If you have a burning desire to be, do or have something and you’re not working towards it, chances are you’re being held back by a lack of self belief.

Most successful people acknowledge that self belief plays a big part in their achievements. At a very superficial level this makes a lot of sense for why would anyone attempt something if they didn’t think they could succeed? 

However, if this thought is carried to its logical conclusion it would mean that successful people never take any risks and this is clearly not the case.

Some of the most successful people I’ve met are those who, at some point in their lives, lost everything. They put their success down to the fact that they already know that if things go wrong, they will cope and come back to fight another day.

And yet, through lack of self belief, most people consistently choose unhappiness over uncertainty. You can prove this for yourself. Just ask everyone you know (including yourself)

“What would you do if you knew without doubt that you could not fail?”

Then ask, “So why aren’t you doing it?” The answer is always, “Because it MIGHT fail”

We do less than we could because what we fear most is our imagined failure. 

People who have experienced real failure don’t fear it anymore. They know it won’t kill them.

There’s a lot of talk about what we learn from failure, but the real lesson, the most important lesson, is self belief. When there’s nothing else left – we learn to believe in ourselves.

If we only get confidence and self belief from our successes, we are out of luck when we fail. We need to get resilience and confidence from both success and failure.

The worst thing is letting this fear get the best of us and not even giving something a good shot and then ending up in between – not achieving what we want yet not completely failing, as we didn’t really try. 

“We’re hoping to succeed; we’re okay with failure. We just don’t want to land in between.” 

–David Chang

Go back to your own definition of success: When you are successful how will you ‘be’? What will you do? What will you have?

What is stopping you from being, doing and having what you want? Whatever it is, imagine for a moment that you’ve been given the wrong information; that the messages that imply that your endeavours will result in failure were really meant for someone else and that you should have got the one that said, “It doesn’t matter whether you succeed or fail, what matters is that you try. No harm will come to you from trying.”

Now go and make a start.

Whether you prefer the ubiquitous slogan “Just do it” or the more esoteric quote sometimes attributed to Goethe “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it”, please know that self belief grows from experiencing both success and failure and, safe in this knowledge, you can now go and build your self belief, your self confidence, your self esteem and your chances of success. 

This is part two of our Steps to Success Series. A discussion on the subject can be found on LinkedIn here: http://lnkd.in/CpFtke Details of all the 12 Steps to Success can be found here

Step 1 Desire is the Starting Point to all Achievement