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I am no good at math. Well, that’s what I had said to myself for a large majority of my life. Also, I am horrible at remembering names. That’s also something I have said for most of my life. Physics is something that I was better off quitting early before I embarrassed myself any further. Are those statements true? Well, the answer to that question is actually pretty complicated. If you asked me today to do algebra, trigonometry, or calculus, I would have a difficult time delivering. If you put me in a room with several new people and give me their names, I would not be as quick to learn them as some others. Physics? Ugh…Don’t get me started. I had to do Physics I and II twice before passing them with a grade of a “C.”
So, getting back to my question: “Are those statements true?” On the surface, one may answer yes, but looking deeper, the answer I would give you is “Only if I allow myself to believe it.”
You have been told by others many things. You may have been told that you’re not very smart or creative, or maybe people teased you or laughed at you at a young age about your looks or clothes or other things you simply could not control. You may feel you are left out of the crowd, or that other people have avoided you or put you down or put you in your place. You may have been criticized or humiliated by others.
Are they right? Are you any of those things?
Only if you allow yourself to believe it.
You see, every time we take something in through our five senses: taste, touch, hearing, vision, and smell, your brain processes it at the conscious level. You are aware of what you are taking in, and, more importantly, you have conscious control of how you react to the stimulus. (This is the called the somatic nervous system, in case you were wondering…I’m guessing you really weren’t.) So, for example, if you walked in to a very hot room, you can consciously control whether you stay in that room, start removing layers of clothing (hopefully not too many layers), or turn on the air conditioning. You have the ability to choose your reaction to the stimulus.
This is what I call the critical crossroads — it is the time where you get to consciously choose what to do with the information you receive through your five senses.
What other people say or think about you is their opinion, not yours. Whether you come to actually believe it and convert it into truth and become that “truth” is based on whether you make the conscious choice to believe it. If you choose not to believe it, then it won’t become fed to your subconscious mind, where anything placed into it has no choice but to be physically manifested by your body.
If someone told me that I had green hair, I wouldn’t believe them. For starters, I don’t have hair, and secondly, if I were to have it, it certainly would not be the color green. I don’t believe it, so therefore it’s not true. I reject that statement. That’s easy to do, but it’s the “difficult” opinions that are harder to “un-believe.” If someone tells you you aren’t good enough, either through what they say or do to you, it’s hard not to consider that they may be true.
When other people share their opinion of you with you, it’s the other person’s ego talking. Their ego is trying to build itself up by reassuring itself how superior it is by comparing to and squashing another’s ego. It feels better about itself when another ego feels worse about itself. It’s a bunch of garbage.
This is the critical crossroads that makes all the difference when it comes to establishing and maintaining one’s self image, self esteem, self worth, and self confidence. Do you choose to believe what another person’s overblown suggests?
You are in control. You can choose whether or not to believe what they say. It’s a pretty powerful tool, once you know you have it and know how to use it.
The last, and most important thing to remember to do is to make sure you give yourself a heavy dose of positive thoughts about yourself…I’ll do that right now.
Yes, I am good at math. Yes, I am good a learning faces. Yes, I am good at physics! And I believe it to be true!
Now it’s your turn! 🙂
Photo source: freedigitalphotos.net
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Great post Victor Schueller. Our beliefs create our reality.
Thanks Angela Artemis! Glad you liked it! 🙂
Loved this Victor. And the green hair/no hair made me lol. It’s all so true, we have the power to accept or reject whatever we hear or see, sometimes the challenge is to be aware that we’ve passively accepted something. The funny thing is that what we accept might not be true, but no matter, if we believe it then it becomes a part of our life experience.
Thanks for the great reminder.
Elle
xoxo
Elle,
It’s wonderful to see you here. Yes, you’re absolutely right — the passive acceptance is tricky. Good point! Take care! Glad I got a laugh out of you today! 🙂
We can sell ourselves short when we blindly believe and don’t think through our decisions about ourselves. Great reminder to accept and believe in ourselves.
Cathy,
Thanks for coming by! I appreciate it! Yes, sometimes we blindly accept what others say or think, and I think that just comes from being used to accepting what our parents and other adult role models instructed us to do when we were young. It takes a bit to overcome that automatic programming.
Take care!
It is the reason many children don’t step forward. Sometimes, parents tell them they are not good at something. I’ve heard parents justify this by saying they weren’t good at it, so how could their son/daughter be? Very sad. It does not occur to them that this will stop their children from even attempting to see if they can be good at whatever they’ve been discouraged from.
We really tend to be what we believe. As we grow up, this just gets strengthened and we build inhibitions based on them. Great post, Victor. Green hair …um…not a good idea. When my son was three, he begged me to dye my hair purple. I declined, of course. And compensated with purple nailpaint – on my toes. 😀
Hugs. Love your presenting style.
Vidya,
I call it “good enough” parenting. Raise your kids to be “good enough.” They don’t have to be the best at everything or anything — they don’t have to be perfect. If you ride them too hard to be perfect they will grow up to feel they are failures and not good enough to do anything.
I laughed when I read your quick story about the purple hair. I would have also opted for the nails instead of the hair. 🙂
Thanks for stopping by!
[…] Subconscious programming of the conscious stimuli is not questioned. It is simply carried out by our bodies. If we are not aware of the programming that was fed to our subconscious over our lifetimes, we operate on autopilot and unknowingly speak and act in ways that are motivated by fear and scarcity. We are all about the ego, concerned with our status compared to others. We worry about how much power we have, or how much influence we hold. We worry about getting our “piece of the pie,” because there aren’t necessarily enough “pieces” to go around. We engage in negative behaviors like complaining and gossiping, because those emotional areas of our brains are so busy worrying about potential threats to our ego that we are constantly in self-preservation mode. […]