You’re not your Thoughts. You’re not your Feelings.

Erikjan Lantink
3 min readNov 24, 2023

One of the more complex concepts to grasp is that who we are is not defined by our thoughts or feelings.

Thoughts and feelings come and go. They’re as fluid as the water coming out of your faucet. You turn it on, and it’s there. You turn it off, and it’s gone.

If only it were that simple with our thoughts and feelings.

Our brain is a powerful part of our body. It can make or break us if we’re not careful and believe everything happening inside our brains.

When people who are close to us keep repeating the same message to us repeatedly, we may eventually believe what’s being said to us.

Most of our beliefs about ourselves were created when we were younger when our parents kept repeating the same type of behavioral messages to us.

Beliefs are thoughts that have been repeated to us frequently.

Hearing from a very young age that you’re not good enough or, respectively, you’re the best impacts later behavior.

Low self-esteem or high self-esteem may be the consequence of such repeated messages.

If you suffer from low self-esteem and keep telling yourself this, you’re building a self-fulfilling prophecy. You must look at…

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Erikjan Lantink

Business & Leadership coach. Interim Leader. Writer. Speaker. Former Retail Executive (general management; operations; HR)