You Are Who You Believe You Are – You Are Who You Surround Yourself With

You Are Who You Believe You Are

It is amazing how much one can achieve just by believing that they can do something. It is important to believe in your capabilities just as it is important for those people around you to be positive people who believe in you, people who believe that you can achieve whatever you put effort into achieving.

I was reading Mind Powers: How to Use and Control Your Unlimited Potential and I have to say that reading that book was quite eye opening, I learned that quite a lot could be achieved by tapping into your brain whether it was becoming more successful, seeing the world or yourself in a more positive light or even healing yourself from illness just by believing you will get better and that you are healthy.

Stay Away From Negative People

Reading the book further confirmed to me the importance of staying away from negative influences, people who bring you down, people who want you to fail and believe you are good for nothing. Staying away from these negative people is the first step to becoming positive and successful because they make you believe you are good for nothing, and by believing it, you never live up to your full potential. So to start thinking positively getting away from negative influencers can be a great help.

Negative Parents

Sometimes these negative influencers could be your own parents, who constantly remind you of how useless you are and that you can never amount to anything. If that is the case there are a number of ways to go about changing their influence on you, one way is to confront them and tell them that their actions and behaviour are affecting you negatively and that putting you down only serves as a negative. Tell them that instead of putting you down they should be encouraging you to chase after your dreams. If that fails maybe moving away from your parents is your best option, this is if you are old enough to move away from home to start a life away from your negative influencers.

Negative Teachers

Some people are let down by their teachers, the people who are supposed to guide us, the people who mould us into what we are from the moment we start our education. Usually with teacher’s first impressions count and when a student does not do well in a test, the student usually starts disliking the subject or school instead of working harder, because most teachers give up on the students with the lower to average marks and pay more attention to the higher achievers (IMO).

 I had this very same problem, when I was in the 9^th and 10^th grades of high school I used to do very well in all my subjects except in the languages, I did not understand why I was doing so badly in the languages so I just thought I was a math and science kind of student, my English teacher did not have much confidence in me and soon I had no confidence in myself I ended up ignoring the language subjects altogether which made sure my marks never improved but they never decreased either. I was always a c student in languages.

However this started to change in the 11^th grade with a change of teacher, this teacher seemed to care a lot about my progress and it was obvious that the teacher believed I could get higher marks than I was currently getting if I put more effort into it. The teacher always gave me a hard time and I was irritated at the time because I always got in trouble with her, she always seemed concerned. Later upon reviewing the 11^th grade I realised that teacher really cared and in turn I started caring about my work as well which led to and increased interest in the subject especially in poetry and short stories. My marks increased a little I progressed from a C student to a B+ student.

Finally in the 12^th grade I made the conscious decision that I was going to become an A student, my changed mindset   coupled with the fact that I had a great English teacher that I was fond of made it easy for me to attain my goal of getting that A. At first I was surprised at the results I was getting, the teacher had confidence in me and that further boosted my own self confidence. I also started reading a lot more which helped me improve my language skills.

I believe that most teachers start out loving their jobs thinking they will be appreciated by students, but most students suck and do not appreciate their teachers, this lack of appreciation and the low salaries teachers earn  leads to teachers hating their jobs and not being the most positive influencers. Only teacher’s pets and top students get the right kind of attention and encouragement/positive reinforcement from teachers to get the best out of their education. Teachers reward interested students, they like it when students ask them questions and show interest in their subject, that is the reason they became teachers in the first place. So to get the best out of school the best thing to do is start showing interest and ask questions, if that does not change, the student teacher relationship then maybe a change of teacher could do you some good. You want to be taught by someone who sees potential in you and helps you reach your full potential, not someone who sees you as good for nothing and a waste of space.

Image By: h.koppdelaney

Negative Friends

Perhaps this is something that could hold you back the most, because your friends are a representation of who you are. We usually hang out with likeminded people or so I would like to think. Hanging out with the wrong type of friends could be disastrous; many people have been led to a life of drugs and crime/gangs because of their friends.

One of my favourite shows at the moment is Suits, one of the main characters Mike Ross is a genius who was kicked out of university for helping others cheat of their tests. The reason he got into trouble most of the time was because of his friend Trevor. He was always helping Trevor out in some sort of illegal scheme and he always seemed to be affected by the negative consequences of those actions. In Trevor’s latest scheme, Mike was to help him sell a suitcase full of weed but what Trevor did not tell Mike is that he overheard the drug dealers he was dealing with saying that the deal could be a set up and that whoever was caught with the weed would spend a long time in prison.  Had it not been for the fact that Mike was very smart; he would have been caught and taken yet another fall for his friend Trevor.

Old friends from back when you were doing not so well and friends like Trevor are usually not good friends especially if they are still in the same messed up situation you left them in. They do not like to see others progress, they always want to bring you back down instead of trying to improve themselves.  Stay away from such negative influencers for they are not true friends, they are like a disease you need to be cured of.

Believing is a step towards being

Imagine your dream life, believe that it is attainable and work towards achieving each goal towards that dream and slowly but surely your dreams will come true. Do not let negative influencers into your life, surround yourself with what is positive and you will in turn become a positive person with self belief powering your motor. 

Read more »