Nothing is impossible; the word itself says “I’m
possible”. Audrey Hepburn
I remember the first day of physics class in
college. A man walked in looking like something out of a cartoon: little pot
belly, disheveled shirt, the bald spot on his head surrounded by a thin ring of
hair that stuck up in every direction. He started writing something on the
chalkboard:
“Definitely YES!
Probably yes.
Maybe.
Probably not.
Definitely NOT!”
He asked the class not to raise their hands, but to
just think about where on that spectrum they were on the following question.
“Do you believe ghosts exist?”
After a short pause he drew a line between “Maybe”
and “Probably not” then said, “Anyone from here down is going to have trouble
with this class because if you can’t believe in something you can’t see, you’re
going to have trouble believing things do what we say they do.” He then went on
to add another fun little wrinkle by saying that some of what we’d be talking
about as “laws” of physics weren’t really laws, they were just “hypotheses no
one has proven wrong yet”.
Uhm. . .so, just believe it 'cause we say so until
we prove differently. Sure. Okay. Needless to say this was not exactly what I
expected to hear from a physics professor. LOL
Nice little trek down memory lane, but what’s it got
to do with anything right now?
Well, we often limit ourselves because we can’t
believe something we can’t see yet. Or we get stuck on a past experience, using
that as “proof” that we can’t do something because we didn’t do it when we
tried before.
What would happen if an ice skater kept thinking
he/she would never be able to execute a triple axel because they’d fallen
before and therefore didn’t try again? They’d be right. It wouldn’t be possible
to ever execute one.
What if Thomas Edison believed that it was
impossible to create the light bulb? Or if the Wright brothers believed it was
impossible for man to ever fly? Sure it wasn’t possible at the time, but they
proved it wrong. Granted it took a lot of effort and lot of trial and error,
but they didn’t let the “impossible” limit their belief or keep them from
trying.
We do this often on a much smaller scale, telling
ourselves we “can’t” do something before we even start, or setting our goals so
low we never stretch and grow.
Before I joined a praise team at church, I didn’t
think I could sing harmony if I didn’t have the notes in front of me. I can – I
just had never tried. I didn’t think I could ever write a book. It may not be
complete yet, but now I know I not only can do it, I AM doing it.
Six months ago, I didn’t believe I could make enough
progress in a short time to do well in a body transformation contest, then
something clicked and I started to really believe I could. I certainly didn’t
have any evidence of that yet. At one point during the challenge, there was a
guy who posted this excel chart where he’d crunched all kinds of data and
thought he could predict based on his data who was going to be in the top
three. I was barely in the top 10 and that only in 1 of the categories he
chose. The rest - not even close. I could have believed that because it was
something I could see; hard data that “proved” it. But in reality, it was just
his hypothesis and it hadn’t been proven wrong yet. I chose to believe I could
still win, and that there were many factors he had no way of measuring. You
know what? I was right! I proved his hypothesis wrong! I won first place in the
women.
The point is, if I kept on with the belief that I
couldn’t do those things, I would never have accomplished any of them because I
wouldn’t have put forth the effort to do so.
If you already have the proof you can do it, then
it’s not going to feel like you accomplished much. But if you aim higher, I
assure you it will feel great when you get there. So dream big. Set goals that
scare you a little. Then believe you can do it, visualize reaching it, and go
for it.
Instead of accepting only what you can see already,
instead of acquiescing to the idea that something is “impossible”, listen to
the whisper in your mind that says “I’m possible”.
