Self Help

I’ll give you an example of some of the negative programming most of us have received in our life that has contributed to chipping away at our confidence levels. During the first eighteen years of our lives, if we grew up in fairly average, reasonably positive homes, we were told “No!,” or what we could not do, more than 100,000 times! If you were a little more fortunate you may have been told “No!,” only 75,000 times, or 50,000 times, however many, it was considerably more negative programming than any of us needs.

Meanwhile, during the same period, the first eighteen years of your life, how often do you suppose you were told what you can do or what you can accomplish in life? A few thousand times? A few hundred? Most people cannot remember being told what they could accomplish in life more than three or four times. Whatever the number, for most of us the “yes’s” we received simply didn’t balance out the “no’s.” The occasional words of “belief” were just that occasional, and they were far outweighed by our daily doses of “cannots.”

This negative programming that we all received (and still receive) has come to us quite unintentionally. It has come to us from our parents (who wanted to protect us); it has come to us from our brothers and sisters, from our teachers, our schoolmates, our associates at work, our life-mates, advertising of all kinds, the morning paper, and the six o’clock news.

Leading behavioral researchers have told us that as much as seventy seven percent of everything we think is negative, counterproductive, and works against us. At the same time, medical researchers have said that as much as seventy five percent of all illnesses are self-induced. It’s no wonder. What if the researchers are correct? That means that as much as seventy five percent or more of our programming is the wrong kind.

Until very recently no one understood well enough the human mind, how it really works. The result was that without knowing what they were doing, and with us not recognizing the immense effect this “casual” programming was having on us, “they” have been programming us in the wrong way. Everything and everyone around us, without being aware of it, has been programming us.

Unfortunately, most of it was the wrong kind of programming, and we took it to heart. Year after year, word by word, our life scripts were etched. Layer by layer, nearly indelibly, our self-images were created. In time, we ourselves, joined in. We began to believe that what we were being told by others - and what we were telling ourselves - was true. No matter how innocently given or subtly implied, we began hearing the same words and thoughts repeatedly; hundreds, even thousands of times we were told, or we told ourselves, what we could not do, could not accomplish. Repetition is a convincing argument.