief shapes what we actually notice.

This matters for our kids too

A lot of us were diagnosed with ADHD later in life, and looking back with that knowledge can be genuinely powerful, but it isn’t our whole story. If you have kids who are already diagnosed, make sure the label doesn’t become their entire narrative either. Tell them what you love about their creative mind, what you enjoy about simply being around them, things that have nothing to do with whether they succeeded or failed at a task that day.

Try treating your home like an experiment

Approach your life and your tasks the way a scientist approaches data collection, not cataloging failures, but cataloging information you can learn from. Scientists tweak their experiments constantly and aren’t emotionally attached to a specific outcome. Instead of “well, that didn’t work,” try “huh, that changed something, just not quite what I wanted, let me try adjusting this piece.” That small shift in language changes what you’re willing to try next.

A summer experiment, one month at a time

Each month I want to introduce a simple household experiment for you to try, a different basic task each time, approached with curiosity instead of an automatic “that’ll never work for my family.” You might discover it genuinely isn’t right for you. You might discover it is. Or you might land somewhere in between and adapt it into your own version. Either way, you’ll have real information instead of another assumption confirmed.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.