Have You Actually Checked?
There are doors in your life you probably stopped checking a long time ago.
Maybe you tried more than once and the answer really was no. After enough rounds of getting your hopes up, doing the work, and ending up disappointed again, you stopped asking.
That decision can feel completely reasonable, and sometimes it is. A closed door is a closed door, and accepting reality can save years of wasted effort.
The problem comes when an old answer keeps making decisions long after the circumstances around it have changed.
In Episode 4, The Possibility You Haven't Considered Yet, we explored the difference between impossible and invisible. Impossible has evidence behind it. Invisible means you can't currently see the path. Standing inside your own life, those two can feel exactly the same.
So pick one area where you've already decided how the story ends. You're going to check it.
Start With the Sentence
Write down one possibility you've dismissed. Use the exact language you normally use in your head.
"I could never make enough money doing that."
"I'm too old to start over."
"I'll never meet anyone."
"I couldn't run a business."
"My body can't do that anymore."
"They would never give me a chance."
Keep your sentence plain. You're trying to catch the conclusion you already live from.
Now read it again and underline the part you can actually prove. Many sentences that sound factual contain very little verified information.
"I applied for three jobs and didn't get an offer" can be verified. "No one wants to hire someone like me" reaches much further.
"I tried the business before and lost money" describes an event. "I can't build a successful business" predicts every version you could attempt from this point forward.
Past experience deserves to be taken seriously. It gives you information. The question is how much information it really gives you.
Make Two Columns
Take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. Write FACTS on the left and ASSUMPTIONS on the right.
Go back to the possibility you chose. Under FACTS, write only what someone else could independently verify.
If you wrote "I could never make a living doing what I actually care about," your facts might include:
- My current job pays $____ a year.
- I've never earned money from this particular skill.
- I have no paying clients today.
- I'd need about $____ each month to replace my current income.
Then move to the assumption side. You may find sentences such as:
"Nobody would pay me enough."
"The market is already too crowded."
"I missed my chance."
"I'd probably fail."
"I don't know enough yet."
Some of those assumptions may eventually prove accurate. For now, you're giving them the correct label until you have evidence, and the label matters: an assumption that gets treated as a fact never has to face a test.
Find Out How Old Your Information Is
Look at your facts again. When did you learn them?
Circumstances change while conclusions stay surprisingly stable. A career option you investigated ten years ago may look different today. The person who rejected your idea five years ago was answering for themselves at that moment. A skill you struggled with before may be easier now because you know more, have different resources, or approach it differently. You've changed too.
So add another heading underneath your two columns:
WHAT HAVE I ACTUALLY CHECKED RECENTLY?
Be precise.
Have you looked at the current requirements?
Asked someone doing it now?
Checked the cost?
Made the phone call?
Looked at openings?
Asked whether the policy changed?
Requested the information instead of assuming what the answer would be?
This is where awareness becomes useful. You can finally see which parts of your conclusion came from current evidence and which parts have been carried forward automatically.
Check Whether You Changed the Input
Repeated disappointment can provide strong evidence about an approach. Look closely at what you repeated.
Suppose someone has applied for ten jobs and received ten rejections. That matters. Now examine the ten applications.
Were they for similar positions?
Was the same resume used?
Were the qualifications roughly the same each time?
Did the person apply through the same channel?
Did anything meaningful change between attempt one and attempt ten?
Ten similar attempts tell you quite a bit about those attempts. They provide much less information about approaches you've never tested.
This works outside of careers too. Someone may have experienced several painful relationships while choosing similar partners, ignoring the same early warning signs, or communicating in familiar ways. A person may have tried repeatedly to improve their health while returning to the same routine each time. A business owner may have launched several offers to the same audience using nearly identical messaging.
The repeated result is useful data. Study it closely enough to discover what it actually describes.
Ask Someone With a Different View
Choose one person whose judgment you trust and who has useful experience with the area you're examining.
Tell them the facts first. Leave your prediction out for a minute.
For example:
"I've applied for three internal positions during the past two years and didn't get any of them. I haven't applied outside my organization. I have seven years of experience in this field."
