Carole Mandi: “IN OUR FAMILY,” one of my aunts once told me, “we all suffer from high blood pressure.”
I had seen my grandmother suffer from it, and eventually succumb to it, as did my own mother. When would the monster come for me?
Throughout my 30s, I held my breath, visiting doctors, waiting. Until one day I understood. It could end with me. I could be the one who broke this genetic pattern. I read up on the ailment, re-organised my diet and started an exercise programme.
While I was genetically predisposed to high blood pressure, I decided that I would change what I could rather than be a sitting duck. It required drastic action on my part.
However, I recently realised that there were other, just as insidious generational predispositions that run in my family that I, and most of my relatives, still accepted as fact.
These half truths, still ruled our lives, and we nodded our heads in confirmation when someone eventually succumbed to them.
It’s a pattern I have seen and heard repeated elsewhere.
“In our family,” someone once told me, “No one had ever completed high school.”
I have also heard it said, “In our family, most of the girls fall pregnant in their teens” or “the boys usually become drunkards,”.
From the family level, this kind of thinking is extended to the community, and finally, it happens at a national level.
For instance, corruption was once so rife that when we saw someone drive a new car or buy a property, the belief was that they stole it.
These kinds of beliefs are always self-limiting, holding us back in some form of mental bondage. Without questioning, we accept that this is who we are, this is what we do and that belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yet the opposite is also true. We can take on positive values and beliefs and these can govern how we live. If children grow up in a family where excellence is expected, nurtured and encouraged, chances are higher that they will excel.
When I attend my children’s concerts or prize-giving days, I’m always amazed at how children from certain families, even though in different grades, always come out shining.
Eventually I took one of the mothers of these children aside to find out how they did it. She told me that children don’t turn out that way by chance, and it goes beyond genetics to upbringing.
“There are standards expected of them, they are trained to achieve them and the same is role modelled not just in the nuclear family but the extended family as well,” she told me in so many words.
The children knew that in their family, being academic, musical or sporting achievers was who they were.
Our belief systems are powerful because thoughts become words, words become actions and actions become character and character becomes destiny. Our belief systems influence not only how we see the world but how we see others.
To positively change the course of destiny for an individual, family, tribe or country, someone has to step forward and question all previously accepted self-limiting beliefs.
However, questioning them is not enough unless we replace them with positive beliefs. Thereafter, we have to be willing to consistently do what is necessary to break the pattern.
As we head into the elections, the pressure to find refuge in tribal cocoons that encourage negative group thinking is high.
Regardless of what happened in the past, or who we believed ourselves to be, the opportunity to create a positive future begins when we have the courage to think differently.