Welcome to Day 1 of the Club 12 Connection Challenge, a 7-part series about personal and professional relationships. For each day of this challenge, I’ll share a new big idea along with an actionable insight to help you enhance your existing relationships and build new ones.
You’ll discover how to:
deepen your existing relationships
forge new friendships in your personal life
strengthen the relationship you have with yourself
make powerful professional connections with high-value people
Ready to dive in? Hit the Play button at the top or keep scrolling to read the written version below.
An all-star baseball player once decided to visit a prison to inspire the inmates to better themselves.
He told them a story about how his father always encouraged him when he was a little boy…
About how his dad would pitch him the ball every day after school and help him master the game.
He also shared the way his father spoke to him every time his baseball bat connected with the ball:
“Son, if you keep on hittin’ the ball like that, you’ll be professional baseball player one day.”
His dad repeated that statement to him over and over again.
So frequently, that it became a recurring voice in his head.
And sure enough, he eventually grew up and became a professional baseball player.
Upon hearing this story, one of the prisoners stood up and said,
“Hey, my dad used to say something similar to me when I was a little boy, too... Every time I did something my dad didn’t like, he looked at me and said, ‘Son, if you keep on mis-behaving like this, you’ll end up in prison one day.’”
Sure enough, he ended up in prison.
As it turns out, 66%-90% of men who end up in jail were treated like dirt by their parents1 when they were children. Many of them were spoken to like they were prisoners WAY before they ended up behind bars.
But this isn’t about parenting. It’s about conditioning.
You condition your reality through your self-talk.
The words we hear as children often become the words we speak to ourselves as adults.
And those words have a direct impact on our self-image, self-esteem, and self-confidence.
There are far too many people walking around these days with a giant smile on the outside, and low self-worth on the inside.
You don’t want one or the other.
You want BOTH.
And trying to outsource your worth to social media ain’t gonna do it…
