My Toilet Was Leaking (And the Chain of Belief That Keeps You Stuck)

Our toilet upstairs has been leaking on and off for months. Not by a huge amount, mind you, but enough to make the skirting board behind it rot at the bottom.

So I switched off the water supply to that toilet and removed the rotting board. Problem solved, temporarily at least. Then, I kinda forgot about it since we have another toilet upstairs.

And then, from time to time, my wife and I would raise the topic:

“I’m sick of looking at that toilet. It needs to be fixed.”

“Yeah, I know, but I really don’t want to hire a plumber. It’s going to take forever to find a good one, and I don’t know how much it’s going to be.”

“True, true.”

We must have had this exact conversation five times. But the upstairs restroom remained unusable.

In the meantime, I found myself taking over small DIY projects in our house, such as mounting a large boom arm in my garden office, fixing our washing machine after it stopped working, or using drywall anchors to hang mirrors on plasterboard. Nothing fancy at all.

But for me, it was a big deal because I never believed I was good at that kind of stuff. (I saw myself as a computer geek, not a DIY expert, since I grew up with a computer in my room). As a result, my confidence in manual skills has grown in the last few months.

Okay, let’s go back to that toilet leak.

The situation hadn’t changed; it needed to be fixed. However, something else did change: I believed I was capable of locating the leak and repairing it, without having to hire a plumber.

So I watched a couple of YouTube videos and proceeded to take the toilet apart. The leak came from a small crack in the pipe connecting the toilet with the waste pipe. That’s it. So I bought a replacement part (and a bunch of other upgrades) and put the toilet back.

It took me the entire weekend (longer than I initially thought) and made a couple of mistakes along the way, but I did it.

What has a toilet leak got to do with standing the f*ck out?

Well, it reminded me that there’s a chain of belief that must be in place before anyone takes action on anything.

For months, I believed:

• “I’m not a DIY person”
• “This will be expensive and complicated”
• “I need a professional for this”

So I did nothing. The leak persisted, and we had the same circular conversation over and over.

But once that chain shifted to:

• “I’ve fixed other things successfully”
• “Maybe I can figure this out too”
• “YouTube has plenty of videos on this”

Boom. Problem solved in a weekend.

The beliefs keeping you stuck at work

Makes me wonder what beliefs are holding us back in our work?

“I’m too stupid to pick a niche.” “My industry is too boring to stand out.” “I don’t have enough experience to have opinions.” “Everyone will think I’m a fraud.” “What if I pick wrong and lose all my clients?”

Because all the methodology in the world is just YouTube tutorials if you don’t believe you can actually do it.

Yes, hiring a plumber would have been easier and cheaper than my day rate, and definitely faster than my weekend-long DIY adventure. But doing it myself gave me something a plumber never could: confidence and the satisfaction of figuring it out. That’s not something you can outsource.