Here is an excerpt from my book, The Silent Master: Awakening the Power Within:
In short, very few of us emerge unharmed from the “growing up” process. Even with the best intentions, parents or significant others simply don’t know your inner truth the way you do. No one can know your personal truth the way you do. Yet, everything in the environment of your formative years encourages you to silence your inner voice in order to please the persons you’re dependent on.
If you were told – taught – that you are lazy, stupid, poor in math, beautiful, temperamental, athletic, friendly, shy, then you probably still are. These significant others don’t tell you that their opinions might be faulty. Quite the contrary, in order to maintain their status as authority figures, they teach you that their word is law, and that only bad or rebellious children contradict them.
I invite you to a challenge. I am so confident that your true abilities far outweigh the Self-Concepts that you have been taught, that I am inviting you to try a simple experiment. Please take one of the concepts you accepted from others as being “you.” I realize this, in itself, is a challenge, because learned some Self-Concepts you have may be so ingrained that it wouldn’t occur to you that you “accepted” them. You think of them as being “just the way you are.” So try to be very honest as you do this.
