Photo by Zach Reiner on Unsplash

I’m writing this with sore calves and a slight limp that’s finally starting to fade. Two days ago, my family and I hiked 11 miles up and over Mount Washington — totally green, mostly unprepared, and somehow, it worked out beautifully. But this post isn’t really about hiking. It’s about the thing that made the hike work, and how that same thing shows up everywhere else in our lives if we’re paying attention.

The Backstory

We were on the last leg of a family trip — Maine, then North Conway, New Hampshire, now Lake George. In North Conway, my husband really wanted to summit Mount Washington. Some friends had done a similar hut-to-hut trip with their twins, who happen to be around my oldest daughter’s age, so our reasoning was basically: if they could do it, we could too. I did minimal research. I booked the hut. That was about it.

It wasn’t until we were standing in the hut, looking at the trail map, adding up the mileage cues — .6, .3, 1.2 — that it hit me: this was a genuinely long, hard hike. And right on cue, the doubt spiral started. Did we under-prepare? Are the kids actually up for this? Should we have looked into this more?

We did it anyway. The weather cooperated, our legs worked, and 11 miles later, we made it back to the car. But looking back, the thing that made the day succeed wasn’t the good weather or our physical health, though I’m grateful for both. It was that my husband and I believed, from the start, that our kids could do it — and that we, as a family, would get through the hard parts together.

Why Belief Is the Foundation

I keep coming back to this idea because I’ve seen it play out in far more emotionally loaded places than a mountain trail.

When I was sleep training my oldest, I remember reading a chapter that stuck with me: the success of sleep training has less to do with technique and more to do with whether you believe your child can do it. I believed she was ready. That belief changed my posture, my tone, what was happening in my nervous system as I responded to her at 2 a.m. Was it still hard? Yes. But it worked, almost embarrassingly easily, in a way that had everything to do with the certainty I walked in with.

The same thing happened in my marriage. Early on, especially through the fog of new parenthood and COVID, I went through real stretches of doubt — wondering if I’d married the right person, if this was actually going to work. It wasn’t until I leaned into the belief that we would make it, that we were fully in it together, that things started to shift. Not because the hard stuff disappeared, but because my nervous system stopped bracing for failure.

That’s the pattern: belief changes your nervous system state, which changes your feelings, which changes your thoughts, which changes how you show up, how you speak, how you hold your body — and all of that shapes how the people around you respond to you. On the trail, if I’d let my doubt take over and started saying, “I can’t believe we did this to the kids,” they would have fed off that. Instead, even in the one moment I quietly thought a much less polite version of “forget this,” I came back to: we’re going to do this, it’s going to be hard, and we’re going to get through it.

Belief and Worthiness

There’s a second layer to this I want to name, because it’s just as important: believing something is possible is only half the equation. You also have to believe you’re worthy of it.

I think about this every time I look at my engagement ring. When my now-husband and I were ring shopping, I steered him toward something small because I didn’t feel worthy of anything more — I was worried about being “too much,” worried about what it said about me. He ended up having a ring made anyway, based on a photo I’d sent him months earlier. When it arrived, I felt genuinely uncomfortable wearing it. That discomfort didn’t fully lift until a woman in her 70s, sitting next to me on a plane, looked me dead in the eye and said, “There is no such thing as too much bling. You wear that ring and you wear it proud.” I’ve worn it proudly ever since.

That’s the piece I don’t want you to miss: it’s not enough to believe an outcome is achievable. You have to believe you deserve it — whether that’s a well-rested household, a thriving marriage, or something as simple (and not simple at all) as a ring you actually let yourself love.

Your Invitation

So here’s what I’m asking you to sit with: where in your life right now do you have one foot, or both feet, out the door on an outcome you actually want? In your parenting, your relationship, your work, your own sense of what you’re allowed to desire?

This isn’t magical thinking, and it’s not about ignoring real constraints or biology or circumstance. It’s about noticing the doubtful, cynical voice that’s quietly setting you up to fail — and choosing, on purpose, to turn up the dial on the belief that it’s possible instead. That the outcome you want is achievable. That you’re worthy of it.