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What is Holding You Back?
November 6th, 2020
by Bill Boyajian

Going through some old files recently, I happened upon a story told by author, Bobb Biehl, which I thought was worth sharing.

While attending the circus and observing the elephants, Bobb asked the trainer how he could stake down a 10-ton elephant with the same size stake as her little one, who weighed only 300 pounds. The trainer answered in this way:

“It’s easy when you know two things: elephants really do have great memories, but they really aren’t very smart. When they are babies, we stake them down. They try to tug away from the stake maybe 10,000 times before they realize that they can’t possibly get away. At that point, their ‘elephant memory’ takes over, and they remember for the rest of their lives that they can’t get away from the stake.”

My conclusion, of course, is that we humans can also be like elephants. When we’re told as teenagers that we aren’t very smart or not good looking or won’t amount to much, we tend to drive a mental stake into our own minds. Often when we become adults, we are still held back by some hurtful or inaccurate statement (or “stake”) placed in our minds when we were much younger.

I don’t care how old you are. You still need to pull up those old ‘stakes’ and move forward with the new you.

What’s holding you back now?



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