The Only Thing We Really Need To Know

Personal transformation rests on two ingredients that are easy to name and hard to live: humility and trust. Without them, change doesn’t begin, and if it begins, it doesn’t last.

Humility comes first, and it usually arrives uninvited. Nobody wakes up eager to reinvent themselves. Something has to crack open first — some experience that stops us and forces us to admit that what we’ve been doing isn’t working. Look at Alexander, on the rise as a respected orator in Australia, watching his career build momentum. Then came the audible intakes of breath in performance, the hoarseness, and eventually the total loss of his voice on stage. Whatever ambitions he’d been nursing collapsed into a single, humbling fact: something was wrong, and he couldn’t perform his way out of it.

The irony is that the trouble had been there his whole life. He’d had respiratory problems since childhood. But it took the public failure of his voice — at the exact moment he needed it most — to make the problem impossible to ignore. That’s how humbling experiences tend to work. They don’t create the problem; they reveal one that was already there.

Here’s the catch: recognizing that something is wrong almost always means recognizing that you have to change. That’s a much harder admission, especially when you have no idea how. It takes humility to say “something is wrong,” and it takes even more humility to add the second half of the sentence: “and I don’t know how to fix it.” That second admission is where most people stop. It’s also where transformation actually starts.

Trust is the second ingredient, and it’s trickier than humility because trust cuts both ways. Sometimes the very things that got us into trouble are things we trusted — assumptions we never questioned, feelings we treated as facts. Trust built on assumption is how we end up drinking the poison we mistook for medicine.

In Alexander work, the thing we most need to stop trusting is our kinesthetic sense of right and wrong.The brain automates whatever we repeat. Anything done often enough gets pushed down into the brain stem machinery so we don’t have to think about it. The upside is efficiency. The downside is that “familiar” starts to feel like “correct,” even when it isn’t. Our sense of what’s right becomes a report on what’s habitual. Trying harder to be right, in that state, only digs a deeper hole.

So one side of trust is learning to distrust the feeling of rightness itself. But there’s another side, and it’s just as important. Once you’ve tried procedures that produce genuinely better results, you have to learn to trust those — even when executing them feels wrong. Especially when it feels wrong. Because at first, it will. New coordination doesn’t come pre-approved by your nervous system. It shows up feeling foreign, awkward, sometimes flatly incorrect. If you wait for it to feel right before trusting it, you’ll never get there.

Marjorie Barstow had a wonderful phrase for this: take a gambling chance. The feelings you’re having don’t yet correspond to any positive outcome you’ve experienced. Fine. Go forward anyway and…JUST SEE WHAT HAPPENS! Because the alternative — reading the signs the same wrong way you’ve always read them — guarantees you’ll end up in the same place and that for sure, is exactly where you don’t want to be.

Lately I’ve been condensing all of this into a shorthand I share with my students: TBT — Trust, But Test. Trust enough to take the chance. Try something different, even if it feels strange. Then test. See what actually happened. Did you get the result you wanted? Did you drift back into your habit? Did you get something better than you expected? Stay open, like a scientist. The results will tell you the truth.

And in the end, that’s all any of us needs to know. Not what feels right. Not what we’ve always done. Just the truth about what actually happened. Everything real about change grows from there.