There was a circus in town and as a man was passing the elephants, he suddenly stopped. He had just noticed that these huge creatures were being held by only a small rope tied to their front leg. No chains, no cages. It was obvious that the elephants could, at anytime, break away from their bonds. But for some reason, they did not.
Then he saw a trainer nearby and asked why these animals just stood there and made no attempt to get away. "Well," the trainer explained, “when they are very young and much smaller, we use the same size of rope to tie them and, at that age, it is enough to hold them. As they grow up, they are conditioned to believe they cannot break away. They believe the rope can still hold them, so they never try to break free.”
Most of us behave like the elephants as we go through life, believing that we can not do something, or be something. We meet our old challenges with the old mentality, fearing them because we had stumbled once before. However, failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.
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