Coelho points to something subtler than mere positive thinking—he's describing identity as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy rooted in your deepest convictions, not your surface wishes. A person might desperately *want* to be confident while believing themselves fundamentally inadequate; that gap between desire and belief is precisely where they remain stuck. Consider the employee who lands a promotion but spends months waiting to be exposed as a fraud—their belief has already written the ending before they've even begun. The real work, then, isn't changing what you wish to be, but excavating and reconstructing what you've come to accept as true about yourself.