Then ask:
"What would you check next if this were your situation?"
Listen for information. They may see an option you missed. They may also confirm that a limitation is real. Either answer helps.
You're gathering evidence, which is much more useful than asking someone to reassure you.
Choose a Test Small Enough to Complete
Now look at the possibility again. You don't need to commit to the whole path. Choose one action that gives you new information.
Send one email.
Look up the requirements.
Request the application.
Price the certification.
Talk to someone in the field.
Make the appointment.
Ask the uncomfortable question.
Whatever happens, you come away with evidence. A success tells you something, a failure tells you something, and either way your understanding of the situation is more current than it was.
Let Some Doors Stay Closed
You may discover that your original conclusion was accurate. That answer is useful too. There's freedom in knowing you checked. You can stop spending energy wondering whether fear made the choice for you, because the decision now rests on information you trust.
Other times, the answer will be less settled than you thought. The door might be open a few inches. Or the first step might be available even though the rest of the route is still unclear. You only need enough information to decide whether the next step deserves a test.
Your Charlie Challenge
Before the week ends, complete this page:
The possibility I dismissed:
________________________________
What I currently believe about it:
________________________________
Facts I can verify:
________________________________
________________________________
Assumptions I've been treating as facts:
________________________________
________________________________
The last time I actually checked:
________________________________
One source of current information I can consult:
________________________________
One small action that would give me new evidence:
________________________________
Then do the action.
You're allowed to keep a door closed after you examine it. You're also allowed to discover that an old conclusion has been making a decision that belongs to the person you are today.
That's the Marie Charlie movement in practice. Awareness helps you catch the assumption. Action gives you something current to evaluate. And sometimes the possibility you thought was gone was simply waiting for you to check again.
Read the full video transcript
[00:00:00] Have you ever thought about doing this?" The question was tossed across Julian's desk in the middle of an ordinary afternoon. He laughed, gave a practical answer, and went back to work. But the question followed him home. Nothing in his circumstances changed that day. What changed was the edge of what he could see I'm Marie, and this is Marie Charlie, where awareness and action work together to move a life forward.
This episode is about possibilities that are invisible from your current position. By the end, you'll choose one option you dismissed before you genuinely examined it and test it against the facts you have now. Think of one door you have labeled as closed. Don't force yourself to believe it's open. Ask a cleaner question, have I actually checked?
Julian eventually did. The result mattered, but the more important change happened before the [00:01:00] result when an assumption finally had to answer to evidence we don't usually give up because the future is impossible. We give up because the future has become invisible to us. We look at what's happening right now, and without meaning to, we turn it into a prediction. This is how it is, so this is how it's always gonna be. Impossible and invisible are not the same thing, but when we're in the middle of life, especially in pain, uncertainty, or waiting, we confuse the two constantly.
We think, "Because I can't see the answer, there must not be an answer." We think, "Because I can't see the door, there must not be a door." Whatever it is, something subtle starts happening. Your current circumstances slowly become your expectation for the future, and that's where possibility begins to disappear.
One of the greatest mistakes we make is confusing current visibility with ultimate possibility. Current visibility means this [00:02:00] is what I can see from where I'm standing right now. Ultimate possibility means this is what life may still contain even if I can't see it yet. Those two things are not the same. Possibility also gets trained out of us over time, and it's usually isn't one big event. It's small. You try something and it doesn't work, so you file that away as evidence.
You get disappointed a second time, and the file gets a little thicker. By the 10th disappointment, you're not even testing anymore. You're just referencing the file. Here's a way to tell which one you're actually facing. Something is impossible if it violates a fact that you could verify. You cannot go back and relive your 20s.
That's a closed door, full stop. Something is invisible if the only evidence against it is your own file of past disappointments. "I'll never find someone who actually gets me," isn't a verified fact. It's a [00:03:00] prediction built entirely from a sample size of however many times you've tried it and it didn't work out yet, which is real information, but it isn't the same thing as proof the door is welded shut. You might be thinking, "But what if I've genuinely tried enough times to know?" That's worth taking seriously, not waving away. Here's an honest check. Has the input actually varied across your attempts, or have the attempts mostly looked the same just with different names and dates attached? A file built from 10 similar attempts tells you about that specific approach.
