Don’t think of the others as ‘opponents’ or ‘the competition’, think of them as partners. They make us want to be better, and it’s not about being better than them, it’s about being a better person than we were yesterday.

In our ‘struggle’ to live, our ‘issues’ are our own, they have nothing to do with anyone else. But when things don’t go our way, our natural instinct is to find a reason, and we often think that the most obvious reason is that someone else is to blame. Obvious, that is, if we don’t know any better.

What’s actually happening, is that we have been gifted an opportunity to look inwards, and face up to some of the beliefs that we are allowing to hold us back.

That belief might be as simple as thinking

‘I can’t, because 20 years ago, someone told me that I couldn’t’

So for 20 years, based on one person’s opinion, we held onto the belief that we couldn’t, couldn’t do what is different for each and every one of us. I used to teach creativity, and I would always provide an example for my students (mostly mature students) to derive their inspiration from, and it surprised me how many of them would follow my example to the letter, getting frustrated if they made a mistake causing it to not look identical to mine. Over and over I would say, it doesn’t matter, I made it up, there is no right or wrong, but what was drawn to my attention was how many of them would say ‘I have no imagination, I’m no good at art, my teacher told me so years ago’.

One person’s opinion, carried around with them for years, which will in most cases follow them around for the rest of their lives.

What other people think of us/our abilities is irrelevant, and if we find ourselves continuously surrounded by nay sayers, then it’s not ourselves that we should be calling into question, it’s the people that we have chosen to surround ourselves with.

The right people will always lift us up

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