95% of What You're So Sure Of Isn't Fact

Remember back in grade school when we used to get assignments to put an "F" or "O" next to a sentence? "F" for Fact, "O" for Opinion. Most kids found those pretty easy. Wouldn't it be nice if telling fact from opinion was still that clear cut as adults?

Last week I walked you through the journey of a thought and how it shapes your results. This week I want to zoom in on the very first fork in that road: fact vs. opinion (also known, in coach-speak, as Circumstance vs. Thought). Same idea, better game.

Facts are boring. If your exchanges with people are anything but boring, here's a clue you've wandered into opinion territory.

Case in point: the 2020 election. Not a pretty scene! (And there it is already... that sentence feels like a fact because a lot of you agree with me. It's not. It's a thought.)

I was genuinely torn that year. Didn't love my option from either major party, couldn't find a third option that struck my fancy either. And depending on who I asked, my choices were framed like this: vote Republican, and I was a brainwashed imbecile. Vote Democrat, and I was a baby-killer. I didn't identify with either label, and at that point in my life I wasn't great at letting people be wrong about me... so I mistook the noise of the masses for fact.

Then it clicked. The actual facts were:

Donald Trump: Republican candidate

Joe Biden: Democrat candidate

See how boring that is? Those two lines could be proven in a court of law. "Brainwashed imbecile" and "baby-killer" could not. Same rule, every time.

(Other facts existed too if you wanted them: what each candidate actually said, on the record. What their platforms actually stated. Also boring. Also provable.)

Once I saw it, I had a lot of fun that election season, quietly amused at how much of what I was hearing wasn't fact at all. I'd guess a solid 95% of it was opinion. Two names. That's it. Most of the rest was opinion wearing a fact costume.

Politics is the easy version, though. Here's where it gets harder... because I do this for a living, and I still fell for it.

I was working with a coach who specialized in chronic pain, trying to get some relief in my knees after having them both replaced. I told her the doctor must have botched it, since I was still in pain that felt just like before. I even wondered out loud if he'd replaced them at all.

She asked me a simple question: could my story be keeping me in the pain cycle?

What? This wasn't a story, this was real pain! And then it hit me... the only fact in the whole situation was: doctor performed a knee replacement. So boring. Everything else, "he botched it," "he didn't even really do it," was opinion I'd been treating as gospel. Six months into working with her, my pain had dropped. My knees didn't need fixing. My story did.

(To be clear: I'm not saying this is the case for every person in physical pain, so please don't go tell your achy friend to just change their story. It's more nuanced than that. But for me, in that moment? It was the problem.)

Here's the part that gets people, coaches included: when you're inside your own story, it's almost impossible to see that it is a story. I needed someone outside my own head to hand me the F/O worksheet again.

Third graders could've told you the difference between fact and opinion. Somewhere between then and now, most of us stopped grading ourselves.

High five! ✋ 

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