For instance, in 1977 in Tallahassee Florida, Laura Shultz, who was 63 at the time, was in her house preparing dinner. Just doing what she needed to do. And she heard her grandson screaming out in the garage.
She dropped everything, ran outside, and here was her grandson with his arm pinned under their Buick. This little lady lifted the car by the bumper. She lifted this full-size Buick right off of her grandson! Later when she was being interviewed she said, “I’ve never lifted more than 50 pounds of dog food in my life.”
Not too much longer after that, Dr. Charles Garfield had read this interview, and decided he wanted to meet Laura. Garfield is the one who wrote the book Peak Performance. He was talking to her and during their discussion; she said she really didn’t like to think about what she called ‘the event’. She kept referring to it as an event.
She said, “Oh I really don’t want to talk about that – it makes me nervous.” The reason was, she finally said, was that it challenged her beliefs about what is normal – challenged her beliefs about what’s natural.
Dr. Garfield asked her, “What is it you’re passionate about?”
And so they began to discuss that passion. She said her whole life she had loved geology. She loved collecting rocks and studying the earth. He said well you know, you’ve already proven you can do anything, right? And she laughed.
But when they finished their interview, she began to think about what he’d said—that she could do anything, and soon she enrolled in college. She finished her degree in Geology and had so much passion for it that she became a teacher at a community college in her area.
She overcame her overwhelm of getting that degree she had wanted for years, but believed was beyond her. When finally someone else began to believe in her and said she could do anything she wanted to, she began to believe in herself, and she went and took the action necessary to make that happen.