THE POWER OF BELIEVING
I must confess that even though I would like to see myself as a very positive person capable of surviving much adversity, I’m at the same time riddled with cynicism…a trait I have wrestled with throughout my life. I live in a world of duality, where I trust everyone to be loving, caring, and nice and at the same time feeling that someone or something out there is out to get me.
Well, maybe not so much anymore…but even now that I’ve learned to navigate through life more gracefully, I still see remnants of this characteristic surface. If there is one in a million reasons why something won’t work, I still find myself thinking I’m the one to find it.
Looking back at my life, I’m proud that I was never the one duped into losing large amounts of money on dubious investments, or losing face because someone emotionally betrayed me. But at the same time I wonder how many opportunities I missed out on because I chose to be a ‘non-believer’.
Most of us want good things to happen to us. We want good relationships, love in our lives, a good home to live in. We want to be surrounded my beauty, financial prosperity, an enjoyable job. We want to set goals and we want to see them accomplished.
So why is it that we are not getting that which we want?
I believe it has a lot to do with ‘believing’. When we expect and believe that good things will happen to us, good things do happen. So if all it takes is ‘believing’, why aren’t we not believing in something happening instead of just wanting it to happen?
Here’s the scoop. Believing can sometimes be very challenging depending on where you are in life and what you are being asked to believe in, either by yourself or others. If you are barely making ends meet, for example, even thinking of generating $10,000 a month might be impossible to conceive.
Thank goodness, training yourself to believe in something out of the scope of what you deem believable is do-able. The trick is to initially consider goals that are somewhat a bit out of your reach-a goal that is not to easy to achieve and too impossible. As you reach a goal, consider how you felt before you met it and what progress you made to get it.
Immediately after reaching a goal, set a higher goal that is a little more challenging this time. The idea is to continue growing and continue recording your achievements.
Remember when you change a belief you open yourself up to new opportunities.
Do you remember when Roger Banister ran the four-minute mile in 1954? Well, before that everyone thought it was impossible for any human being to run a mile in less than 4 minutes. No one believed that it could be done. But a year after Roger broke that record, 300 other runners did the same thing. Why? Because they now believed it was possible.
On March 10, 1981 Morris E. Goodman had a terrible accident that had him fighting for his life. During the months that followed his plane crash, he was told he'd never be able to breathe on his own, much less eat, dress himself, or walk. He was paralyzed from the neck down. All he could do to communicate was blink his eyes. But he still had his mind. He knew "What a man thinks about, he becomes". He believed this completely.
Morris thought and worked himself off the ventilator, off the feeding tube and out of the wheelchair. Doctors had no medical explanation. By Christmas of that year he fully recovered and walked himself out of the hospital, just as he had believed we would.
When I was a child, my mother told me of a prisoner of war who survived food deprivation by cutting out pictures of food and pretending he was eating that food. All the other men that were imprisoned with him had died. He was the lone survivor. Why? He believed that he could fool his body into believing it was being nourished.
I don’t know what war that was or the name of the prisoner my mother was talking about. I don’t even know if the story was true. But I’m sure that story or a similar story is archived in some book or some record somewhere.
