I believe that things come into your life at the right time and for good reason.
Lesson 1: My belief about myself.
I’ve always been a slow test taker — partly because I am methodical but mostly because I am a slow reader. As a result, this planted the seed of belief that I was not smart.
I have gone through life believing I am not that intelligent. And if any of you know my husband, he is brilliant. I am in awe at times when it comes to his knowledge. Case in point: he did not grow up with cable, but we played 80’s tv/movie trivia and he knew all the answers. While this is not incredibly useful knowledge, it does show just how amazingly smart he is! But I digress.
Anyway, my point is that I am married to one of the smartest people I know. I myself don’t believe I am smart and now married to someone I am in awe of. Of course, this perpetuates my belief about myself.
Even when my husband would compliment me, telling me how smart I am. I could never hear it.
When you go through a therapeutic coaching program, you spend a great deal of time on healing yourself. Yet I still could not shake this idea that I’m not smart enough. I even stepped it up a notch by telling myself I am not deserving of making good money because “only smart people make lots of money.”
Lesson 2: Implied Meaning
But then one day, I decided to go through the miscellaneous stuff my mom had saved for me from growing up. In one bin was the key that unlocked and released this long-standing belief. Inside the box were the missing ingredients.
I had always believed that because I was a slow test taker and a slow reader, I wasn’t smart. I believed that because kids could get done fast, they were smart.
But as I read through all the clippings from the papers that my mom had saved, I began to see I was always on the honor roll and many of the kids I had deemed as better than me because they were “smart” were not listed.
What this told me was not that I was smarter, therefore I was better. Rather it showed me that I was smart according to one measure. I needed the evidence so I could rebut my own misguided belief system about myself.
This information did not tell anything about the others I had been comparing myself to, either. Just because they were not listed doesn’t mean they are not smart. I know those individuals were smart because I got to experience their brilliance first-hand. They were my friends.
And to think, all of this insight came from my mom saving all that information, which I’d have never thought would come in so handy at this point in my life.
Do you have long-standing beliefs you want help healing? Have you implied meaning that is not true? Let’s talk!