Evidence Columns + Distancing Statements (Rewriting Speaking Beliefs)
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
Aliénor Hunter went from being unable to email a storage manager for her duvet to coaching public speaking, and the engine of that change was a repeatable belief-testing routine she learned in therapy. Instead of drilling delivery skills, you treat the thoughts behind the silence as testable claims. You capture the thoughts in writing during the week, split a page into evidence for and evidence against, then deliberately hunt the 'against' column, which confirmation bias makes hardest to see. Reading it back on paper is what breaks the belief, because a claim like 'people hate me when I speak' visibly fails to stack up. Distancing phrases ('I'm thinking that...', 'I'm noticing that I'm thinking that...') then downgrade a live thought from fact to weather. The same routine dismantles the invented politeness rules that keep shy people quiet.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Capture the thoughts in writing during the week
Through the week, write down the actual sentences running through your head about yourself and your speaking: I'm not good enough, I'm bad at speaking, people don't like me when I speak, I say silly things. Don't edit them into something reasonable, record them as they arrive.
Pro tip Beliefs feel easy to hold until they're written down, at which point you get to ask whether you really walk around all day believing that.
- 2
Split the page into evidence for and evidence against
Take one thought and draw two columns: evidence FOR the thought, and evidence AGAINST it. This turns a mood into a claim that has to be supported by things that actually happened in your week.
Watch out Doing this in your head does not work. The mind is too fast and too partisan; the whole mechanism depends on seeing it on paper.
- 3
Go out into the world and collect the FOR evidence
This column fills itself easily: someone looked away while you were speaking, someone got distracted, a conversation fizzled. Write those down without arguing with them.
Watch out Notice how automatic this column is. That ease is the bias you're about to correct for, not proof the belief is true.
- 4
Hunt the AGAINST evidence deliberately
Ask concrete questions each day: did anyone listen to me when I was speaking, did I have a fun time, did I make a friend, did someone invite me back. You are wired to look for evidence for what you already believe, so this column has to be worked at rather than waited for.
Pro tip Use questions with binary answers. 'Did anyone listen?' is findable; 'was I likeable?' is not.
Watch out Expect this column to feel almost impossible in the first weeks. That difficulty is the symptom, not a verdict.
- 5
Read the page back and check whether the belief holds
Look at the two columns side by side. Typically there is an overwhelming amount of evidence against the belief that you're a failure and people hate you, and a very small amount for it. The conclusion writes itself: it doesn't make sense to hold this belief so tightly.
Pro tip Ask whether the belief would stand up in a court of law. If it wouldn't, stop treating it as a fact about you.
- 6
Add distancing phrases to live thoughts
When a thought hits in the moment, prefix it. 'I am not good enough' becomes 'I'm thinking that I'm not good enough', said a few times, then 'I'm noticing that I'm thinking that I'm not good enough'. Each layer puts distance between the thought being right and the thought just being a thought you can choose to let go.
Pro tip Say it more than once. The lightness comes from repetition, not from the phrasing alone.
- 7
Attack the safety rules, then expect whack-a-mole
Alongside beliefs, list the rules you invented to keep yourself safe (never inconvenience anyone, never ask, always say no thank you) and test them the same way. Then keep running the loop weekly with real-world challenges, because confidence gained in shops tends to reveal insecurity that's moved somewhere else.
Pro tip Weekly challenges are the point: give someone a compliment, make a friend, call your mother. Sessions without the homework don't move you.
Watch out Confidence is devious. You get it in one area and the insecurity hides in another, so treat reappearance as normal progress, not relapse.
In the wild
One of Aliénor's invented rules was that accepting anything was an inconvenience. Offered a drink at someone's house, the old her would say no thank you, then no to water too, believing this was politeness. Tested against evidence, the rule collapsed: refusing everything actually reads as rude and makes the host work harder. Dismantling rules like this one, over a couple of years of weekly sessions, was what made her progressively more comfortable, because it was the first time she had considered that her way of seeing the world might simply be wrong.
→ The politeness rules that kept her silent were retired, and she became noticeably more comfortable and outgoing.
Years later, now a coach, Aliénor still catches herself imagining scenarios of failing while teaching a public speaking class. Rather than arguing with the image, she names it: 'I'm noticing that I'm thinking that I might do a bad job here, let's put that aside.' Adding the two phrases, noticing and thinking, makes the whole thing lighter, and the class goes ahead. She describes this as the one tool from therapy she still reaches for regularly.
→ A pre-class anxiety spiral gets defused in seconds instead of running the session.
Common mistakes
Running the argument in your head
The mind is too powerful and too fast to lose an argument with itself. Without a written page, you'll simply re-run the belief with a new coat of reasoning. Writing it out is what makes the imbalance between the columns undeniable.
Only filling the 'evidence for' column
Confirmation bias makes supporting evidence effortless and disconfirming evidence nearly invisible. If the against column is empty you haven't disproved anything, you've just documented the bias. Ask specific, answerable questions to force it open.
Expecting one clean, permanent fix
Aliénor describes it as whack-a-mole: confident with cashiers, then newly insecure at a party. Treating the reappearance as failure is how people quit. It took her roughly two years of weekly work, with challenges done between sessions.
From the transcript
“I would write them down and then there would be this column that would be evidence for and this column that was evidence against”
“my beliefs don't really stack up to the evidence that I see in my day-to-day life”
“and then you add another phrase I'm noticing that I'm thinking that I'm not good enough”
From the episode
5 Powerful Habits To Build Unshakeable Confidence - Aliénor Hunter (Ultraspeaking)
Aliénor Hunter (Ultraspeaking)