When One Bad Moment Rewrites Your Whole Story
Vince Morales is a mindset, self-image, and resilience coach. In addition, he is skilled in leadership consultation and development. From April 2016 to June 2017, Vince was a homeless veteran in San Diego, California. While homeless, he made a powerful decision to change his thinking and mindset, which led him to pursue life coaching.
Imagine a capable professional leaving a meeting after a colleague repeatedly dismisses a concern. The discomfort brings a quick explanation, “I am making too much of this.” Later, a supervisor praises the professional’s work. That experience receives another dismissal, “They would not say that if they knew how uncertain I feel.” In this hypothetical situation, both pain and accomplishment are denied a fair hearing.
What if the moment you keep using to explain who you are cannot support the conclusion you have drawn from it? Imagine delivering a presentation that engages the audience, then struggling with one question. By evening, you are calling the presentation a failure. By the next invitation, you are wondering whether you belong in front of an audience at all. The difficulty was real. But how did one difficult answer acquire the authority to define your ability?
In my book The Momentum Mind, I explore how the meaning we attach to setbacks can influence our ability to recover and move forward. That raises a question worth sitting with. When you say you are stuck, are you describing your present circumstances or repeating a verdict you reached about yourself during an earlier experience? Both deserve attention. They call for different responses.
A practical obstacle may require resources, preparation, or a change in conditions. A sweeping verdict requires scrutiny. Before accepting a conclusion that limits your future, examine whether the evidence is large enough to carry it.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his coauthor Jason Riis distinguished between two perspectives on our lives, the experiencing self and the remembering self. These are ways of understanding experience rather than separate personalities. One lives through the moments. The other looks back and evaluates them. Their assessments can differ significantly.[3]
The experiencing self is present while life unfolds. It feels the enjoyment of a conversation, the discomfort of an awkward exchange, and the relief when understanding returns. Its question is, “What am I experiencing right now?” Across an afternoon, it may encounter many different feelings. Those moments belong to the experience, even when they receive little attention afterward.
The remembering self answers a different question, “How was that experience overall?” It draws on memory to form an assessment. That assessment can give certain moments disproportionate influence, allowing an uncomfortable ending to overshadow earlier enjoyment. The distinction matters because our remembered evaluations can influence which experiences we choose to repeat or avoid.[3]
Consider the difference between feeling nervous during one part of a conversation and remembering the entire conversation as a disaster. The nervousness may be accurately remembered. The overall verdict still deserves examination. What else happened? Was there connection, useful information, or a moment of understanding that the summary leaves out?
For our self-image, I would extend the inquiry further, what happens when “That experience went badly” becomes “That is the kind of person I am”? We have moved from remembering an event to defining ourselves through it. Before giving that conclusion authority over our next decision, we should ask whether it represents the whole experience and whether that experience can justify such a broad judgment.
Their illustration is simple, a person enjoys a symphony recording until a scratch near the end produces an unpleasant sound. The ending appears to spoil the whole occasion in memory, although it cannot remove the enjoyment that already occurred. As Kahneman and Riis (2005) wrote, “The remembering self is sometimes simply wrong” (p. 286).
Research on painful medical procedures helps explain the distinction. Redelmeier and Kahneman (1996) found that patients’ retrospective evaluations were strongly related to the intensity of pain at the worst and final parts of the procedures. Their findings helped establish what is commonly called the peak-end rule, certain moments can carry disproportionate weight in an overall evaluation. This is a finding about particular kinds of remembered experience, not a formula that explains every memory or every life judgment.
For coaching, I would take the distinction as an invitation to examine another question, "What happens when our assessment of an experience becomes a statement about our identity?" That is an application of the research, and it deserves to be examined on its own terms.
Return to the presentation. “I struggled to answer that question” describes a specific difficulty. “The presentation was a failure” judges the whole performance. “I am not a capable speaker” generalizes across performances, circumstances, and time. Each statement makes a broader claim. Yet the evidence has not necessarily grown with it.
This is where accuracy becomes more demanding than either criticism or reassurance. Perhaps you did need more preparation. Perhaps the audience found the answer unclear. Those possibilities deserve investigation. They still do not establish everything you might be tempted to conclude about your potential. A useful assessment identifies what needs work and remains open to what further practice could reveal.
I spent 14 months as a homeless veteran in San Diego. That period is part of my personal history. So are my military service, law enforcement service, and the work I now do as a coach, leadership consultant, author, and regional manager in my other career. If I told you only about those 14 homeless months, I would be giving you a true account of one chapter while leaving you without the rest of the life needed to understand it.
Looking back from where I stand today, I can see the difference between acknowledging that chapter and treating it as a forecast. Homelessness described a condition I experienced. It could not tell the complete story of what I would later contribute. The work I do today belongs in the account, too.
“You can respect what you feel while examining what you conclude.” – Vince Morales
I would never reduce homelessness to a problem of attitude. Rebuilding a life involves practical needs and circumstances alongside personal choices. What my story allows me to say is narrower and more honest, a painful chapter can be real without being a sufficient description of a whole person. When we examine our past, we owe ourselves enough accuracy to include that distinction.
