Whether You Think You Can

How often do we decide what is possible before we have even tried? The poster “Whether You Think You Can” carries a powerful message: the way we think about our abilities can influence the choices we make, the risks we take and the opportunities we are willing to pursue. 

If you tell yourself that you cannot do something, your thinking can become the first barrier. You may avoid the opportunity, find reasons why it won't work or give up before you have discovered what you are capable of.

But believing you can doesn't guarantee success either. Positive thinking isn't magic. It doesn't remove obstacles or make difficult things easy.

What it can do is change the question. Instead of asking, “What if I fail?”, you can ask, “What if I succeed?” Instead of deciding I can't, you can ask What would I need to learn to give myself a chance?

That small change matters because your thoughts influence your actions. When you believe something is possible, you are more likely to have a go, keep learning and find another way when the first attempt doesn't work. And when you discover that you were wrong about your limitations, something important happens. Your understanding of yourself changes.

You don't need to believe you can achieve everything. You need to stop automatically believing that you can't. You are not broken. You may be capable of far more than your thinking has allowed you to believe. Sometimes the first step towards changing your life is changing the thought that tells you it cannot be changed.