Encouragement – You Can Do It!

When I was about 4 years old I was staying with my grandmother and she had a house that she rented out one side of the house to help secure income for her.  She was a widow and had to pretty much make her way in life by herself.  So, my grandmother would always tell me I could do anything, because she would here me say “I can’t” to almost everything I tried to do or learn.  I don’t know what possessed me, but one day my grandmother had gone to the bathroom, she had the door closed and the lock was a flip type of lock on the outside of the door.  I remember flipping the lock and locked the door.  After my grandmother had completed her bathroom visit she tried to open the door and of course it was locked.  She would call me by my name and ask me to unlock the door and, of course, I could unlock the door, but I chose to not to unlock the bathroom door.  At four years of age I pretty much knew right from wrong, but decided to tell my grandmother “I can’t”. This went on for about 10 minutes of telling me to unlock the door and I always responded with “I can’t”.  Well, my grandmother decided to climb out of the bathroom window that was about 6 feet off the ground.  I don’t know how this 54-year-old woman did it, but she climbed out the window and balanced herself on the gas meter.  My grandmother always believed where there was a will there was a way.  You see, she had a very hard life growing up in south Mississippi.  In her day, you had to work hard just to survive.  It took the whole family working and pulling together just to make ends meet.  Needless to say, after my grandmother climbed out of the bathroom window and got in through the backdoor, I received my just rewards.

It was years later that I found out I had an attitude of “I can’t”. I was under the impression I could not do anything right. Belief in myself was something that I I did not have and thought others were better than me.  I truly believed I could not do anything right.  I begin to hide from conversations; especially, when I was a teenage about cars.  I knew nothing about cars, and I was embarrassed and I though other guys knew everything about cars.  I would just nodded along and agreed with my buddies on how to fix a car.  I learned how to put up a front.  I felt that one day someone is going to find out about me and expose me.   Being a pretender, I was always stressed, never felt any peace and never developed confidences in my abilities.  I just assumed everyone was right, but me.

It wasn’t until college that I saw a different way of thinking.  I was in the Baptist Student Union one night with a few friends and we were talking about life.  Someone stated something and I had a thought I would just share my true feelings about what they said and to my surprise several of the people in the group said they felt the same way, but was afraid of saying anything.  That night was a life-changing experience.  I realized that I was a normal.  I came to the realization that if I was a normal person and had normal feelings, then, everyone else had the same types of feelings as well.  I realized we experience emotions pretty much the same way, whether the emotions are joy or anger.

So, over the years, I have changed my way of thinking and it didn’t happen overnight, but was a process.  I have come to understand it truly is what you think about yourself that matters.  The scripture says “the way a man thinks so is he.”

If you need someone to help you change the way you think, send me an email at rampuptolife@gmail.com and let’s do an exploratory meeting to see if I can be of service to you!

Let me help you change the way you think from “I can’t” to “I can do it.”

Best of joy and happiness
Randell Pickering
Owner of Ramp Up to Life