How High Can You Jump?

Between two stints in college, I went to business school. The counselor there looked at my records and said, ‘Well. I guess you can do just about anything you want to do, according to your records.’  I was shocked. My whole life no one had ever said anything like that to me. I could have used the encouragement. And much earlier.”

Award-winning artist who wishes to remain anonymous

Imagine having an expert look closely at your capabilities and tell you that the sky isn’t the limit—that you can do almost anything you want to do. What if you knew your capability for performance were literally unlimited?

When we decide what our limits are, whether through fear, apathy, or even just simple habit, we make them our limits. The architect who believes that no one can jump higher than three feet will build ceilings right around that level. The assumption has become a self-fulfilling prophecy: the architect has ensured that no one can jump higher than three feet.

We do the same with ourselves. We tend to take the limits we’ve been given, accepting a metaphorical ceiling to our performance. We pat ourselves on the back if we jump high enough to touch that ceiling—we’ve performed to our limit! Woo-hoo!!

The truth is that we have only performed to the limit we accepted. The actual limit is not in our capability—it is in our belief about where the ceiling is. What if we let go of that belief and trusted that our capability for performance is unlimited?

This is the kind of “magic” we can perform when we act as our own counselors and mentors, raising our expectations of ourselves. Author Tom Krause writes, “If you only do what you know you can do, you never do very much.”

Working as our own mentors, we can whisper to ourselves “You can do more. You can do more than you’ve ever imagined.”