It doesn't automatically tell you about every door you haven't tried yet. And this doesn't stay confined to one closed door. Once the file gets thick enough in one area, it tends to bleed into others. Give up on finding the right relationship, and you might quietly stop believing a new friendship could go anywhere either.
Give up on the career pivot, and you might actually stop applying for the [00:04:00] internal promotion too. Invisibility left unexamined has a way of fogging up rooms it was never actually about. This matters for more than how the future feels to imagine. It shapes what you actually attempt today. A closed file doesn't just predict disappointment.
It prevents the very attempts that could update it. You stop applying so you never find out if the market changed. You stop reaching out so you never find the friendship that might have gone somewhere. The file protects itself by making sure it never has to be tested again. There's a particular kind of exhaustion behind most closed files worth naming honestly.
It's rarely that you never believed in the possibility at all. It's that you believed hard more than once and the disappointment cost something real each time.
Calling the door impossible instead of just invisible, in a strange way, protective. It means you never have to risk that particular hope [00:05:00] again, which makes sense as a short-term relief. It just isn't the same thing as the door actually being closed Theo had a marriage end after many years, and in the middle of it, it didn't feel like a transition, it felt like a collapse. Every morning seemed to confirm the same sentence, "This is how my life will always feel now." For a while, all he could hold onto was one small opening, "Maybe this isn't the end of my story."
Little by little, things shifted. He started taking walks again. He reconnected with old friends. He remembered a hobby he had dropped years earlier. Years later, Theo describes the season as one of the hardest things he's ever lived through, and also the beginning of a chapter he couldn't have imagined at that time.
The event didn't change. His perspective changed. What's easy to miss in Theo's story is how ordinary the turning point actually was. It wasn't a single revelation. It was a walk he almost didn't take on a day he almost didn't get out of bed that [00:06:00] happened to remind him his body still worked and the world was still out there.
The file didn't get overturned by an argument. It got a single new page added to it, and then another, until there were finally enough new pages to outweigh the old ones
Imagine standing inside a giant maze. Every direction you look, all you can see are walls. If someone asked, "Do you think there's an exit?" You might say, "I don't think so." And from your perspective, that would feel completely reasonable. Now imagine someone looking at that same maze from above. From their view, they can see three or four paths that lead straight to the exit.
The maze hasn't changed. The walls haven't moved. Only the perspective has changed. Life works that way more often than we realize. When we're inside our own situation, we can only see the walls directly in front of us. We don't see the conversation that hasn't happened yet. We don't see the person we haven't met yet.
And because we can't see it, we start assuming it isn't real. Go [00:07:00] looking for a moment at your own maze, not the wall everyone knows you're up against, the one you've stopped mentioning out loud because you've decided the conversation is closed. It's usually smaller and quieter than the dramatic version, and it's usually been standing there longer than you'd guess.
It's worth saying, too, that other people can genuinely help widen the view, which is different from other people just cheering you on. A mentor who's actually stood where you're trying to go, a friend who's solved a version of the exact wall you're facing, their view from above isn't magic. It's just a different vantage point on walls you've been staring at from one angle for too long.
Nobody needs to airlift you out of the maze for your situation to change. You just need to remember that the helicopter view exists, that somewhere a wider picture is true, even from inside the walls. The maze shows up in ordinary [00:08:00] places too. Someone stuck in a job they've outgrown might genuinely believe there's nowhere else for their specific skill set, right up until the conversation with someone outside their industry reveals three paths they had never have found from inside their own walls.
Nobody lied to them. Their view was just limited to what their particular corridor of the maze could show. There's a version of this maze most people don't expect. Sometimes the exit was visible the entire time, just from the angle you stopped checking. A parent stuck in the same argument with a teenager for years might discover the exit was a single sentence they'd never actually tried.
