As a Spanish speaker, I took many years of English classes, and by the time I graduated form high school, I was not able to put one sentence together in English. Dropping the class was not an option, would have done it if I could. I had to keep going despite my struggles and lack of success. My happiest thought on graduation day was that I believed that I would never have to speak English again, what a relief that was! Little did I know that exactly two years later I was going to be in the US, and I needed to speak English.
I realize now that during high school the language of my inner mind was: “English is just too hard, I don’t understand it, I can’t do it.” And my favorite one was: “the teacher doesn’t like me.” I did a very good job at convincing myself that it was almost impossible for me to learn and to speak English. Later on, a series of events led me to change my thoughts and begun to take English classes five days a week. On the same day, I took level 1, 2, and 3 of ESOL, English as a Second Language. Level one was easy, after all, I had sat in English classes for many years. Level two and three were a little more challenging, but I was relentless in my burning desire to master this thing that for many years, I believed I couldn’t do. After one year of this intense work, I woke up and I noticed that I was bilingual, what a sweet feeling that was. Mastering this challenge led me to go back to school, finish my bachelor’s degree, and then I was blessed to have the opportunity to continue with my masters. What was even more interesting, I graduated summa cum laude from my bachelor’s, no one was more surprised than me. I had never been a stellar student until that point, but I believe now that I was very afraid of failure and pushed myself harder than I thought I could. At that time my children were teenagers, and I convinced myself that failure was not an option for them to witness.
This journey led me to discover a career path in helping people change the way they think, and to be mindful of the language, the words, and the beliefs that run through their minds because that create their life the way it is. This is not an easy concept to understand, to believe, or to change at first. However, the cold truth is that the language we use daily, spoken or unspoken, creates our successes and our failures. Most of us are not ready to take responsibility for every thought we think. When I was struggling to learn English, nobody could have convinced me that it was easy to do until I believe I could. Henry Ford said: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you are RIGHT” this quote is on my office wall to remind myself that every thought I think matters.
Most people want two things in life: inner peace and success. And most people don’t realize that this is already inside them, and all they have to do is bring it out. Yes, it does require work, but the rewards are worth it. My ability to speak English was inside me all along, and it required that I believed that I could, and I put the effort forward. We can manifest anything we want, if we do those two things: believe that you can and put the effort forward. Once you decide to overcome a challenge or learn something new, you will be guided on how to do it step by step. Trust that the guidance and the information will come to you in small steps. We have about 75,000 thoughts going through our mind every day, begin to wonder how many of those are about worries and fears, and how many are about inner peace and success. New, positive, and empowering thoughts are like learning a foreign language, it takes time and practice to master.