The Believing in Yourself is Power
Believing in yourself means having faith in your own capabilities. It means believing that you CAN do something — that it is within your ability. When you believe in yourself, you can overcome self-doubt and have the confidence to take action and get things done.
1. Work on your strengths (not weaknesses)
When you fail over and over at something that seems easy to others, it’s nearly impossible to believe in yourself.
Struggling with confidence, you tend to focus on things you can’t do. That’s because you feel weaknesses more keenly. They are painfully highlighted in your mind, symbols of shame, weakness, and failure.
“I’m bad at this,” quickly escalates to, “I’ll never be good at anything!”
The good news is that everyone has weaknesses — and strengths.
You need to determine how to identify your strengths, so that you can get the most mileage out of them.
The solution to start building confidence right away:
Stop spinning your wheels at things you aren’t wired for.
Discover what you are already good at, and work at becoming great.
A common habit of successful people is to focus on the positive — what they excel at — and delegate weaknesses to others instead of worrying about not measuring up.
When you shift your focus to developing your strengths, you will effortlessly feel more competent and confident. And when you put effort into developing your natural abilities, you can become a badass.
Maybe you know some of your strengths. To get some ideas, think about how people might describe you:
Talk to your family, close friends, and colleagues about what your strengths are. What are some things they come to you for help with? You’re not fishing for compliments, though sometimes this exercise can come with a confidence boost.
2. Be your own coach
If you don’t believe in yourself, you won’t believe someone who is cheering you on from the sidelines. That’s why a great small business coach leads their clients to success not by cheerleading, but by developing talent.
According to Gallup’s research, great performance is a result of managers who empower employees. Managers who focus on developing talent get outstanding results.
Great coaches, and managers, lead by empowering people to succeed with the right tools, education, and resources to become excellent. They interact with people using approaches like Conversational Intelligence to put people at ease and bring out the best in everyone.
The research shows that positive thinking, goal setting, and performance reviews don’t create results on their own. When you don’t believe you have what it takes, none of those things are a magic bullet.
So how can you take advantage of this knowledge, and coach yourself?
Seek out the tools and education to develop your talent. Take action.
Each step you take, moving closer to your goal, is evidence of your ability to succeed. Believing in yourself will become easier and easier, the more you see your success reflected back to you.
The secret is, you don’t need another person to work through this process. You don’t need to possess qualities of leadership to coach yourself through it.
The trick is to learn more about yourself without being judgmental.
Start by journaling on where you want to be in life. Write out all the things you want to have, and the kind of person you want to be. From this, you can come up with strategies to get to that point.
What does success look like for you?
Choosing ideas that suit you — and working with your strengths — can propel you towards your own vision of success.
You can also write out the parts of your life that you’re unhappy with. Create action steps, and find the resources, to improve any of these areas:
By identifying the parts of your life that you’re least satisfied with and keeping an eye on where you ultimately want to be, create long term goals that are manageable for you.
Set one big goal at a time, and break it down into smaller parts. Succeeding in taking each small action step, no matter how tiny, leads to visible progress.
Ultimately, these consistent small successes add up to self-belief and massive confidence.
Over time, you start to see that you can achieve anything you put your mind to — because you are already doing it.
The power of believing you can improve
The magic happens by simply believing it’s possible. Your belief in possibility is necessary to the work, the experimentation, and the consistency needed to change your life.
This belief in possibility is what provided rock stars with the single-minded intensity to get on stage every night, in the face of ridiculous odds.
It’s what gave famous authors the tenacity to keep writing and editing after countless rejected manuscripts.
It’s what kept star athletes training, through pain, injury, and loss, until they made it to the top.
Now you have some tools to start believing in yourself. Work on these steps consistently, and you will begin to see amazing things happening in your life.
