Stop Running from Shadows

I was a frightened 15-year-old kid, in jail for burglary and armed robbery.  This situation wasn’t an accident or even unexpected. It was the result of a lot of bad choices with drugs and alcohol, acting out, my raging bitterness and entitlement mentality.

Although this was 50 years ago – I can remember it like it was yesterday.  Allow me to bring you in on the story…

One day there was the sound of jangling keys and my cell door opened.  In walked a middle-aged blond stranger. Turns out that he was a schoolteacher, and the father of my best friend’s girlfriend. (Who had pleaded with him to come and try to rescue me from what was certain to be a disastrous fate.) After the introductions and some small chitchat, he said:

“You don’t belong here,” he said. “You’re capable of great things.”

I thought he was full of shit and flat out told him that.  He should have smacked me and walked out. Stop wasting his time on an insufferable, arrogant kid, oblivious to the kindness he was being offered.  But he didn’t. (Praise be to all that is holy.) He calmly took in my reaction.

And what he said next rocked my world like a five-megaton thermonuclear bomb… 

He’d spoken to all my teachers and learned that while I was bored, disruptive, and confrontational, they believed I still had enormous potential. My reading comprehension scores were above college level, and it wasn’t uncommon for me to skip classes for a week and still ace a test the day I returned.  He basically told me that I was the foolish one, because I was denying my own potential.

This man who had never met me, took the time to look beneath the surface and see the greatness in me that no one else could.  Arguably the greatest gift you can ever give anyone.

And the fact that he shared that gift with me is why I’m still here now – and the reason I’m writing this blog to you…

At this moment, I have spent 24,028 days on Earth. And of those, the day that stranger spoke those words to me is the single most important one.

More important than the day I was born, fell in love, buried my brother, hit the New York Times bestseller list, survived getting shot, was inducted into the Hall of Fame, or became a multi-millionaire.  Or the day I will die.

Because no day really matters if you don’t believe in yourself... 

Which is the whole point.  I had no way of knowing it at the time, but subconsciously somehow knew that if I did turn my life around, there would be a debt to pay.  Not to the man who ignited that transformation in me…  (Because he didn’t even want that.)

But a debt to be paid forward to others…who need someone to believe in them the way that stranger (Whose name was Baxter Richardson) believed in me.

If I were on my deathbed and this was the last post I’d ever write to share with you one last piece of advice on how to succeed – I would summon all my strength to metaphorically reach up, grab you by the collar, pull your eyes even with mine and say…

Pay very close attention to the stories you tell yourself.  Because those stories will determine your reality. 

Because that is the lifelong lesson I learned (but didn’t fully understand for years) when Baxter walked into that jail cell.

People are trying to sell you stories all the time.  And most of the time, those stories are based on limiting beliefs. Either you buy them, or you reject them.

If you buy a story, it starts a chain reaction:

• It creates a foundational belief.
• That belief creates your vision (positive, negative, or neutral).
• That vision creates your daily actions.
• Your daily actions determine your destiny.

In Plato’s The Republic, he shares the fable of the men chained together with their backs to a fire, frightened out of their wits by the shadows being created behind them, thinking the shadows are real.

How many of the fear-based beliefs we buy into are just shadows others are using to manipulate us?

Health, happiness, and prosperity aren’t created in a microwave.  They are simmered over time in the crockpot of your life – the cumulative effect of millions of minute daily actions.  But if you reverse engineer the process, you see those actions were produced by your vision, which was created by your beliefs, which were developed by the stories you bought into.

Let me assure you without a scintilla of doubt…

• People who fail in a business will try to sell you why you can’t succeed either.
• People suffering from suboptimal health will try and sell you why you can’t lose weight, create energy, etc.
• People who haven’t found love will try to sell you why it’s unattainable for you.
• People who didn’t reach the summit will try to sell you why the climb might kill you.
• People who are broke will try to sell you that the system will prevent you from ever becoming rich.

People desperately want to sell you their limiting beliefs, because they think it validates the fact they’ve given up on their dreams.  Stop buying them.

These people often mean well.  They usually believe in their story. Unfortunately, they don’t realize the story they bought is a make-believe one.

Please.  Bookmark this post.  And the next time your relationship is blowing up, your business can’t make the payroll, or someone you love gets taken away far too early, and you’re lying on the ground…  

Picture me gazing in your eyes and saying,

“You don’t belong here.  You’re capable of great things.”

Peace,

- RG

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