Recently, a guest speaker visited one of my journalism classes to share her career experiences in broadcast journalism. She is just a few years older than us college kids, so I guess you could say her advice really applies, maybe even a little extra, since she grew up in our generation. And at the end, she said something I haven’t stopped thinking about:
“You are who you think you are.”
You are who you think you are. It naturally raises the question… who am I?
I think we try to answer that by pointing to what fills our Outlook calendars, our grades, our involvement or the people we sit with when everyone’s looking — and when no one is. But I think there’s more to who we are than these answers that can be listed on paper.
Who we are is who we think we are.
Who we are is what we choose to put on our Outlook calendar. Who we are is believing that yes, you can pull yourself out of bed and make it to class. Who we are is how we respond when a friend needs five dollars, when someone we love goes into surgery or tells us his brother recently passed away. Who we are is the confidence we carry in public, even when we’re quietly unraveling in private. Who we are is what we believe we have the capacity to do — or overcome.
This might be an opinion column, but this part is not an opinion: yes, you can.
You can because you believe you can. You can because you are who you tell yourself you are.
Yes, you can make it to Christmas break because you’ve decided you will. Yes, you can pass that one darn class because you believe that you can. Yes, you can do it.
And if you fail — when you fail — you went down believing in yourself. That’s not failure; that’s bravery. And, honestly, maybe this is just my opinion, but believing in yourself ain’t so bad.
I think changing our frame of mind to believing that we can allows us to actually achieve. After all, perhaps your pursuit of becoming who you believe you can become will land you farther than you think.
Staff Reporter
