Getting Back to Happy by Marc Chernoff & Angel Chernoff & Alyssa Milano

Author:Marc Chernoff & Angel Chernoff & Alyssa Milano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-05-22T04:00:00+00:00

Our past experiences have conditioned us to believe we are less capable than we are.

A metaphor comes in handy for this one: zookeepers typically strap a thin metal chain to a grown elephant’s leg and then attach the other end to a small wooden peg that’s hammered into the ground. The ten-foot-tall, ten-thousand-pound elephant could easily snap the chain, uproot the wooden peg, and escape to freedom with minimal effort. But it doesn’t. In fact, the elephant never even tries. The world’s most powerful land animal, which can uproot a big tree as easily as you could break a toothpick, remains defeated by a small wooden peg and a flimsy chain.

Why? Because when the elephant was a baby, its trainers used the same methods to domesticate it. At the time, the chain and peg were strong enough to restrain the baby elephant. When it tried to break away, the metal chain would pull it back. Soon the baby elephant realized that trying to escape was impossible. So it stopped trying. And now that the elephant is fully grown, it sees the chain and the peg and it remembers what it learned as a baby—that the chain and peg are impossible to escape. Of course this is no longer true, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that the two-hundred-pound baby is now a ten-thousand-pound powerhouse. The elephant’s self-limiting thoughts and beliefs prevail.

If you think about it, we are all like elephants. We all have incredible power inside us. And we have our own chains and pegs—the self-limiting thoughts and beliefs that hold us back. Sometimes it’s a childhood experience or an old failure. Sometimes it’s something we were told when we were younger. The key thing to realize is this: we need to learn from the past, but also to be willing to change our assumptions—our perspective—about the way things are now. Life is not static. You can break free.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.