You don’t have to join the U.S. Army to be all that you can be.

This weekend I watched The Princess Diaries movie again.  This time I was uplifted and entertained in high definition due to our Christmas purchase of a new television.  The line that really stood out for me this viewing came as Mia is reading the letter from her deceased father.  He wrote the letter as part of a gift for her 16^th birthday and she is reading it after she has decided not to accept the role as princess of Genovia.  In the letter her father wrote, “From now on you will be traveling the road between who you think you are and who you can be.  The key is to allow yourself to make the journey.”

How many times a day do we hold ourselves back from making the journey to who we can be by being who we think we are?  Are you truly stepping out and being your best every day or are you limiting yourself by believing the stories in your head and the messages from others that have accumulated over your life time?

Mia had many reasons of her own why she did not want to be princess of Genovia.  Here are just a few of the self-limiting lines she told herself as a fifteen year old Californian.

“I can’t do this, I’m a girl.”

“I’m not good at public speaking.”

“I am invisible, and I am good at it.”

“I am a freak.”

What does your self-limiting talk sound like?

What if, today, you acted as if one of those stories that you tell yourself were not true?

Let me give you an example from my life.  I know that I love working in small groups with people to help them in specific areas of leadership and life skills.  In a previous job, as a corporate employee for a national firm, I regularly worked with teams in offices across the country to help them improve their leadership and project skills.  I loved helping them identify what was holding them back in their projects and careers and working with them to develop new behaviors.  I also had concrete evidence of success and achievement.  Despite that when I started my own business I told myself that I could not offer leadership skills workshops to people.  Some of my self-limiting talk included:

“I don’t have information that people are interested in.”

“No one will pay money to attend a workshop by me.”

“I am not as good a presenter as others that present workshops.”

“I don’t know anything that everyone else does not already know.”

“I don’t know how to organize and market a workshop.”

However, one day in a burst of self confidence I decided to offer a workshop and see what happened.  Guess what?  People did sign up and attend and provided feedback that they found the content valuable and left enriched by the time spent in the workshop.

For too long I accepted the stories in my head as true and did not have the courage to challenge them.  When I finally found the courage it led me further down the path toward who I can be, breaking out the box I put myself in of who I think I am and who I think I am not.

As Norman Vincent Peale said, “Change your thoughts and you change your world.”  You too can break out of the box you have defined for yourself and embark on the road to who you can be.  What will you do today to be all that you can be?