I had quite a response to last week’s Your Whole Self, where I was talking about the big task and what that meant for some people.
Reading some of the responses and thinking about what can happen to us as we grow and develop and the effect our experiences have on us made me realise something. It made me realise that things can be said to us that can set up life-long beliefs about ourselves.
For example when I was at school I didn’t do very well with my ‘O’ levels (GCSEs to my younger readers) and a teacher told me I wasn’t clever enough to do ‘A’ levels, so I did an extra year at school redoing some ‘O’ levels … and guess what? … I still didn’t do very well in them. I carried through what that teacher had said to me and almost proved him right, and I always continued to believe that I wasn’t very academic.
So when we speak to people we should be mindful about the words we use and what we say because they can have a deep, lasting effect on what then becomes a belief. So I found this quote from Maya Angelou:
You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anybody.
and I thought these words should be heard by everyone regularly, repeatedly, until they then become a belief of what is true.
And by the way, I did get my 'A' levels … just not at school!!!
