Breaking Free from Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs)

The multipurpose room at Summit School in Ahwatukee was packed. Rows of folding chairs, parents crammed in shoulder to shoulder, the kind of crowd that fills up a gym on championship day but for graduations. The air was thick, humid, smelling like new carpet cleaner and that particular perfume-cologne-deodorant soup that happens when you cram two hundred people into a room built for half that many.

My son Colby was there in that sea of eighth graders lined up in the front row, fidgeting in a crisp white button-down underneath the blue graduation robe. I was there for him, obviously, the whole reason I’d taken the afternoon off, the whole reason I was sitting in a folding chair with my knees jammed against the seat in front of me. But I had another connection to that stage too, one that snuck up on me a little as the ceremony went on.

A few years earlier, I’d coached a sixth grade basketball team that included a lot of the kids now walking across that stage. We were bad. Not scrappy-underdog bad, actually bad, the kind of team that got run off the court by bigger, faster, more coordinated squads every single week. We had heart and we had fight and we lost more than we won, and I loved every minute of it anyway. The next year, that same group moved up to varsity under the real coach, Mr. Pray, and Colby made the team as a seventh grader. They won the state championship. I wasn’t on the bench for that one. I’d handed them off, done my year in the trenches with the JV group, and watched from the stands as the kids I’d coached through all that losing turned into champions under somebody else. Last year, as eighth graders, they’d come close to doing it again.

So when a few of those kids spotted me in the crowd before the ceremony started and came over for hugs, telling me they were excited, some of them nervous about high school, most of them headed to Brophy with Colby, I felt something more complicated than just pride. I was proud, genuinely. But underneath it was a quieter voice keeping score in a way I didn’t ask it to. You weren’t there for the championship. You did the unglamorous part and somebody else got the banner. You were good enough to build them, not good enough to finish with them. I didn’t say any of that out loud. I just hugged a few thirteen year olds and told them how proud I was and let the other thing sit there, uninvited, the way it always does.

Then Mr. Pray got up to speak.

He didn’t have notes. He didn’t need them. He’d coached these same kids through those championships, taught them more than just basketball, and the room knew it. Parents sat forward. Kids actually stopped fidgeting.

“I’m not going to stand up here and tell you how to be successful,” he said. His voice filled that room the way voices do when they actually have something to say. “I’m going to tell you one thing. One thing that will matter more than grades, more than sports, more than any of the stuff you think matters right now.”

He paused. The room was quiet.

“Don’t let the ANTs get into your brain.”

He let that hang for a second, then explained. Automatic Negative Thoughts. The voice that tells you you’re not good enough. The voice that says you shouldn’t bother trying because you’ll probably fail anyway. The voice that whispers that everyone else has figured it out and you’re the only one who hasn’t. That voice. Recognize it for what it is, he said. Call it by name. And then push it out.

I sat there half listening to a middle school graduation speech and half doing an inventory of my own ANTs from twenty minutes earlier, the ones about a championship banner I never touched. Funny thing about a coach named Mr. Pray telling a room full of kids to fight off the voice in their head. I don’t think he meant it literally. But I’ve thought about it exactly that way ever since.

These days I hear his voice most mornings around 8 a.m., sitting at my desk with my coffee getting cold, laptop open to my email, staring at the query letter I’ve rewritten seventeen times.

The ANTs show up without fail.

Nobody’s going to want this. You’ve spent five years on it already. Who are you to think you can do this?

Just revise one more time. Keep it safe. Keep working on it forever. That’s better than finding out you’re not good enough.

All those other authors have agents, have deals, have their books on shelves. Look at you. Still writing query letters. Still trying.

The voice is so familiar by now that some mornings I don’t even notice it’s there until I realize I’ve spent an hour rewriting the same paragraph I rewrote yesterday. It’s like a worm burrowing in, the way Pink Floyd once sang about it, except these worms whisper instead of scream, and somehow that’s worse. It’s the same voice that sat next to me on those folding chairs, keeping score about a championship I helped build and didn’t get to stand under. It doesn’t care what the project is. It just wants credit for stopping you before you find out whether you were good enough.

But Mr. Pray was right about one thing. The only way through them is to keep moving. I didn’t get a banner for that sixth grade season, but those kids learned how to lose without quitting, which turned out to matter more than the year I wasn’t there for. I write another page anyway. Send another query anyway. The ANT telling me nobody wants this book doesn’t get a vote on whether I finish it.

Colby’s off to high school now. Brophy, same as most of the kids who hugged me that day. He’s got his own version of that voice waiting for him somewhere in freshman year, the one that’ll tell him he’s not fast enough, not good enough, not whatever enough, because that voice finds everybody eventually. I hope somebody tells him what Mr. Pray told that room. I hope he remembers it the way I have.

That’s what Mr. Pray was actually teaching us that day. Not how to win at basketball. How to win against yourself, and how to keep showing up even when you didn’t get the banner, even when the ANTs are keeping score in a language that has nothing to do with what actually matters.