Johnny was feeling very anxious, in fact the poor guy was distraught. Whatever he tried he just couldn’t hit that ball, and the whizzing of the ball passing his ear nearly caused panic attacks. What could Johnny do to get out of this situation?

You see Johnny lived and breathed baseball all of his life and was now one of the highest paid players in the American leagues.

This year he just couldn’t hit that ball and Johnny knew that if he didn’t get his act together soon, he would be out. This was all he knew, his whole life was baseball, Johnny got very desperate.

Then Johnny found out as people do when they are desperate, about some guy who was great at helping people with this kind of problems. He called this guy Frank and said to him, if he could get him to hit that ball again that he would give Frank 10% of his annual income. Frank knew that, that was no small amount and agreed to take on the challenge. Frank told Johnny that he’ll come to see him in a week’s time.

You know what Frank did next? He hired the guy who was hitting the ball.

He wanted to find out exactly what this guy was doing to hit the ball. He asked him specific questions on the pitch as the guy was doing his stuff and this was what he found out:-

Basically Frank found out exactly what this guy was doing in his head so that he could hit that ball. Frank questioned this guy to make this process conscious.

When Frank was confident that with what this guy was doing, that this was his strategy, he went to visit Johnny.

Johnny did some tweaking for his own personality.

Do you know Frank got at the end of the year, a big fat cheque.

Now, we all have ways that we do everything from buying shoes to what we’re going to watch on TV. These are all processes that are running in our heads without us really have known what we’re doing consciously. There are ways of how we make ourselves happy, anxious, and confident and whatever we do there is a subconscious process involved.

Some times all that is involved is finding this process and then changing it to another one that can serve us better.

Ever since the Olympic Games begun at Olympia in Greece in 776 BC , runners from around the world have been competing against each other. After 2 millennia, runners with gold medals and broken world records and others with the highest achievement, yet no-one had done the mile within 4 minutes. Was this ever going to be possible?

In fact many of the coaches had actually believed that the attempt could actually result in physical death, that the heart would not be able to cope.

When Roger Bannister an Oxford university student finally broke the 4 minute mile on May 6^th 1954, within a few weeks several other runners had run the mile within 4 minutes.

How was this possible? Did the entire human race all of a sudden get physically faster in the summer of 1954?

No they didn’t, but what happened?

You see Roger didn’t listen to what people had said and he knew what needed to be conquered was not the physically mile, but the mental mile that existing in his head.  The world’s athletes consciously or even subconsciously simply didn’t believe that it could be done, they had made up their minds that they had reached the peak of human physical speed.

But once this fact had been proven wrong, and runners across the world said that if Roger Bannister can do it, then so can we.

Our beliefs are a very powerful force on our behaviour. It is common wisdom that if you really believe that you can do something then you will, and if you believe something is impossible no amount of effort will convince you that it can be accomplished.

Beliefs like “it’s too late now”, “there’s nothing I can do anyway”, I’m a victim..”  can often limit us from fulfilling our full potential.

Limiting beliefs are not set in concrete, they were not there when you were born, you learnt them as you grew up from your elders.

Beliefs are kept in our subconscious mind and like habits, they run automatically behind the scenes without any conscious effort on your part.

Most of your beliefs serve you well, it’s the limiting ones we’re concerned about.

Beliefs can be changed, or is it your belief that they cannot?

Flickr Creative Commons image by sashafatcat