High Expectations and Caring Relationships: Positive and Negative People in Our Lives

Remember the story of The Wizard of Oz?  Dorothy and her friends are told to go to a powerful wizard to get the help they need.  When they get there, the Wizard gives them gifts that endow powers; a diploma to make you smart, a medal to make you brave, or a clock to help you feel love.  In the end, of course, we learn that the wizard is a phony and that the power to improve themselves already resided in each of the characters.  The wizard just gave them permission to believe in themselves.

We all have “wizards” in our lives.  These are people who have impacted us in a big way.  Hopefully, you can think of positive wizards.  These people build us up and help us believe in ourselves.  When I was a kid, I thought I was a mediocre baseball player until about the age of 12.  When I was 12, I was on Mr. Bunnett’s team.  Mr. Bunnett believed in me.  He gave me opportunities to play new positions and left me to stay there even when I made an error.  He treated me like a star because he believed I was.  Guess what?  I believed him and I lived up to his expectations.  He really didn’t do anything to make me a better player except give me opportunities and believe in me.  He helped me believe in myself and that’s all I needed to excel.

Unfortunately, we can all think of negative wizards in our lives as well.  These are the people who don’t believe in us and let us know it.  They have low expectations of us and find a way to make us feel small.  I had a few teachers like this who gave me a lifetime of challenges when it comes to certain subject areas.  It wasn’t until I learned that I had the power to change my beliefs about myself that I realized these people don’t have to have control over our lives.

We need to be aware of the positive and negative wizards in our lives and we need to train ourselves to be the gatekeepers to what beliefs we allow to shape what we think of ourselves.  A powerful tool I learned in this regard is how to take or reject compliments and insults.  In order to not allow a negative wizard to influence my beliefs, I take what they say and push it away.  For example, if someone says, “You are not good at Math” I would push that insult away in my mind and say to myself “No.  They don’t know me.  That’s not like me.”  If someone were to offer me a compliment that I wanted to use to affirm my beliefs, like, “You’re a great teacher” I would say to myself, “Wow, thanks.  That is like me!”

I know this sounds cheesy.  I wouldn’t blame someone for saying that it sounds like new age fluff.  All I can say is that it works.  We need to teach our kids to reject the thoughts of those who would give us a negative self-concept and be affirmed by those who build us up.  This is true in the home, the classroom, and on the playground.