Imagined or Real? Why Your Brain Believes Everything You Tell It.

The Condor in the Paddock — Why Story Shapes Reality

There’s a story about a condor raised among geese, and she learnt the choreography of paddling ponds, not soaring cliffs. Even though she had powerful wings, she tucked them tight. She lived within fences because the voices around her said, “This is who you are.” Many of us know that feeling, not because we lack capacity, but because the brain loyally mirrors the stories we rehearse. When we change the story, we change the sky we’re able to fly in.

The Chemistry of Choice

We are born with a nervous system designed to learn, and our brain is exquisitely plastic; it keeps firing and wiring according to where you place your attention and what you repeatedly rehearse. This repetition becomes a relationship in which a thought rehearsed often enough swells into a feeling, and that feeling settles into a familiar state that shapes behaviour and, over time, becomes identity. Without noticing, we can script a way of being that doesn’t belong to our deeper truth, like a condor becoming very good at being a goose.

Fire Together, Wire Together

Neuroscience has a simple phrase: "neurons that fire together, wire together."

If most of your attention lands on what isn’t working, like the struggle, gossip, blame, and the daily loop of not enough, those circuits grow stronger, and your body learns the chemistry of survival. Your days quietly organise themselves around proving your story true, and it feels real because your system is beautifully efficient at making it so.

But there is a turnaround when we shift our attention to how we want to show up, to what is working, to gratitude, or to having clear accountability for our choices and results. Your brain then fires and wires in a different sequence, proving a different story to be true.

The magic is that your brain cannot tell the difference between what is real, imagined, thought, or spoken, it believes and follows whatever you feed it. The condor thought she was a goose, and her brain organised itself around this script until the script became a false belief.

Our Words Create Worlds

The stories we tell ourselves become the realities we live. The words we use to describe our experiences become our experiences, for every thought we have, every phrase we speak, tells our nervous system what matters and what to prepare for.

So, if our inner language sounds like, I have no choice, I’m stressed out, our nervous system responds with adrenaline and cortisol, our shoulders tighten, our vision narrows, our breath becomes quick and shallow, and our fight-or-flight responses engage. However, if your language shifts to I choose, I decide, I have clear boundaries, the same system receives a different instruction, activating serotonin and oxytocin, and our breath deepens and slows, the body relaxes, the prefrontal executive returns, and new possibilities emerge.

Think of the flock saying, “We don’t fly that high.” The condor hears it every day until it sounds like the truth. Many of us inherited similar ceilings, families that didn’t model rest, workplaces that glorify busyness, and cultures that confuse self-neglect with devotion.

However, when we are reminded of how powerful our rehearsal has been, we are also reminded of how powerful our next rehearsal can be.

What we think about comes about

One Simple Practice to check in

Notice what you are creating: check in each morning, before you get out of the car, at your desk, in a supermarket queue, or as you put the kettle on.

• Notice your thoughts. What story am I telling myself?

• Notice your language. What words am I using, internally or aloud?

• Notice your feelings. What’s present, what do I feel in this moment?

• Notice your behaviours. How am I breathing, standing, feeling, replying, acting?

Then ask, with kindness: Are these the thoughts, words, feelings, and behaviours I want to keep rehearsing?

If yes, breathe them in and let them land. If not, choose one small change, a new thought, a kinder phrase, a gentler breath, a truer action, repeat often, repetition changes reality.

When you choose your next thought, word, feeling, and small action with kindness, the condor in you remembers her wings and the life you rehearse, imagined or real, becomes the sky you rise to.