Shy Girl
- Tiffany Kent
- Jun 21, 2024
- 3 min read
Growing up with my single mom in New Canaan, CT was a miserable experience.
I didn’t have a lot of friends;
I was small and shy;
I was held back in the 2nd grade, and
I was the only kid with divorced parents.
What made my childhood even worse,
was my mom spent a lot of her energy hating my dad.
She would tell me my father should have been more successful.
What I’m realizing now is that when my mom told me my dad wasn’t successful, I somehow internalized that I wasn’t smart.
My mother dropped out of college, meanwhile,
my dad graduated from Harvard Business School and climbed the ladder at IBM, and supported me and my mom financially.
In 1980s, I lived in two houses in an affluent town an hour outside of NYC.
While we didn’t belong to a country club, a girl teased me that I was a rich girl.
We all know that we are children, a product of our parents.
Kids absorb and interpret information in ways we, as parents,
don’t always understand and know.
Her criticism created an internal criticism inside of me.
I created a harsh internal judge who told me that I wasn’t smart.
I mean, who fails the 2nd grade?!
Listening to a podcast by Dr. Jim Joehr and Shane Parrish, I learned ....
Success isn’t about getting another degree but it's about changing something inside.
Life is all about winning the mind game and the stories we tell ourselves.
I didn’t know I was holding myself back because of an internal voice until I broke the spell.
This is what happened.
I suffered a rejection at work five years ago. I shared this failure with my now-coach, who told me I should start my own firm.
Then my daughter told me to listen to the book The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. This is when I realized, "The more you think you can or think you can’t, you are right"—Henry Ford.
The last piece of the formula, I shifted my mindset from fear of failure to I have nothing to lose.
And so I broke the spell of the internal evil judge had over me and went for it 6 months later. That was almost 4 years ago.
So many of us, tell ourselves we can’t do something and this becomes our reality.
The secret is to stop the judge and just move forward and start to take action.
We have to stop working from fear of failure and learn to think that we have nothing to lose.
Have kindness on yourself and others. I'm working on my Positive Intelligence, Why Only 20% of Teams and Individuals Achieve Their True Potential. Great book by Shirzad Chamine.
Tiffany Kent
Your Friendly Wealth Engagement Guide,
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