Not a clever strategy, just an honest question they'd been too proud or too hurt to ask directly. The maze doesn't always require new walls to be found. Sometimes it requires walking back to a corner you wrote off too early. Widening the view once doesn't keep it wide forever, and it helps to expect that. You'll [00:09:00] likely walk back into a narrower version of the same maze the next time something goes wrong. That's not a failure of this exercise. It's just how attention works under stress. The goal isn't to hold onto the helicopter view permanently.
It's just to remember it exists a little faster the next time the walls start closing back in. Psychologist Ellen Langer's work on mindfulness emphasizes active noticing. Look for novelty, context, and distinctions instead of responding from a fixed category. That fits this episode because an invisible possibility often becomes visible when our attention stops treating the current view as complete.
You may have heard dramatic claims about Langer's counterclockwise study with older men. The study is frequently described as proof that changing expectations can reverse aging. The sample was small, and the strongest popular claims go beyond what the evidence can safely carry. I would rather keep the useful [00:10:00] idea and leave the miracle language alone.
The useful idea is that the context and the expectation can influence behavior, attention, and experience. They are influences, not magic switches Dweck's research adds a second piece. When people believe a capacity can develop, they're generally more willing to engage with challenge, use strategies, and seek help.
A growth mindset is not a promise that every door opens. It's a willingness to gather information before declaring the door permanent. Put those ideas together and possibility becomes a practice of attention. Notice more, ask better questions, look for support, test the assumption. Julian's colleague did not create a new path out of thin air.
The question widened Julian's field of view enough for him to see an option he had never investigated. That is the kind of possibility we can work with. Grounded, testable, and still capable of surprising us
Possibility does [00:11:00] not require endless options. Too many options can become another form of hiding. We are looking for one credible opening, something supported enough to test and uncertain enough that the test can teach you something.
A fact is something you can verify. An assumption is a meaning you've added to the fact. A fact might be, "I applied for three jobs and didn't get them." An assumption might be, "No one will ever hire me." A fact might be, "I've never built a business before." An assumption might be, "I'm not capable of building one."
Here's a quick test for telling two apart under pressure. A fact survives being said flatly without any emotional weight attached. Three jobs, no offers is just data. An assumption needs the emotional weight to survive. Strip the drama out, no one will ever hire me, and what's left is a guess about the future dressed up as a settled matter.
A fact may be real, but the assumption may be the thing that's actually closing the future. We build entire identities [00:12:00] around assumptions we've never questioned. But what if they're conclusions you made while you were standing inside the maze? Conclusions that made sense from where you were standing but were never the full picture.
Some people, once they hear, "Challenge your assumptions," swing into ignoring facts that are genuinely useful, refusing to notice a real pattern because acknowledging it feels too much like giving in. That's not possibility either. Possibility isn't pretending the three rejections didn't happen. It's making sure the story you built from them is actually the smallest, most accurate one available, not the biggest, most permanent one.
A useful gut check, if you described the assumption to someone whose judgment you trust, would it hold up as a reasonable read of facts, or would they raise an eyebrow at you about how far you took that story? Assumptions that survive that conversation are worth taking seriously. Most don't survive it, in [00:13:00] which that tells you something about how much weight they should actually be carrying.
One of the greatest gifts awareness has given me is this: I don't have to know exactly how every day will unfold. I only need to stay open enough to recognize an opportunity when it appears. Marie reveals the path, Charlie walks it. Awareness helps you notice the possibility. Action helps you step towards it.
Sometimes another person sees a possibility because they are not carrying your history with it. They do not remember the first rejection, the embarrassing attempt, or the year you were too depleted to follow through. Their view can be incomplete, and it can also be less crowded. You don't have to accept someone else's vision of your life.
Let it become a question. What are they seeing? What information did they have? What information are they missing? Which assumption of yours did their suggestion disturb? Possibility becomes useful when it [00:14:00] survives contact with reality. Make the phone call. Read the requirements. Ask someone already doing it.
