From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual” by Arnold Kunst
21
April
You and
I, all of us, have had this experience: you suffer from low self confidence
because there’s an ogre inside that says, more often than you might care to
admit, "you wet your pants in kindergarten, and don’t you EVER forget it!"
Countering
that ogre clearly is a multi-faceted process probably lasting a lifetime, but
surely for you as for me that process includes the help of a mentor, someone
close to you who NOTICED, someone who said/did the exact right thing to get you
to take those first few halting, stammering, fear-filled steps toward something
like a goal, and before you knew it you extended beyond your comfort zone[s]
and did what, once, you were convinced was impossible. Maybe the only thing
that mentor did to stoke the fire of your self esteem was simply to make you
feel welcome. Maybe all [s]he did was say, “How are you?” and meant it. But
whatever [s]he did, your self-confidence shot up exponentially. With that
subtle help you went from "I could never do that" to "If he can do
that so can I" and finally to "if I did that then I can do this
now." And almost without your noticing it, you stopped being such a welter
of shyness and defeatism anymore – you stopped pandering to ogres!
[By the
way, remember to pay it forward. Now it’s your job to NOTICE, to be the mentor
to someone who dutifully, unconsciously, 24/7, just like you, ever panders to
ogres.]
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