Last night I started listening to Zig Ziglar’s Goals program, the old Nightingale-Conant recordings from his goal-setting seminars. Most of them were taped in the ’80s or early ’90s. It’s hard to believe how long I’ve been listening to that voice.
Zig tells a story about a man who’d hit bottom. Divorced, heavy, out of hope. He started listening to motivational tapes on a battery-powered recorder he carried in his car, and he played them over and over and over.
One night he was in a grocery store and heard a little girl say, “Hey, Mama, look at that fat man.”
He turned around to see who she was talking about.
It took him a minute to realize she meant him. He still had a lot of weight to lose. But the picture he carried of himself had changed so much that “fat man” wasn’t who he was anymore, even to himself.
I’ve wondered for years whether that kind of thing is real. People talk about visualizing the future, seeing it before it happens, believing it into being. Some of that is grift. I’ve bought enough of it to know.
But underneath that story is something I believe for a different reason. Scripture says God made me on purpose. Psalm 139 says He knit me together in my mother’s womb. I have a purpose. I’ve been given talents. I can love people and influence them for good. None of that is a fantasy I’m trying to manifest. It’s already true. The only question is whether I see it.
It took me a long time to understand that it starts with how I think about myself. How I talk about myself. What I expect from myself. If I don’t see what’s been put in me, I won’t use it.
Psalm 19 asks that the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in God’s sight. I’ve always read that as a verse about how I talk to other people. Lately I’ve been wondering if it covers how I talk about myself, too.
If God took the time to make me, I wonder if I offend Him when I talk myself down. When I convince myself there’s less potential in me than He actually put there.
I want to hold two versions of myself at once. The realistic one, who has things to change today. And the potential one, who’s the reason those changes are worth making.
The man in the grocery store still had weight to lose. He’d just stopped seeing himself as the fat man.
