“Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn’t know it so it goes on flying anyway. ”

Mary Kay Ash

As a parent there are few things better than watching your child grow and achieve things they didn’t yet know they could do. It is beautiful to watch the joy in their eyes as a child succeeds in successfully completing some new physical or mental challenge for the very first time. You can literally see their confidence in their abilities grow right before your eyes.

The beauty here is that children don’t know they “can’t” do something and when they have a cheerleader, whether that is a parent, grandparent, sibling, etc. alongside helping and teaching they can, and will, learn and accomplish things that perhaps they would never have dreamed were possible. They haven’t yet created self-imposed limits on their abilities.

When is it that we as adults begin to create beliefs governing what we can accomplish? How are these belief systems formed? Is it because we don’t have, or haven’t created, the right support system of people around us coaching and pushing us to learn new and different things? Is it because we have tried and failed and therefor have turned failure into a belief that says “I can’t?”

Every time we try and fail we can either turn that into a learning opportunity which will help us as we grow towards our next attempt OR we can choose to treat those failures as limits on our abilities. The first perspective serves as a platform for future growth. The second creates a world that is constantly shrinking as you implement a belief system based on limits and “I can’t.”

How we talk to ourselves and who we surround ourselves with as coaches and mentors will greatly influence our ability to accomplish things we don’t even know are possible. Choose wisely if you want to fly…