The Power of Choice: Living the Life You Always Wanted and Absolutely Deserve by Dr. Berge Minasian Remove The Proverbial Lid Let me share an interesting anecdote about believing and achieving.
This one involves a group of young behavioral scientists who wanted to see if they could condition a jar full of fleas.
They put some very active fleas in a jar and put a cover over the mouth.
The fleas tried and tried to jump out of the jar but they were held back because of the lid.
Soon they were not even jumping to the top anymore because they just bounced off and couldn’t get out.
Then before too long, the fleas just jumped, but never to the top because they “knew” they couldn’t get out.
After observing this behavior for awhile, the resear– chers were convinced that they had indeed conditioned the fleas to believe that it was “impossible” to jump out of the jar.
Then one day they took the top off the jar and as we would suspect, the fleas did not jump to the top because they “knew” that it was impossible to jump out of the jar.
They had been thoroughly conditioned by their experience.
It’s probably a safe bet to say that many of us, to one degree or another, have had the proverbial lid placed over us.
Our well meaning parents, our teachers, our relatives, our friends, and employers have all unwittingly contri– buted to the “lid” which some psychologists call “learned helplessness.”
The evolution is subtle but quite real and I dare say that some of us are regularly placing our own lid upon ourselves.
What do we mean by learned help– lessness?
Learned helplessness is the behavior some of us adopt to avoid taking responsibility for the way life is unfolding.
Some hide behind such “lids” as “I come from a dysfunctional family,” or “I can’t help it, everyone in my family is fat,” or “it’s in my genes.”