Holding on to Nothing...
01/11/2008
A dear friend sent me an article recently on “Self Confidence” and how people lose it and, I suppose, how to regain it. I briefly glanced at it and just as quickly deleted it determining this is not for me. At first I felt a little badly, inasmuch as my friend sent it to me and I didn’t even bother to read it. Later, I learned in a conversation with my main man in Albuquerque he had not read it either. Self confidence is not something I lack. In fact, I don’t believe I have ever thought about it. Maybe I am not smart enough to doubt myself.
The second paragraph of Dean Koontz’s latest novel reads: “For some, the past is a chain, each day a link, raveling backward to one ringbolt or another, in one dark place or another, and tomorrow is a slave to yesterday.” Now know that I am not a Dean Knootz fan, I think I have read only one of his books, but this short snippet from his latest resonated with me. Why do some of us want to chain ourselves to the past?
Have you ever watched Chef Gordon Ramsay’s series “Kitchen Nightmares?” For those of you who don’t know him, Gordon Ramsay (http://www.gordonramsay.com) is a highly successful chef with restaurants in London, Prague, Dubai and Dublin. He also has a series on Fox called “Hell’s Kitchen.” He is a foul mouthed, in-your-face perfectionist when it comes to food preparation and running a restaurant. I love him. On one of the Kitchen Nightmares segments, where he goes into a failing restaurant operation and sets it on a successful course, he told the owner/chef that he was “so afraid to risk change he would rather fail than try something new.” The resistant restaurateur was so stuck in his past and his routine he missed the fact he lives in the present and things change. If fact, there in only the present. Anything that happened yesterday is old news. Right now is the now.
I am not so sure even I get what I am saying here is coming out as I wish it to. The point is that the lack self confidence, in my opinion, is so totally related to something from one’s past it makes the whole concept moot. If you lack self confidence it is a self worth issue, and that is that. If you deem yourself unworthy you are so dragging that chain Dean Koontz refers to. Have you seen the TV commercials where Peyton Manning gives pep talks? Well, here’s one for those of you with a self-confidence/self-worth issue.
In this life you are totally responsible for what happens to you in your life, you are not your past and your life is nothing more than possibilities and choices. If you think you are a pile of shit, guess what? You get to choose who and what you are. If what you choose doesn’t work, choose something else. Don’t go down on a sinking ship under the sheer weight of memory. This is what I took away from my Millennium3 Education workshops.
And that is all I have to say about that…