Get Smart!: How to Think and Act Like the Most Successful and Highest-Paid People in Every Field
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- The Newborn Child
- Fears of Failure and Criticism
| One Thought at a Time Your mind can only hold one thought at a time—positive or negative. But if you don’t deliberately hold a positive thought or emotion, a negative thought or emotion will tend to fill your mind, at least at the beginning. Negative thoughts tend to be easy and automatic, the default setting of the brain for most people. Thinking positively actually requires effort and determination until it becomes a habitual response to life and circumstances. Fortunately, you can become a purely positive thinker through learning and practice. The starting point of eliminating negative emotions is to understand where they come from in the first place. The good news is that no child is born with any fears or negative emotions. All fears and negative emotions must be taught to the growing child in his or her formative years. And because negative emotions are learned, they can be unlearned. Because negative emotions are habitual ways of responding and reacting to people and situations, they can be replaced with constructive habits of responding and reacting. This is very much a matter of choice. Abraham Lincoln said, Most people are just about as happy as they makeup their minds to be.” The Newborn Child Children are born with two wonderful characteristics, fearlessness and spontaneity. The newborn child is completely fearless. The growing child will touch, try, or taste anything, however dangerous. Parents have to spend the first few years of the child’s life preventing the child from killing himself or herself. The child is also born spontaneous. He or she laughs, cries, pees, poops, and expresses himself or herself without limit or constraint, twenty-four hours a day. A child has no concern about the reactions and responses of others. He or she simply does not care. Fears of Failure and Criticism At a young age, because of mistakes that parents make, children begin to develop the two main fears of adult life, the fear of failure and the fear of criticism. When parents, in an attempt to restrain or constrain the child’s behavior, tell the child, No Stop that Don’t do that Getaway from there and, even worse, physically punish the child for fearlessly exploring his or her world, the child soon develops the belief that he or she is small and incompetent. Soon the child refrains from reaching out and trying new things. He or she starts to say I cant, I cant, I cant when confronted with anything new or different. This feeling of I cant soon turns into the fear of failure. As adults, it becomes a preoccupation with loss or poverty. Adults fear the loss of money and time, the loss of security and approval, the loss of the love of someone important, the loss of health, and the possibility of poverty. This generalized fear of failure acts as a brake on the child’s potential and then the adult’s potential. It is the single greatest obstacle to success in adult life. T HE F EAR OF C RITICISM Young children soon lose their natural spontaneity as well. As the result of parental mistakes, especially making their love and affection dependent upon the child’s doing what they want him or her to do, the child very early develops fears of criticism and rejection. When parents become angry and threaten to withhold their approval if the child does not do what they want, he begins thinking to himself, I must do what Mommy and Daddy want, or they won’t love me Because, to children, the love and security of their parents are the paramount concerns in their existence, any threat of loss of this love terrifies them and causes them to engage in or refrain from any behavior that may lead to this loss. L OVE W ITHHELD Psychologists generally agree that most problems in adult life stem from “love withheld in early childhood. The most powerful and profound way to distort the adult personality is rooted in love deprivation or the giving and then withholding of love when the child is young. Children need love like roses need rain. Without an endless, unbroken flow of unconditional love, the child grows up emotionally vulnerable and soon becomes susceptible to negative emotions of all kinds. Alexander Pope wrote, Just as the Twig is bent, the Tree’s inclined A negative childhood leads to a negative adulthood. Download 0.86 Mb. Share with your friends:
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