January 21st, 2022

Do beliefs control behavior?

  • Yes, remember the story of the air rifle? Their behavior was controlled by what they believed.

Bob Beaman was heading to the Olympics; he had jumped poorly during preliminaries. Finally qualified on the third day. The world record in long jump had been broken 13 times. On the day of the Olympic finals, the Soviet record still held.  Once the previous three had jumped, Ralph Boston said to Beaman, “Give ‘em two inches in the front, you take two feet when you land”

His words became what Beaman thought about himself. The possibility had been placed into his mind. 

Beaman had jumped almost 2 feet beyond any previous jumps. He had destroyed the event.  The jump was named as one of the five greatest sports moments.  Beamanesque – an adjective meaning doing something completely unexpected and being completely amazing coming out of nowhere with great excellence involved. 

Beaman returned to the same place under the same circumstance and was not able to reproduce the same result.

A belief was posed by Ralph Boston. Boston believed Beaman capable and with no time to think whether or not to believe what Ralph had said he chose to believe. 

There’s an equal amount of power in what you can do as what you cannot do.  

It had become obvious Beaman had been kissed by fate. A gift from God, a singular event.  

The question asked by the experts – can Beaman do it again? The answer began to form as a consensus amongst the experts – no he couldn’t do it again. 

Let’s consider a question that was never posed… what is they asked, “WILL he ever do it again?”

When asked can he do it again – did anyone assess the damage being done?

The mind with wings can be described as momentum.  When the mind folds its wings and drops is anchor – it loses its momentum. 

Momentum can take results beyond what reality says they should be, and vise versa. 

Beaman lost momentum. How did it happen? 

Can Beaman do it again? The answer no, released the anchor.  If the question was, “will he do it again?” and the answer was no, the answer would have been opinion. If he could do it once, what was stopping him from doing it again? Physically he was capable. But he had folded his wings. Later, instead of listening to the voice that believed in him, he began listening to the others. His jump was a fluke – an outlier. Beaman told himself he would never be able to jump that far again.  He believed it and he never jumped that far again. 

Remember your mind has both wings and an anch