Everyone's a prodigy
Steve Harvey’s “Little Big Shots” is just one example of the entertainment value of seeing kids do extraordinary things at such a young age. We tend to label them as prodigies. Kids that have barely been walking and talking, playing the piano like a pro, others singing with the tone and control of a seasoned vocalist, and so on. So...how does that happen. Is it a miracle? Are they a freak of nature? Were their parents better parents than me? I mean, my kids are awesome, but unless that unknown phone number wasn’t a sale guy, Steve Harvey hasn’t called my house.
Let me introduce an alternate theory. What if everyone of us had some amazing gift or gifts just like those kids? What if the only difference was the amount of resistance to that gift introduced in the early development years? What if all we had to do in life at any age, was remove that resistance that is blocking it. So what is the resistance? It’s the thoughts of inadequacy and low self worth that are introduced at an early age and begin to compound like a high interest credit card throughout our lives.
Since I became aware of this concept, I started realizing the number of times that I have done this to my own kids. Statements of “you can’t do that”, “we can’t afford that” and more planting seeds of ragweed in what would have normally been a bumper crop of a life. But understand this, the minute I started paying attention to this and changing the self talk and thought in my own life, it started to have a ripple effect for my family. I didn’t even tell them I was doing this and yet I heard them start to speak and think differently. I even heard my oldest son give someone advice along these lines that I hadn’t given him.
Yesterday, we had an afternoon concert at pumpkin patch. We’ve done this for a few years and load every one of our willing kids in the bus and take them with us. The 45 minute stretch of highway there is a little bumpy, which provides a roller coaster like experience in the bus. My brother sat in the recliner with his daughter and the whole trip we heard “weeeeeee” every bump. No one told her to stop and it did my soul good to take the the whole moment in. By the time we got there, I had unloaded a fair amount of resistance out of my own life. Kids all around us can teach us so much about living life fully. And that my friends is one giant step towards going from dreaming big to living big.
