Which Part of “Trust Yourself” Don’t You Get?

The hairy guy is Ari; the statistics gal is Libby, on the left!

The hairy guy is my son, Ari; the statistics gal is Libby, on the left!

My younger daughter, Libby, left her statistics test feeling fine about how the test went for her. Then she spoke to other students. Comparing answers, she realized that she got a lot of them wrong. No surprise there, she told me. Every one of her brothers and sisters who had taken statistics had struggled with it. Her brothers even called the subject, Sadistics.

Then she called me yesterday to say she got a 97 on the test. Those other students? Their answers were wrong, not hers.

How often do we discount our own abilities? We assume the next guy is smarter. In the middle of a test in high school, I glanced at the answers of the boy sitting next to me. The kid was smart. Waaaay smarter than me. I cheated. I changed my answer. When I got the tests back, I saw that my original answer was right. But I didn’t trust myself.

That was the last time I cheated. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the last time I questioned myself.

We can trust ourselves just as much as we can trust someone else.

Today, I can trust my own mind, my own perceptions and my own abilities.

If you are one of the three people who did not see this review about my talk in Rome, read here.

About dianabletter

Diana Bletter is the author of several books, including The Invisible Thread: A Portrait of Jewish American Women (with photographs by Lori Grinker), shortlisted for a National Jewish Book Award. Her novel, A Remarkable Kindness, (HarperCollins) was published in 2015. She is the First Prize Winner of Moment Magazine's 2019 Fiction Contest. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, tabletmag, Glamour, The Forward, The North American Review, Times of Israel, and is a reporter for Israel21C, and many other publications. She is author of Big Up Yourself: It's About Time You Like Being You and The Mom Who Took off On Her Motorcycle, a memoir of her 10,000-mile motorcycle trip to Alaska and back to New York. She lives in a small beach village in Western Galilee, Israel, with her husband and family. She is a member of the local hevra kadisha, the burial circle, and a Muslim-Jewish-Christian-Druze women's group in the nearby town of Akko. And, she likes snowboarding and climbing trees.
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2 Responses to Which Part of “Trust Yourself” Don’t You Get?

  1. To Scott says:

    Amen! Great review from Rome. Hope all is well.

    Tom

    Tom Scott District Sales Mgr Legrand 630/864-1669 Cablofil/OnQ/P&S/WattStopper/Wiremold Sent from my iPhone

    >

  2. Great reminder, Diana 😊

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