The question reaches beyond obvious self-criticism. How much of the evidence you use against yourself comes from periods when you had fewer resources, less experience, or very different responsibilities? A conclusion formed under those conditions may deserve to be revisited under the conditions you live in now. Ask what has changed before assuming that an old result predicts a new one.
Kahneman (2011) offered another relevant observation, “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it” (p. 402). He used this sentence to describe the focusing illusion, in which directing attention toward one aspect of life can exaggerate its weight in an overall evaluation.
That observation requires care. It does not mean that loss, betrayal, discrimination, or failure is unimportant. It invites us to notice what an intense focus may leave outside the assessment. A difficult event can deserve serious attention while other facts remain essential to understanding the whole situation.
This is the purpose of a principle I use in my work, “You can respect what you feel while examining what you conclude.” Disappointment can be acknowledged without making it the sole basis for a judgment about your competence. Hurt can be taken seriously while you examine what happened, what responsibility belongs to whom, and what the experience establishes about you.
The distinction also protects against careless positivity. Some events genuinely change the meaning of a situation. A serious breach of trust can warrant a different decision about a relationship. A consequential error may require accountability and corrective action. Reframing should preserve those realities. The question is whether the conclusion fits the evidence, including evidence that is uncomfortable to face.
For an everyday setback that you can reflect on safely, try four questions:
What happened, stated specifically enough that another person could understand the event without accepting my judgment of myself?
What conclusion did I add, and how far does it extend beyond this particular situation?
What relevant evidence, context, or change in circumstances have I left out?
What action would address the actual difficulty and give me useful information about what I can do next?
For the speaker, that might mean reviewing audience feedback, preparing a clearer explanation, and rehearsing difficult questions with someone who will give honest guidance. The next task becomes concrete. “I need to improve how I answer an unexpected question” gives you something to practice. “I am a failure” offers no comparable instruction.
The same precision matters in leadership. When giving feedback, identify the behavior and its consequences, then make the expected improvement clear. A missed deadline may require a conversation about planning, workload, or follow-through. Calling someone unreliable reaches beyond the incident and should not substitute for understanding what happened. Accountability becomes more useful when the person can see what to do differently and how improvement will be recognized.
There is a psychological reason to make room for new experience. In his account of self-efficacy, Albert Bandura (1977) identified successful performance as an important source of belief in one’s ability to carry out particular actions. This concerns perceived capability for a task, rather than a promise that every effort will succeed or that confidence alone can overcome external barriers.
“Awareness changes what becomes possible. Intentional action creates new evidence. Repeated evidence can reshape what you believe about yourself.” – Vince Morales
My practical recommendation is to choose a manageable action that tests the conclusion you have been carrying. If the claim is that you cannot contribute in a meeting, prepare one relevant question and ask it. Then assess what actually happened. If the attempt is difficult, use the details to adjust the next one. Give your assessment access to experience beyond the event that first shaped it.
As I have put it, “Awareness changes what becomes possible. Intentional action creates new evidence. Repeated evidence can reshape what you believe about yourself.” The word “can” matters. New evidence needs to be noticed and weighed fairly. Dismissing every improvement while treating every difficulty as definitive would preserve an old conclusion regardless of what happens.
Before you decline the next opportunity, return to the moment that seems to explain your hesitation. Name what it cost you and what it taught you. Then ask what it could not possibly have known about your future. A memory can tell you about an earlier performance, it cannot observe the person you have yet to become through learning, support, and practice. Your next decision deserves the fullest evidence available, including the evidence you still have an opportunity to create.
Ask yourself this one question, "Have I allowed one moment to define more of my life than it deserves?"
Read more from Vince Morales
Vince Morales, Mindset, Identity, Resilience Coach & Leadership Consultant
Vince Morales is a mindset, self-image, and resilience coach with expertise in leadership consultation and development. After experiencing homelessness as a veteran in San Diego from 2016 to 2017, Vince transformed his mindset and built a coaching career focused on resilience and personal growth. He is the founder of Validus Coaching and Consulting, a certified John Maxwell Team Coach, Trainer, and Speaker, and holds two master’s degrees in leadership and executive coaching. Vince’s work has been recognized through features in U.S. media and honors including the Brainz 500 Global Award, SUCCESS Magazine 125, and IAOTP Top Coach and Consultant of the Year.
References:
[1] Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215.
[2] Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
[3] Kahneman, D., & Riis, J. (2005). Living, and thinking about it: Two perspectives on life. In F. A.
[4] Huppert, N., Baylis, & Keverne, B. (Eds.). The science of well-being (pp. 285–304). Oxford University Press.
[5] Morales, V. (2026). The momentum mind: Break old patterns and change your direction.
[6] Redelmeier, D. A., & Kahneman, D. (1996). Patients’ memories of painful medical treatments: Real-time and retrospective evaluations of two minimally invasive procedures. Pain, 66(1), 3–8.
