Sunday, April 22, 2018

Believe In Yourself First




On Facebook everyone posts pictures or memes that are quotes, sayings or their own thoughts. Many times these posts mean something to the person posting it and can mean something entirely different to a person reading it. I know for myself, I find quotes that are meaningful for me, my life or what I am going through at that moment. I am not really thinking what it means to you. Then later I come back and have a friend who has written a comment about it from a different concept than I had in mind when I posted it. The reason being is that we are all different. In all ways, not just our physical bodies but our mental state and that includes our thoughts. Your environment affects you greatly. The people you are friends with, or live with, and your family, all affect your thoughts and beliefs.




If you have a child with special needs, such as "learning disabled" which is the tag put on my own son while he was growing up, does that limit his own beliefs that he is, in fact, unable to learn? Maybe. My ex-husband talked about it constantly within earshot of my son. So maybe it programmed him to not do any better than he was. I tried to encourage my son to do other things and he had a good group of friends of which none were in the special education classes like he was. I was happy about that because outside of school he lived pretty normal. He will many times exclaim that he can't read or do normal stuff, yet he does use a computer. I still try to encourage him.




If I believe I cannot do something, then I can't. The moment someone gives me encouragement about something I can do, I become very good at it. It was in me all along. Just like writing. I always wrote. My whole life was spent writing in notebooks. Journals, stories, poems, story books for children, magazine articles, etc. In school I did not get very good grades. I found it extremely hard and now I realize that I may have had some of the same issues my son had, but not as extreme. Learning was hard for me. Maybe I had a mild case of Dyslexia, though reading was not hard for me at all. Yet, it is classified as a reading disorder. So I don't know if I had it or not. I didn't notice mixing my letters up in a word until recent years. I can spell a whole word backwards correctly on my computer. I can't do it if I tried to spell the word that way on purpose. I would have to think about it first. I learned to read before I went to school at the age of four. The subject I was best in was English. I loved everything about it except standing in front of the class giving a book report. If someone had classified me as "learning disabled" or a "slow learner" or having Dyslexia, would that have held me back? Yes, in fact, I am positive it would have.




In school my teachers every year would try to change the way I held my pencil. My mother would come to the school and tell them to leave me alone and not to mention it to me again. She believed that would stop me from writing or wanting to write. I wrote all the time, even before I went to school. I still to this day, hold my pen that same way. And you know what? My whole life, everyone has complimented me on my handwriting! Like they say, "mother knows best" and especially about her own children.




My belief is that if you set your mind to doing something, you should be able to do it. I incorporate the Japanese method called "Kaizen" into my self-improvement program that I am currently doing. Now if you have never heard this term before, "Kaizen" simply means, "change for better." They use it in their businesses and continuous improvements are the result of this method. You do little improvements each day, no matter how little they are. Kind of like building wealth one penny at a time. I have been doing this now for awhile and have seen much improvement in my own life. Soon it will be paying off.





Believing in yourself is the key to developing the life you want. That is my whole idea. I believe I can do what I want to do and if it effects someone else, I am sorry. I need to to do what I can to make the rest of my life happy and free. I am not saying that to hurt people intentionally, but are they hurting you by keeping you unhappy? If so, it is time to move on.





Copyright © 2018 Kathleen G. Lupole
All Photographs Copyright © 2018 Kathleen G. Lupole



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