Cross Your Own Niagara Falls
Wednesday 1 June 2011
When engineers were contemplating building a bridge over the gorge below Niagara Falls, the first problem was to get a line across the chasm. It was impossible to do by boat and the airplane had not yet been invented. Also, the distance was beyond bow-and-arrow range. As a creative solution, designing engineer
Charles Ellet held a kite-flying contest, offering a cash prize to the first person to fly a kite across the gorge and allow it to go low enough for someone on the ground to grab the kite string.
The string led to a cord, then a line, and next a rope. Then came cables until there was support sturdy enough for a suspension bridge to be built.
“Think of that kite string as a single thought in your mind,” suggests Denis Waitley, a psychologist and internationally known speaker. “The more vivid and clear the thought, and the more you come back to it, the stronger it becomes – like a string to a rope to a cable.
“Each time you rethink it or dwell on it or layer it with other thoughts, you are creating a cognitive map, like building a bridge over Niagara Falls,” says Waitley. “That map will become so strong and real that your mind and body will automatically respond to it and improvise when the ravine widens suddenly or the environment changes.”
Adapted from The Psychology of Motivation
DENIS WAITLEY