How High Can You Jump ?

Something recently reminded me of a story I used to tell when I was a therapist & coach teaching people how to break through limiting beliefs and realise their potential.  It went something like this ... 

If you ever decide to change your career and become the owner of a flea circus … you know the sort of thing : little fleas on tiny little trampolines and tiny little bicycles, that sort of thing ... then the best fleas you can get live in Mexico - where they all jump 12 metres high.

Trouble is, if you have a flea circus, you don’t want all the fleas jumping to exactly the same height – because that would be boring, you want each act to be different … so you have to train your fleas !

All you have to do is go to Mexico and look in the shadows of the big cactus plants, ideally first thing in the morning, so you can sneak up and catch the fleas sleeping.

Then you need a number of different jam jars, at different heights - say some 3 metres high, some 6 metres high and some 9 metres high - and you put the fleas into the various jars.  

Finally the fleas wake up and the first thing they do is jump (cos that's what fleas do !) ... and of course they hit their head on the lid.  So they jump again – and hit their head again.

After a while, they start to realise that they are going to hit their head every time they jump, and it hurts !!  So next time they jump, they jump to just below the height of the lid.  And they learn to jump to that height, and that height only - so they never have to hurt their head again.  

Then, after a couple of weeks, you take the lids off the jam jars ... and guess what happens ?

Each flea has now learnt to jump to a certain height and so he continues to jump to that height only – because he doesn’t want to hit his head again.  He doesn’t realise the lid isn’t there any more ... and that’s how you train fleas to jump to the height you want them to jump.

Unfortunately, we work in a very similar way.  If we learn that we can only do certain things, we only do those things and we think we can’t go any further.  We belief that we have limits. That’s our experience and that is what we buy into.

Until someone says “look - there’s no lid there”.  And we may be unsure and nervous at first, we may be reluctant to jump higher in case we hurt our head, but if we trust that person enough we jump a little higher to see if it's true ...

And very quickly we realise that there is no lid and we can jump as high as we like !

So make today a great day .......... and see how high you can actually jump when you realise there is no lid.  We have no limits !