Stumbled upon a TEDx talk on Facebook this morning. Started to watch it in bed this morning, and didn’t get far before I sat up and got out a pen and paper. Graham Shaw asks the audience if they think they can draw, and then prove them all wrong:

Here’s my drawings (and my thoughts when Graham asked the question was ”No, I can’t, sadly, I am so bad at drawing anything that is figurative”), and I’ve already drawn a few more since then as well, all extatic that I can actually create something that looks like a person!

Now. Graham got an entire audience (bar the handful of people who actually did raise their arm, knowing already that they can draw) – including me! – to go from thinking they cannot draw to actually having produced a handful of sketches of people, actually looking like people!

I don’t know about you, but I sure have gotten a different relationship going with my thoughts and beliefs, based on the fact that most of them are but thoughts and beliefs. They are not real. They are thought, not The One and Only True Thought. They limit me, in the sense that I myself let these beliefs become boundaries for me. And sadly, even though I’ve gotten better at spotting these limiting beliefs, I do still let them stop me from experimenting and playing around more.

Now what is that Albert Einstein quote? Oh yeah:
We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

And that’s really what Graham does in these 15 minutes. He shows me that the notion that I cannot draw is actually not a truth. And voila, something is created!

Graham ends his talk thus:
How many other beliefs and limiting thoughts do we all carry around with us every day, beliefs that we could perhaps potentially challenge and think differently about? And if we did challenge those beliefs and think differently about them, what else would be possible for us all?