What You Believe About Yourself is the Most Important Belief.
Everything else is just secondhand!
You’re not where you want to be.
You know you can be better…and you want to be better.
But for some reason, making the right choices on critical matters seems to elude you.
You’ll be great for a few days. On a high. Nothing can stop you.
And yet on other days, you can’t even get out of bed. The peaks and troughs of an ordinary life are debilitating.
The problem is, you know you!
You know how inconsistent you can be. You have a track record of starting things and not finishing them. You know your ups and downs.
You’re so familiar with them, you can predict them.
When someone says, “Hey, great work,” you feel like it was luck or a one-off.
They certainly shouldn’t expect it as the norm. That’s not who you are. You have a whole past that supports that notion.
But what if you looked at your past differently?
What if you looked back and rather than see “supporting evidence,” you saw lessons you have learned? Skills you have gained.
(You know you have. I mean, you can walk, get dressed, clean your teeth and drive a car!)
I know, it seems too good to be true, but stay with me and you may realise how important your past is to your future, successful self.
Belief
We all have beliefs. They were given to you from an early age.
Whether they are:
Religious beliefs (there is one god and the rest will burn in eternal hellfire),
Education beliefs (no one in our family has ever been to college),
Relationship beliefs (divorce is not an option)
You get the idea.
All of these, and many other beliefs, have been instilled in you well before you learned about making your own choices.
You may not even realise some of the beliefs you have until they are challenged, if they ever are!
You’ll note all these beliefs are “outside” of you. They are the beliefs of others and, ironically, they were given these beliefs as well.
But the only beliefs you need, and must have, are beliefs about yourself!
This is more important than you may know.
If you believe success is fleeting or just plain luck, you’ll behave that way.
You’ll think you “got away with something” rather than recognising and building on a strength, or the early stages of a strength.
It’s like working out. We all know you need to do the reps and keep increasing the weight. That’s just the basics of resistance training.
It doesn’t get easier, you get stronger!
You might “go back into your shell”.
Pulling away instead of reaching forward.
You do less reps and lower the weight, or if it’s something like writing, you write less and less frequently.
If you don’t really believe you can achieve what you set out to do, you’ll hedge your bets.
You’ll see obstacles as either a sign that you’re on the wrong path, or that you were wrong or that the task itself is wrong.
But in reality it’s just an obstacle. Something to climb over, get around or overcome.
But if you don’t believe in your ability, you may not even try. In the end, all those people with their beliefs don’t matter!
Here’s an example
What have you started that you have since dropped, but still have some small inkling that you’d like to do it?
At some point you believed it was worth trying. The point is you believed. YOU! You believed in you! That’s all it was. And idea … and a belief!
Yet now, you don’t have that belief. You may have had the belief yesterday and today, you don’t. What changed?
All that really changed was how you looked at the idea and whether you could do it or not.
And you decided: not!
But today it could be different. Today it could be better. Today, right now, you could believe again.
Believe you can do this thing.
A First Public Appearance
A few weeks ago, my granddaughter performed in her first public dance performance. She is six.
In the weeks preceding her debut, she umm-ed and ahh-ed about joining the show. It drove her parents crazy. One minute she’s in, the next minute she’s out.
She finally decided she would. But it was never a done deal … until it was done. And she did. Her mum (my daughter) cried with joy. So proud of her daughter. What turned the tide, I believe, was two things:
She wanted to believe she could but she had butterflies and icky feelings and maybe those feelings meant that she couldn’t, or she shouldn’t.
She has an Aunty who is a very strong and successful dancer. Zoe called her and said the butterflies and icky feelings about performing are normal. Everyone gets them, even her after years of experience.
Allie wanted to believe she could.
Aunty Zoe said “Yes, all the feelings you are having are valid and normal. You are on the right path.”
Belief, the only real and valid belief, is belief in yourself.
Without that, you will always be living according to the beliefs of others.
And the vast majority of people are living according to the beliefs and rules of others, without even knowing.
So, back to you…
What is it that causes you butterflies and icky feelings? Why is that? Are the feelings normal? Are you reliving your past rather than learning from it?
What did you believe about yourself yesterday that you want to believe again today?
Create a trigger word or phrase
As soon as you begin to think you can’t, think of what can trigger a positive response.
I work with clients whose trigger word is the word: “impossible”. This is because at a conference, they talked about their experience during the COVID-19 pandemic and could reel off a number of situations they thought were impossible. But now those issues are part of normal business. It took them a while, and figuring out a few processes, but they are now in a far better position.
But they all stated with a belief their situation was “impossible”.
Think of your “impossible” situation. What would trigger a better response for you?
My phrase is simply: “every day”.
I have things I want to do every day (running, pushups, hydration, writing, to name a few).
So when I get a sense I may fail on any of those, I trigger myself with “every day”.
Thank you for reading. I’m trying to get into the habit of writing more, every week if I can, about personal experiences that are helpful to others.
Was this helpful? If not, what was missing? Keen for feedback, ideas. 😀
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Was in a funk this morning. Good timing