Conditioned Thinking

I remember my childhood with lots of different memories, fortunately so many were fond. And those that werent, well there's been years of therapy for that.

Today I can only mostly recall being compared to my much smarter sister, who always made better grades than me, and of course, my attitude was the cause. Maybe it was, maybe it was that I had trouble focusing through the day, maybe I daydreamed too much. But really at the end of the 6 weeks all that mattered to me was that I had at least passed the semester and could move on to the next. I did realize that I had to at least pass each semester or I would be in a world of trouble.

As I advanced in years, this little 6 week report card approval/disapproval thing never changed, it was always the sister that got good grades and I got passing grades. I was often told I wasn't as smart. I was often told I was trying (which was probably right), though I was trying to AT LEAST Pass. But I understood I wasn't trying hard enough, I didn't care, I was passing the test at home.

By the time I was in high school, I really didn't believe I was smart. I didn't believe I could excell because I had been told most of my life that I didn't really try, that I didn't really care. In my senior year, for many different reasons, I set out to prove them wrong. And I did, many of them, all of them. When it was time for the sister and I to go to college, my goal was to always have the A that she came away with, and I did. But I wasn't because I was told I could do it, it was because someone had convinced me in my childhood and teenage years that I couldn't, they were able to do that by repeatly telling me I couldn't, until I believed them.

Much of life is this, we believe and learn what we are fed everyday single day, and if those aren't positive words it won't take long before we start to believe what people say to us. It doesn't challenge us to do different because we've done beat down so long that at some point, we begin to believe that we are actually worthless, lazy, dumb, etc. So why is there a reason to be different.

You see, we've already tried to be different but you continue telling us what we are, won't allow us to be anything other than that. You've told us so long what we are that we can't possibly decide anything else.

Hopefully, at some stage in our life, we all overcome this and realize that someone has conditioned our thinking to make themselves feel better, or were just really crappy people at motivation or encouragement. Whatever it is, we are not what someone else says about us, we are who we decide to be and we are the only ones that can decide that or make a judgement upon it and we need to own this!