The only limit to your success is made up in your imagination.
We can all learn from this profound, yet unfortunate, story…
Have you ever noticed that circus elephants have a thin metal chain around one leg that’s connected to a small wooden peg hammered into the ground? The ten-foot-tall, ten-thousand-pound elephant could easily snap the chain, uproot the wooden peg, and free itself with minimal effort. But it doesn’t. It just stands there. In fact, the elephant never even tries. The world’s most powerful land animal, which can uproot a big tree as easily as you can break a toothpick, remains defeated by a small wooden peg and a flimsy chain.
Why? Because when the elephant was a baby, its trainer used this method to domesticate and control it. In the beginning, the chain and peg were strong enough to restrain the baby elephant. Whenever it tried to break free, the metal chain would pull it back. Soon the baby elephant realized that attempting to break away was impossible so it stopped trying….Now that the elephant is fully grown, it sees the chain and the peg and unconsciously remembers what it learned as a baby, thereby, making it impossible for the elephant to move about freely. It doesn’t matter that the two-hundred-pound baby elephant has grown up and is now a ten-thousand-pound powerhouse. The elephant’s self-limiting thoughts and beliefs continue to prevail.
If you think about it, we are all like elephants. We all have incredible power inside us, yet we have our own restraints that, at times, keep us stuck with self-limiting beliefs and thoughts that hold us back. These restraints could have derived from childhood experiences, an old failure, or something we were told when we were younger.
We need to remember that it’s not the circumstances of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs about what those circumstances mean.
We need to learn from the past and be willing to change our stories and old beliefs into new and more empowering beliefs—beliefs that reflect what we want and how we want to live our lives now. Let go of those invisible chains…Break free!!!
Imagine what your life will be like when you decide to play full out, now!
To Your Success,
Marla Brucker
Peak Performance Coach