“You’re slow.”
“You’re lazy.”
“Why do you always fall down?”
It’s amazing how one little flippant comment can change the course of our lives.
We might not even realize it. Say you’re a kid and you’re playing sports for the first time. Someone, maybe even your parent, tells you that you’re slow. Maybe they didn’t mean anything by it. But for some reason you paid attention to it and really heart it.
And you believed it. Not only that, but you’ve gone through your entire life believing it.
These types of things can be true. But they’re more of a self-fulfilling prophecy. You hear that you’re slow from someone and you don’t really try to run fast. You don’t really work on it. In fact, you avoid it all together because you assume that it’s not for you.
The same thing happens on the other side of the spectrum. Maybe the first time you picked up a basketball you made a shot. That feels good. And maybe someone saw you do it and they gave you a compliment and said that you’re a natural. You believed them and now you’re confident every time you touch a ball. In fact, you continued getting better because you believed that you were a natural. Maybe it was true, but maybe not. Maybe it was pure luck that you made that first shot and you just improved thanks to that confidence and practice.
The point here is not that little comments aren’t true or not. The point is to take the time to consider that they could be wrong. We get what we emphasize in life. We want to make sure that we’re controlling what we emphasize. Don’t let others influence your life in this way. We do it far too often.