The Motivation Speaker, David Thomas, is speaking at our Learning & Development Thought Leaders' Conference in June. In his guest blog below he gives us an insight into his session...
"Our quality of life is directly related to the quality of the decisions we make.
- What time we get up
- Whether we do any exercise
- How well we educate ourselves
- How we conduct ourselves at work
- The primary person we choose to spend our life with
- What we eat
- Etc, etc.
I am sure you get the message. All day, every day, we make and take decisions and they create our world around us. Even if things happen to us that are out of our control, we still decide how we manage our responses.
WE are responsible for those responses.
And some of the things that happen can be terrible. We all know someone who has suffered the loss of a child, lost their parents early, been divorced, got money worries, been falsely accused of a heinous crime, had a disabled child or struggled with poor health. I am sure that some of these things have happened to you. It’s just the law of the Universe.
I had difficult times as a child. My mother’s alcoholism destroyed her marriage to my father. She remarried a guy who was 65 years old when I was just 6. He was an animal. Dreadful things happened at home. At 16, I fell apart attempting suicide twice and committing multiple burglaries. I nearly killed a police officer with an iron bar coming out of a shop that I had burgled. I got expelled from school and went to court where I received a juvenile criminal conviction.
In court, I can still remember the words of the judge very clearly
“Young man, you need to start taking some responsibility.”
This was brilliant and very sage advice from a wise man. What I should have done is nodded back at him, taken it on board and applied it. But what I actually did was give him some lip spouting garbage about how it wasn’t my fault, that things were difficult at home and how he wouldn’t understand.
But in reality, it was me committing the crimes. No-one else made me do it. There was no peer group pressure, no need for the money. I lost my head and got involved in something illegal that could have had life-long repercussions.
Eventually, I left a life of crime behind me. I had had enough of the stress and hassle so I walked away. I became one of the world’s leading authorities on accelerated learning and now spend my working life overcoming other people’s self-limiting beliefs about what they can do. Because, for most people, when they hit a challenge with their learning, they blame something or someone.
- Their lack of education
- They are not ‘bright’ – whatever that even means
- They are not well read
- They didn’t go to University
- Their parents didn’t go to University
- Etc, etc.
You get the message.
When I hear this, I then share a technique or two with them. A memory strategy, for example. They get an average score of 11/20 on their first attempt but this goes up to 19/20 after I have shown them the process. This is in just a few minutes.
How is this possible?
Because they are now learning in the way their brain naturally works. Nothing more, nothing less. They already had the ability to learn the objects; they just didn’t know how.
We all have the ability to learn well. We cannot all be A grade students but we can learn way better than we think we can and currently do. But this will only happen if we stop blaming our background, upbringing, parenting or any other negative issue and truly open our minds to new possibilities and explore our true potential.
Because in life, it’s not the cards you are dealt in life but the way that you play them."
