Argue for Your Limitations



I was an adult of middle age before I encountered the phrase argue for your limitations and they are yours. Until that point I had seen my limitations basically as those forced upon me by others. If you are female you are most likely familiar with most of those beginning with nice girls don't do that. And I usually responded with, Who wants to be a nice girl? And in my youth I wasn't even sure I wanted to be a girl.  Who wants to be labelled a second class citizen at birth.

I was raised in conflict on so many levels from a father who told me I could be anything I wanted to a mother who sent me away on my freshman year in college to earn my Mrs. degree. I was encouraged by society to go along to get along.

And it wasn't until and it wasn't until I was teaching adaptive skiing to adults and children with perceived limitations I encountered the concept of arguing against your perceived limitations. I learned to not see them in my students and in my role of teaching them to ski. And later in my recovery from my CBT I used it daily for my own survival and victory. There was nothing I could not surmount or work around.

So yesterday with the goal of seeing a dear friend in Taos for dinner it began to snow. And I shocked myself with my trepidation of driving over the mountain.  In retirement, with a home based business, I don't have to get out and go somewhere if it is not optimal conditions. And that permission to not do had been translated in my mind as do not.  I had argued for my limitations.

And those limitations were of my own making. I have a heavy duty four wheel drive pickup with huge tires. I have decades of experience driving in the snow. The weather report said light snow flurries. I had a purpose for making the drive. Actually two purposes. I had not grocery shopped in a week of failed weather warnings of two feet of snow which never happened.

So I jumped in the truck with the new battery (the failing one just replaced having been a limitation for a couple of weeks) and headed out. Five miles on my journey and the snow stopped. The roads all the way into Taos were totally dry. It was a great time seeing my friend again.

So why the orchid at the top of this post? Because Mother told me once I had a brown thumb. And others told me orchids were not easy to raise. This one of 13 is currently blooming for the third time. Another nine have buds.

Don't limit yourself. There are enough people willing to set limitations for you. They don't need your help.


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