Tag: impossible

This week I have been helping my husband replace a metal roof. One of our daughters has also been there helping. She and my husband are up on the roof, and I am running our extendable reach forklift and doing the running on the ground. On occasion my husband will forget to bring with him a small tool or item or will need an additional bag of screws or what not. It is my responsibility to get said item up to him by throwing it. In the past I would have been completely confident in my ability to get anything he needed up to him, but my shoulder issue a couple months ago weakened my shoulder enough that I was somewhat worried about my ability to throw. I have been working on strengthening it, but I don’t feel like it’s quite back to normal.

My daughter was commenting about how I was psyching myself out, and that I just needed to believe in myself. That was the motivation that I needed. I needed to change my way of thinking and have confidence in myself rather than worry so much. I also remembered at that moment what I had told my kids all through the years, Visualize! I needed to see myself succeeding before I ever threw it. Between those two reminders, that was all I needed to have renewed confidence in my ability to get everything up to my husband the rest of the week. I am grateful to my daughter for the pep talk and the renewed confidence in my abilities.

This got me thinking about how often in life we see things we think might be fun, or that we might want to do, and we just assume we can’t do it. When I wrote my first book, I had several people ask me how I decided I could do it. I thought that was a funny question. I told them that no one had told me I couldn’t, why wouldn’t I think that I could. My whole business venture has been one thing after another of things I didn’t know how to do, like creating a website, writing a book, learning how to paint, learning how to create videos, editing videos, and on and on. Doing so many things that, if I had thought about everything I didn’t know and couldn’t do yet, I might have gotten discouraged and quit before I started.

But I didn’t. I think sometimes in life we allow other people’s pessimism or inability, to affect what we think we can or cannot accomplish. We see this result we want, and it seems far off and daunting. And I’m not saying that all of the above things that seem so hard weren’t hard, or at times daunting, but in all reality, they weren’t as bad as my mind made them out to be. There was a learning curve with everything I did and am currently learning how to do, but there is a learning curve with everything we do. I think we have this misperception that as adults we should know more, or have more skills than we do, and when we come upon something challenging to us, we start to think we can’t or that it’s impossible. But nothing is impossible if we are willing to work for it.

The other thing I have learned is that I shouldn’t listen to pessimistic people, and I shouldn’t be that pessimistic person when others are telling me about their dreams and aspirations. Everyone needs a cheerleader in life, and any one of us can be that person. We don’t have to do the work for them, but we can cheer them on and help them have confidence in their ability to do whatever they set their minds to. My daughter’s optimistic outlook on my abilities is what helped me this week be more confident. My kids are all the time cheering me on. There are many others in my life that have encouraged me as well, and I am grateful that I have each one of them in my life.

So, don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do any good thing you set your mind to. Have confidence in your ability to learn, to grow, and to accomplish. Visualize the end and keep that at the front of your mind, and you will make progress, you will accomplish whatever great things you set out to do!