The Invisible Barriers

I don’t know how many of you remember the track star,

Roger Bannister. To refresh your memory, Roger was the first
person to run the mile in less than four minutes. When Bannister
first talked about breaking the four-minute barrier, every
authority on running came forth with a list of reasons why it
could not be done. They went to great lengths to explain why the
human body could not stand such a strain. They believed the
heart would simply quit pumping. To maintain a pace of less
than sixty seconds per quarter mile was unthinkable. I can recall
reading many such articles myself and believing that it was so!
One person refused to believe those ideas. Roger
Bannister believed he could break the barrier. It didn’t matter
that no one had ever run a mile in less than four minutes. He
believed he could and methodically planned every step of the
race, never losing sight of his goal. In the end, he reached it.
After Bannister broke the barrier, others began to do it.
Once he proved it was possible, the invisible barrier was gone
forever. The impossible became easy to do.
How many self-limiting barriers have you placed in your
path to a successful life? How often have you doubted your
abilities? What activity have you failed to begin because you
didn’t believe you could complete it? How would your life be
different if you could remove those invisible barriers? These are
important questions to consider as you seek to improve your life.
Breaking barriers requires belief. Often beliefs get
clouded with untruths and we are unable to see ourselves
victorious. To clear up the fog of misconceptions, we must be
willing to risk failure. We must be willing to question our beliefs
so we can venture forward. We must be willing to systematically
plan, examine, and evaluate our performance in order to improve
the next try. Roger Bannister cleared his foggy misconceptions,
he took the risk to fail, he planned every minute detail and, in the
end, he proved the world wrong.
Now is the time to start your own demolition company.
Now is the time to tear down those walls of limitations and reach
for your dream race like Bannister did. You have an abundance
of talents. Your resources are barely tapped, no matter how
much you’ve managed to accomplish so far. Resolve to increase
your efforts and dig up those untapped resources.
Do not become one of the many that go to their graves
with a fresh supply of talents. Recognize that you have the right
to reach your dreams. Prepare yourself to knock down the walls
of resistance and begin your journey into becoming what you are
capable of being.
Self-limitation is not a new trait of man. It has existed for
all time and will surely continue to plague us in the future. In
our search for success, there will be real and imagined barriers.
It is our task to distinguish between the two, to eliminate
erroneous ideas, and to carefully plan how to overcome the few
real barriers we face. Those are the actions that will make our
search successful.