“Don't believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you'll see the way to fly.”-Richard Brach
When my now 13-year old daughter was just five years of age, she had a really hard time tying her shoes. I had initiated the training process with regards to the tying of her shoes as early on as her third birthday. Yet, whenever I found myself planning to leave my home after she had reached the age of five, I was forced to wait as she collapsed on the floor, crying, and telling me that she could not tie her shoes.
On the day that I finally reached the end of my rope, I stood in the door, and as opposed to breaking and tying her shoes for her as I had done for each of the previous five years, I told her that we would not leave the house until she figured out a way to tie her own shoes. At that moment, an amazing thing happened. Although my daughter's sobbing only intensified, in the midst of her tears she started wrestling with her strings. She failed with the first attempt. She failed again with the second attempt. However, her third attempt was a MASSIVE success. From that day forward, I never tied my daughter's shoes for her again.
"I CAN'T." I am convinced that this phrase has single handedly destroyed more lives, families, marriages, careers, and dreams than perhaps any other phrase known to man. You see God has equipped each of us to do and to perform above and beyond that which we could ever even think or imagine. However, many of us learned to use this phrase as a crutch early on in childhood, and we have carried this crutch right along with us into our adult years.
A year or so ago, I took up the practice of exercising on the elliptical machine at my local gym. For the first week or so of my workouts, I climbed onto the machine, and managed to last no longer than 10-15 minutes. I was extremely disappointed with my calorie count each time that I cut my workouts short, because I realized that I would never achieve my desired results by running for 10-15 minutes.
The elliptical machine is not for the feint of heart. After five or six minutes on this beast of a machine, every muscle in the lower body appears to scream for dear mercy. I was experiencing numbness in my feet. My legs were burning. My chest was heaving. My calves ached. I was close to retiring from working out on this "man-killer" altogether, when I made a decision. I decided that I would block out pain. I decided that I would focus my eyes on the football games that were blaring across the television screens in the gym, and that I would no longer allow fatigue or aching to cut my workouts short.
On my next visit, early on in my workout, I started to feel many of the same pains that had forced me into premature retirement on each of my previous visits. However, I blocked out the pain. I was focused. After about 20 minutes on the machine, a MIRACLE took place. My body kicked into a second gear! The pain dissipated. I started to actually enjoy running. My mind entered into this state of relative calm, and it seemed as if I were the only person in the gym. I had entered THE ZONE, which was a new level that I had never experienced before as a result of my tendency to quit at the first sign of difficulty!
So how does all of this apply to you? I want you to know that you have the ability to do and to perform ANYTHING that you set your MIND to do. Your body is at the mercy of your MIND. Change is never comfortable, and so naturally, anytime that you begin to make demands of your body, after living in a sedentary or lazy fashion; you will (at least initially) have to wrestle with your body, in order to establish the fact that there is a new sheriff in town, and that things will be different from that point forward.
We all experience desires and ambitions for things that we'd like to achieve in life. These desires may vary from person to person, but may include: acquiring new jobs, finding new mates, losing weight, earning more money, traveling around the world, writing books, etc. Whatever YOUR personal desire or ambition may be, I am asking you to take just a moment to make the following statement: "IT IS POSSIBLE." How do you know that it is possible? It is possible, because it has been done by OTHERS.
So as you go away from this reading, take with you the understanding and the belief that you have all of the tools, talents, and abilities necessary to manufacture, or to create the life of your dreams. Eliminate the phrase, "I CAN'T" from your vocabulary, and make this new year of 2012, a year of, "I CAN & I WILL!!"
"The difference between the possible and the impossible lies in a man's determination."-Tommy Lasorda