Price the first step. A possibility that fails an honest test still gives you information. A possibility dismissed without a test gives you only the comfort of staying certain For the next seven days, write down one possibility you've completely dismissed. Just one. Write it down honestly as you can. Then draw a line down the middle of the page, and on one side, facts that support this limitation, and on the other side, assumptions that support this limitation. Be brutally honest with yourself.
And let's go ahead and give some examples across different areas of life. In a career, it might be, "I could never make a living doing the thing I actually care about." In a relationship, it might be, "The right person doesn't exist for someone like me." In health, it might be, "My body has already decided how this goes."
The setting changes, but the pattern holds – a genuinely thick [00:15:00] file mistaken for a locked door. Then ask one more question: If I believed another possibility existed, what's one small step I'd take this week? Not 10 steps, not a life overhaul, one step. Make the call, send the message, research the class, ask the question.
Julian's version of that step was small enough to almost feel silly. He didn't quit his job or draft a business plan. He replied to that one offhand comment from the beginning of this episode with the actual question instead of the usual laugh it off. That single reply the whole reason the next five years look nothing like the 20 before them.
The step rarely needs to be dramatic. It just needs to be the one you were avoiding. Before you choose your step, pause on one more thing. Out of everything currently filed under impossible, which one is actually just invisible, and which one is genuinely a closed door you've made peace with? Not everything on the list needs reopening.
Discernment here means [00:16:00] being honest about which file is worth reopening this week and letting the rest sit for now. If you sit down to do this and the page stays blank for a while, that's all right. Naming the possibility you've dismissed is sometimes the hardest part of the whole exercise. Don't force it.
Just stay with the question for the week. And if the small step you take doesn't lead anywhere obvious right away, that's not the proof the door was actually closed. One step rarely reveals the whole path. It just adds one new page to a file that's been running for a long time on old information, and one new page is enough to start changing what the file actually says.
a small real step does more here than a big resolution would. A resolution is just a new prediction. The part of you that has learned not to fully trust predictions, you've made a few that didn't stick. The actual step, however small, is something the file has to record as evidence, whether or not it goes well. That's the whole mechanism. Not forcing [00:17:00] belief, just feeding the file something newer than it's used to running on. This doesn't end when the video does either. The next time you catch yourself saying, "That's just not possible for me," that's your cue to run the same check.
Is this actually a closed door or just a thick file? Most of the time, you won't have a notebook handy. Just asking the question silently is usually enough to loosen the file's grip just a little. That's the real practice. Not the one exercise finished once, but the habit of pausing on the word impossible a little sooner each time it shows up.
In the comments, tell me one possibility you're willing to reconsider this week. I read them, and I genuinely like to know what you're carrying
Your future isn't limited by what you can currently see. It becomes limited when you stop believing there's more to see. There are things in your life right now you once couldn't have predicted. People you know now who were once strangers. Strengths [00:18:00] you have now that were once undeveloped.
Julian didn't see his new career from inside his old one. Theo didn't see his new chapter from inside the grief of the old one. And you may not be able to see yours yet either. That's not proof it isn't coming. It may just mean you haven't reached the place where it becomes visible. If you take nothing else from this episode, take this. The file you've been running on was built honestly out of real disappointment by a version of you protecting itself the only way it knew how.
That file was never wrong to exist. It's just gotten old enough now that it's worth updating with whatever you learn this week. Awareness opens the door, action walks through it, and transformation happens on the other side. None of this asks you to trust blindly that everything works out. It only asks you to stop confusing the walls you currently see with the entire maze and to take one step towards a corner you haven't checked yet.
And once you start believing a new possibility exists, [00:19:00] it raises a harder question. Who would you need to become to actually step into it? Because sometimes the next door doesn't just require a new opportunity, it requires a new sense of who you are and what you're capable of becoming. That's exactly where we're headed next in the next episode, the person you believe you are.
You'll see exactly how the identity you've been quietly carrying, not just your circumstances, has been deciding which doors you're willing to walk through, and the one question that starts changing which doors you can even see. I'm Marie, this is Marie Charlie, and until next time, take care.