As a Home Business Consultant and Coach for over ten years, I’ve heard a myriad of “reasons” why someone has not achieved success.  It’s always something out of their control. That gives them the latitude to blame someone or something else for their lack of success.

Let me introduce you to Deron, my son (that’s his picture taken while we were on vacation.

I can still remember the day like it was yesterday.  Deron was in second grade and came in from school and we were going over his papers.  I was shocked to see an “F” on a test he’d taken on capitalization.  While he had capitalized the first letter of a sentence, none of the other appropriate words were capitalized.  We had studied this and he knew to capitalize proper nouns.

“Deron, what happened?  You knew to capitalize people’s name, streets, and towns. How did you forget to do it on your test?”

“Because, Mom, I couldn’t read the words. I’m the stupidest kid in the class.”

My heart stopped. And my life was never the same after that.

Turns out Deron was dyslexic. To qualify for help in the public schools, you must have a 15 point difference between your IQ and reading score.  His was 45 points off.  He was reading at a kindergarten level in January of second grade.

The school put him in a special education class and he immediately went from F’s to A’s.

That was unacceptable because it implied that it was okay not to excel. It was okay not to read. It was okay to make excuses because he was dyslexic.

I put my life on hold for one year and attended every seminar, read every book, and learned everything I could get my hands on.  There was a wonderful program in Houston for dyslexics…but we simply couldn’t afford it.  I convinced the professor who owned the company to allow me to take the training he provided for the teachers, so I could teach Deron these concepts myself.

One of the most important things I did was talk to him about every famous person I could find who was dyslexic. If you visit http://www.dyslexia-test.com/famous.html, you’ll see that people like Albert Einstein, Walt Disney, Thomas Edison, General George Patton, Winston Churchill, were all dyslexic.  We talked about how lucky he was to be dyslexic because it’s been shown that dyslexics have a different way of thinking.

“You can always hire someone to type papers for you. But you either have that extra creativity in your brain or you don’t. And you have it!”

One day we were talking about Tom Cruise being dyslexic (we had just seen one of his movies).

“Mom, do you know what this means?”

“No, Deron, what?”

“I guess I’m going to be famous some day”

You see, I would not allow self-limiting doubts to enter his mind.  In fact, on his ARD at school, one of the goals I made them include was self-worth.

Do you allow self-limiting thoughts to enter your mind concerning you success or lack of success in your home buisness?

• The reason I’m not successful is I don’t have enough money to promote properly.
• I don’t have name recognition…who would talk to me?
• If anyone saw where I lived/what I drove, they wouldn’t want to work with me.
• I have Attention Deficit Disorder.
• I’m a single mom/dad.
• I work long hours at my job and don’t have time.
• I don’t have a college education.

There are people – just like you – who have risen past their challenges and disabilities and become successful.  Don’t you realize that by overcoming those obstacles you can provide inspiration to others?

Why not put together your own list of famous people who have risen above the same challenges you’ve faced?  Why not read their books and articles and model what they did to overcome adversity?

(By the way, Deron just brought home a paper from class yesterday. He’s now a freshman in high school, taking all honors classes. Out of a freshman class of 995, his class rank is 34!  Yes, reading is still difficult and spelling is a real challenge. But, he has decided that he’s not going to let a little thing like dyslexia stand in his way.)

What’s standing in your way?  Turn off your self-limiting beliefs and BELIEVE you can overcome any challenge. And then take ACTION. 

Care to comment? Just register on the right. Would love to hear what you have to say.