This image has stayed with me ever since I first saw it: a massive elephant standing still, held in place by a small rope tied to its leg.
At first glance, it feels absurd. An animal with enough strength to pull down trees, restrained by something it could snap without effort. And yet, the elephant doesn’t move. It doesn’t test the rope. It doesn’t resist. It simply accepts the boundary.
That image isn’t really about the rope.
It’s about the belief.
As a calf, the elephant was restrained by a rope. Back then, it didn’t have the strength to break free. It pulled, failed, and learned a lesson: this is as far as I can go. Over time, that lesson hardened into truth. When the elephant grew stronger, the rope got smaller—but the belief stayed the same.
That’s how most limitations in our lives are formed.
Early failures, old feedback, past circumstances teach us what we think is possible. At the time, those conclusions might even have been reasonable. But we rarely go back to update them. We carry childhood ropes into adult lives. Junior-level fears into senior-level roles. Survival beliefs into seasons where we’re no longer just surviving.
So when we feel stuck, we point to the rope. The job. The role. The market. The family expectations. The timing. We tell ourselves, If only this weren’t here, I’d move.
But like the elephant, we often have far more strength than we think. We’ve grown. We’ve learned. We’ve changed. The rope hasn’t.
The dangerous part isn’t that the rope exists—it’s that we never test it again. We stop pulling. We stop experimenting. We stop asking, What if this no longer applies to me?
Beliefs have a quiet way of turning into cages. They don’t shout. They don’t threaten. They simply whisper, Don’t bother. You already know how this ends.
And because the belief feels familiar, we mistake it for truth.
The irony is that ropes aren’t always meant to trap. Sometimes they’re there for safety. Sometimes they’re reminders of where we started. Sometimes they exist simply because no one thought to remove them. But when belief steps in and assigns meaning—you are stuck, you are limited, you cannot—the rope gains power it never had.
Growth doesn’t always require breaking free in dramatic fashion. Sometimes it starts with a small, almost innocent act: a tug. A question. A challenge to an assumption you’ve been living under for years.
What if this rope can’t actually hold me anymore?
What if the last time I tried was when I was half the person I am today?
The elephant doesn’t need to become stronger. It already is. It just needs to relearn what’s possible.
And so do we.
Because the rope was never the problem.
The belief was.
Kenrick Vaz 