Confidence
Silencing Negative Voices
Personal Perspective: Refusing emotional limitations from those inner critics
Posted July 30, 2025 Reviewed by Davia Sills
Key points
- Allowing negative voices to influence us can limit our potential.
- Resilience can grow with time and experience, enabling self-confidence.
- Internal motivation enables us to ultimately succeed.
- We can silence the limiting voices around us.
A respected soul once asked me if I would have done anything differently in my life. While I don’t adhere to regrets, I responded: “I wouldn’t have listened to others’ loud whispers of fear, whose echoes soon became my words.” Such statements limited my potential: You aren’t good at math, so you can’t be a doctor, and certainly not a mother and a doctor.
Throughout my decades, I fought such voices, yet a few have survived at times, just with lower volumes. Today, I know for certain that these words held only the power I allowed them. My fear-based decisions were never the true north of my younger soul. With age and self-assurance, I refused to allow such emotional limitations from negative voices; rather, they propelled me into many accomplishments.
You aren’t good at math, so you can’t be a doctor, and certainly not a mother and a doctor
The first train carrying animals for the circus is traveling at 50 mph, and the second train carrying the circus performers is traveling at 65 mph. The first train leaves ten minutes before the second train. When will the two trains arrive, and which one will be first? Keep in mind they leave from the same location.
My father used pencils to visually demonstrate the two trains and how they ended up at the same location at the same time. He was proud of himself, a natural lover of numbers in any form, knowing that if he could animate this word problem, I, his math-dense daughter, a devotee of words and never numbers, would finally understand this seemingly straightforward (for him) math exercise. My passions lay in the circus animals and the performers in those trains, never the formula that helped them arrive simultaneously. My mind never held numbers and letters together; one or the other. Word problems were an oxymoron to my literary mind.
Still, I smiled, nodding my head, pretending to understand, but my dad’s answer defied me: “You have no clue, do you, Barbara? For someone so smart, you are so stupid when it comes to math.” I did not respond, but a piece of my confidence crumbled into dust, especially since the comment originated from the one parent who was my cheerleader.
So began the confirmation of my math fate, reinforced by an obese geometry teacher whose puckered, jiggly arms stuck out of her smock dresses like white tree stumps. “You just don’t get it, Barbara, do you?” adding her verbiage to my D+ on my recent math test. Another nail in my math coffin.
My mother hired a math tutor for me. I had no understanding of Asperger’s at my young age, but I eventually realized why this young genius could not make eye contact with me. This googly-eyed, blemished college math major walked through my door to sit with me in the dining room, at the table usually occupied for special occasions and holidays, never for math work. His antiseptic odor further sealed my memory of math trepidation, forever cementing numbers with disinfectants.
He asked, “Do you understand, Barbara?” I nodded my head, and it wasn’t a lie. At that moment, I truly comprehended his explanations that attempt to simplify another nonsensical word problem.
I practiced the entire session so I could transfer the same knowledge into my 10th-grade math class. But something happened between the time the math whizz left the house and when I turned off the dining room lights and closed the door. My minuscule math brain emptied out—no numbers remained, only words.
The next day, I arrived in class just as confused as I was before Mr. Formaldehyde-Numbers sat at Mom’s mahogany dining table. Today we call it math anxiety, and some who teach algebra, geometry, and calculus specialize in ways to help students overcome such number trepidation. Oh, how I would have flourished with additional kindness, self-talk, and understanding of my number fears. I would have been a brilliant doctor, a compassionate diagnostician. And I would have still been a mother.
Fast-forward to graduate school, when I earned my doctorate. Our youngest son was in high school when I challenged myself with this advanced degree. I lamented to my dear friend, “I’ll be 50 when I graduate.” And she wisely responded, “You’ll be 50 if you don’t try!”
Ironically, in my second year of doctoral classes, I was required to take statistics. But by then, having earned my two other degrees, teaching as a college professor, and a mother of three, I had the confidence to succeed. Failure was not an option. I took advantage of every mathematical support offered to me, including the invitation from my professor to have weekend tutorials at her home.
After a particularly challenging concept, the statistics professor inquired, “Are there any questions?” And one second later, another follow-up, “Barbara, do you have any questions?” Instead of shrinking into my chair with embarrassment at being singled out, as I would have as a younger girl, I smiled, laughed, and said, “Of course, I do. Thank you.”
Nothing had changed for me in my ability to weather the mathematics storm, except for one major issue. The limiting voices are not mine anymore. I know I can do anything if I want it badly enough.
Yes, I wish I had this level of self-confidence so long ago, when it was still time to apply for medical school. That was not to be, but the journey I have had over the decades has enriched my soul. I earned my doctorate in a noble field—education—even if it wasn’t in medicine. I was the best mother I knew how to be to my three sons, and all the while, I taught full-time at the college. I did it all and did it well because I knew I could and believed in myself.
Perhaps I needed the anxious sighs that were always fear-based, so as I aged, I could say, Yes, I heard them and even listened to the words of dread that deterred me at times from the path I could have taken. Yet, when I reflect on where I was and where I am, I wouldn’t do anything differently except increase the volume of my own voice and silence the others. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change anything, for at 71, I enjoy a life of contentment and quality. Certainly, with challenges and sorrows, but one of intense joy and lightheartedness.
