MBTS - You Are Worth It Program - Chapter 2
CHAPTER 2-1
You absolutely cannot use the past as an excuse not to change, your past is where the person that is you came from, but it in no way prevents you from changing who and what you are today.
Your Stupid Past
Do you realize that if you are told you are stupid throughout your life than you will act stupid. The younger you are when this type of abuse occurs the more likely you will believe the lies you were told. You will do stupid things, fail at school, have only stupid friends and try to convince your friends that they are even stupider than you are.
The one thing nobody will tell you is smart people do stupid things quite often throughout their lives.
When others say you have done something stupid it is after the fact, and they possess knowledge that was not available to you when you made your stupid decision. In other words, you made a good decision based on the information that you currently had, you were actually being quite intelligent in arriving at your decision. Then sometime later new information comes along that makes your decision seem stupid. How can this be?
If something you say or do is proved wrong at a later date you must realize that’s all it is; wrong now, it was not wrong or stupid based on the information you had available at the time. If this was not true than everyone in the world must be stupid, since everyone has made choices based on assumptions that were later proved wrong.
REMEMBER: Some very famous people have been proved wrong, yet nobody considered them as being stupid; Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, Woodrow Wilson and many more, have been proved wrong about many things, yet they were not stupid people by any means.
So if someone tells you that you made a stupid decision just remind yourself that you used only what was available to you, you had no way of knowing your information would be wrong in the future. If you think like this, you will also realize the difference between a truly stupid choice and an incorrect choice.
For a practical example think of this, say your toast is stuck in the toaster, you see a fork on the counter, nobody has ever told you what electricity is or even that this is an electric toaster. So quite intelligently you decide to use the fork to get the toast out, you are rewarded with a shocking experience. Was this stupid? NO. You effectively applied your intelligence to use the fork as a tool and you quickly found that this was not the correct thing to do. The intelligent part of you will file this information away somewhere in your brain with a red flag that says, “Don’t do that again!”
If we carry this one step further, assume the toaster had become unplugged when you were shocked, your brain will notice that “something has changed” and you may very timidly try the fork again. You poke it in very quickly and realize that there was no shock this time. So now you have gained even more knowledge and you know what you did at first was wrong, not stupid. You also know the only truly stupid thing to do now is plug the toaster back in and try again.
REMEMBER: Trial and error is one of the primary ways by which we learn new vital information.
However some will react by doing everything they can, to prove they are not stupid. They will memorize little known ‘useless’ facts, they will know all the names of the entire cast of Star Trek or Days Of Our Lives and they will continually fall back on what little material they actually do know in an endeavour to be ‘smart’.
In reality all this person has accomplished is to make him-self even more stupid, they are dumbing themselves down to blend in with the rest of the world. In a case such as this, their past has convinced them that they really are stupid. They are doomed to never knowing what the opposite of stupidity is, Intelligence.
The fundamental change that needs to occur is at the core of their being, they first need to understand why they are stupid (when they really are not) and where to start in order to change this mistaken belief.
This takes us back to how can you be stupid if you were acting on the only information available to you at the time? As a child, I was often called stupid for many things I did and I suppose to an adult they were, but the adults never realized that I did not and could not possess the knowledge that would have enabled me to make the correct (smart) decision.
At this point, please think back to times as a child that this happened to you. Substitute any words applicable to your own past such as; stupid, dumb, idiot, etc. I am sure many of you were called some truly nasty things in the past that I will not print here.
REMEMBER: Write the above in your journal, for many this will be a long list and you need to be able to re-read the list, as you do this more memories will be unlocked, write them down too. This list will be very valuable in determining why you are what you are later in this book.
Your past is governing everything you say and do today. You cannot escape it without some effort on your part and help from friends & family. If you do not have friends & family to help, do not worry you can still help yourself to change (remember the mirror) and when you do start to change you will notice that even strangers treat you differently than what you are used to.
If you do not usually see many people, remember a friendly voice is never far away if you have a telephone, the Internet or just your friendly Alter-Ego!