How many times you say ‘I can’t’ coming across an excellent job offer, a chance to find a life partner or when someone tells you that your business could be much bigger?
How many times you end up saying, ‘it’s not for me. I’m not cut out for this’?
And so, you don’t give it a try.
This friend of mine, stung by his failure to find a life partner, made it a habit to call me and rant about everything that has gone wrong with his life.
“Why should women show pity the moment they realize I’m blind? Why couldn’t they love, for heaven’s sake?” he’d go on for about a minute or two before hanging up the phone as abruptly as he’d begin.
When I heard about a disability charity organizing a singles’s meet in a city not too far, I gave my friend a heads-up. My heart sunk when he responded: “Oh, I want an able-bodied girl.”
I asked him how he expected others to accept him –with his disability- when he wasn’t doing the same with another person?
“Not like that,” he hesitated, and then spilt the beans. “I’m afraid I won’t succeed. What if even a girl with disability refused to accept me? What if I were to fail finding anyone in that singles’s meet?”
“What if you actually found a girl who could love your sense of humour, your vivacity? What if she responded to one of your jokes with laughter?” I countered, hoping somehow he’d be convinced to register and actually go for the meet.
But I hung up with a sad and helpless head shake. Fear of failure had frozen my friend from moving forward and taking action to find his dream.
And it’s often the case that we let the opportunity to slip between our fingers, letting go of something we badly want.
The idea that you’re not good enough has been so strongly planted in the subconscious that it could be harder to believe you deserve to live your dream and you actually possess the power to make it happen.
A wonderful TED talk by Sarah Vaid, which I happened to listen just the other morning, describes “the glass delusion”, a common paranoya among people in the middle ages that their body was brittle like glass and could break if they dash into something harder.
“Saying ‘I can’t was making me a victim to my circumstances. I wasn’t able to move out of my ‘I can’t’ because that’s where I was stuck. My counsellor offered me to say ‘I choose not to’ instead of ‘I can’t’. So, I’ve some choice,” Sarah said in that 12-minute talk that you can watch here: https://youtu.be/RTjN1K-zsSM
And so, if you choose not to let your limitations guide your life; if you choose not to get stuck in impossibilities; if you choose not to cross the lines of limitations others draw for you, and, if you choose to be the child that chases the rainbow without caring if it’s real, my friend, you can rewrite the destiny and live your dreams.
Sarah’s talk, by the way, is called ‘change your story, change your life’. Any wonder? And, do you want to change your life story to be successful in your job hunt, growing your business or getting supporters for your charity?
As a journalist for 20 years, I did nothing else but hunt for stories. Now, I’m here to share the tips and tricks of how to tell a story that makes your employer, investor or supporter connect with your dream idea and get you the dream opportunity.
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