Eleanor Roosevelt once wisely said: All the water in the world cannot drown you unless it gets inside of you.
Words will only hurt us if they connect to something going on inside of us in the first place, or if we provide space for the negative words to get in and reside.
Let’s explore those two statements a little more.
What’s going on inside us already
What is going on inside of us is developed from the moment we come out of the womb.
As babies, toddlers and children, our brains soak up every piece of information presented. The brain’s filtering process is rudimentary – readily absorbing data and creating a foundation of beliefs that we’ll carry for our entire lives – unless challenged. As we grow, the filtering process becomes a little more sophisticated however, our brains continue to follow the path of least resistance – less energy is needed if the brain can simply confirm what it already knows (believes).
Imagine a child brought up in an environment where their intelligence is constantly undermined. As a child, if they are told enough times that they are stupid, the chances are that by the time they grow up, they’ll be convinced that they are stupid.
But does it mean they are stupid? No, of course not! They may have the greatest mental capacity amongst their peers, however, if they don’t believe it, they’ll not even be aware of the intelligence they possess.
On the other hand, imagine another child of equal intelligence as the first, but this one consistently receives messages on how smart they are. If they are told enough times that they are highly intelligent, by the time they grow up, they’ll be convinced that they are highly intelligent.
With both examples, both children with the same mental capacity – imagine the decisions they make throughout their lives, based on what it is they believe about themselves.
We are those children. We’ve been brought up to believe certain things about ourselves. Smart. Not smart. Attractive. Not attractive. Likeable. Not likeable. Given any characteristic, we hold a belief of where we stand in relation to that characteristic.
And what we believe continues to either expand or limit our lives.
Providing space for other beliefs to get in
It’s totally up to you what you let into your belief system. For example, if someone said to me “I think your blue hair is ugly”, I would pretty much ignore the comment. A comment like that has no connection into me as I have an absolute belief, absolute certainty, that my hair is not blue.
But if I just had a haircut and I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not, and just one person said “I think your haircut is horrible”, then that would lay a foundation for a new belief. That thought would be put into my head because I already thought it may be true. Maybe plus a confirmation from someone else pretty much cements it my mind: my haircut is ugly.
Our brains do a remarkable job at filtering out information that is not relevant to us. So, in the blue hair example, because I believe my hair is not blue, any commentary about me having blue hair is filtered out. It is contrary to what I believe about my hair. However, in the example of a (bad) haircut, I left space in my brain to be filled in with someone else’s opinion, and as a result my brain stored that information and then began the process of automatically filtering for confirmation data. Any data contrary to that initial thought is filtered out.
Bad haircuts and blue hair aside, the most important thing to realise is that we can both challenge the ingrained beliefs we hold, and we can also choose what to let into our minds and hearts, thus creating new beliefs.
Becoming aware that what you believe is simply a belief and not a fact opens up the possibility that there could be another way of seeing things.
The late Dr. Wayne Dyer stated:
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
So how do you look at yourself? How do you see yourself? What if, just as an experiment, you chose to see yourself differently?
Imagine the different decisions you would make and the different actions you would take.
Oh, but what would people say?
Well, they can say lots of things. But remember, those are their words. They don’t have to become your words.
