The 1 Thing Holding Potentially Successful Students Back

Let’s talk about about limiting beliefs today. When I was a school counsellor, I noticed many students believing they were bad in English, Maths, History and so on simply because they have failed a test or an exam once.

This ‘failure’ episode could define their lives for years. They went around saying and thinking, ‘It’s hopeless lah. I’m bad at English. I failed last year leh!’ Something which happened years agocan still have power over them.

Since they genuinely believed that they were bad at English, for example, most of them did not put in much effort to improve themselves.

(It’s even worse when someone – especially an adult or authoritative figure- actually told them that they were bad at a subject.)

A Story About Limiting Beliefs 

I’ll use a story to illustrate how harmful limiting beliefs can be.

Once there was a man who walked past a group of huge elephants. Each elephant was tied to a tree with a thin, flimsy rope. He was surprised that none of these elephants tried to escape even though they were enormous and could break the ropes at any time.

So the man asked their trainer: ‘Why don’t these elephants break free?’

The trainer replied, ‘We’ve trained them from young. They’ve been conditioned to believe they cannot escape. When they were small, we tied them with the same flimsy ropes but they were too small to break free back then.

‘As they grow bigger, the belief remains and they still don’t try to break free….even though they can!’

So those poor elephants remained prisoners because of their past experience.

So don’t let our children keep thinking that they are lousy or bad at something because of 1 failure, 1 mistake or 1 unpleasant experience.

For all they know, they have grown wiser, learnt from that ‘failure’ and have improved now.