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

Image from www.bigtomatocompany.com

Oh dear, poor you. You’re having a hard time, your business isn’t going well and life is so unfair and you have a lot to deal with.

This sympathy is free, there’s no obligation to return it and it’s offered in all sincerity. I’d offer you some tea to go with it but I can see you’ve already had lots.

Now, how do you feel? Understood and supported? Good.

But here you are still feeling bad and I can see that every time someone asks you how things are you feel that pain all over again. Could it be that the more you focus on your difficulties the worse you make yourself feel?

Anyway, that’s more than enough sympathy now. What you need is some encouragement.

Your business doesn’t have any emotions. It responds to action. Take the right actions and your business will flourish. Expect it to sit and wait for you to ‘feel like’ taking action and it won’t.

If fear has you in its frozen grip, sympathy won’t get you out of it. Even the tea won’t melt it. Only action has any effect.

If you can’t think straight, DO something.

Consistent action, doing the right things at the right time, is what gets us what we want but until you figure out the right things to do, do something anyway. Action has a 50% chance of getting the right result. Inaction has none.

I’m sorry you’re feeling bad. Really I am but what are you DOING to change things?

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”

Franklin D Roosevelt

You don’t have to look far to find something to be afraid of – the internet is full of dire warnings and also, strangely enough, its also full of people who’d like to sell you the things that can protect you from the very things of which they tried to make you afraid.

Newspapers TV and radio are no better except that they often seem to peddle fear just for the hell of it, under the guise of ‘news’.

Everyone must, at some time in their lives, have experienced the gut wrenching, heart stopping sensation that we call fear and yet, for all the scary stuff that is manufactured by others we are the main culprit when it comes to creating our own fears.

It is the thing that most people acknowledge is the major factor that holds them back from achieving their full potential and they give it all sorts of names: fear of failure, fear of success, fear of losing what they’ve got, fear of the unknown, etc., etc., etc.

What are most people afraid of?

Writing at the end of the Great Depression in 1937, Napoleon Hill suggests that most people have six basic fears. They are: fear of poverty, criticism, ill health, loss of love, old age and death.

When questioned if these are still relevant today, it was fear of poverty that caused the most dissent amongst a group of business owners. There was a strong argument that in our modern Western world, poverty is a relative term, even when we have lost all our material possessions. However, there was an equally strong argument that it is this fear of losing everything that is the biggest driver in our society, especially for people in business who seek to create a sense of security by being in control of their own means of earning a living.

Looking at Hill’s list again, all those fears related to losing something: our material possessions, pride, independence, status, love, connection, and of course, life itself.

What became clear is that almost every feeling of fear we experience is the result of an IMAGINED situation, not a real one.

Moreover, in almost every case, the imagined situation that we most fear never happens.

When a situation that we had feared actually materialised, most of us dealt with it without any real consequences.

Beyond the survival instincts that keep us safe, there appears to be only one real fear and that is the fear that we won’t be able to handle whatever happens to us. The fact that most people do handle even the most horrendous occurrences indicates that most fear, which usually concerns a future event that never happens, is completely unnecessary.

Bob Newhart had his own suggestion for how to deal with this:

Coping Strategies

In all the suggestions that proliferate in how to deal with the physical symptoms of fear (usually manifested as stress) no one mentions, booze, sex, drugs or rock ‘n’ roll but I’m guessing that at some point, most people will use at least one of these in an attempt to banish fears and anxiety.

The thing that everyone agreed on was what doesn’t work is trying to ignore it, suppress it or pretending the fear doesn’t exist. This can often result in real physical damage – perhaps that’s why booze, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll weren’t offered as serious means of coping!

Strategies to cope with fear usually involved taking action to arrive at a point where the fear is no longer felt as a physical sensation. This involved a whole range of activities from talking and sharing the fear – being talked off the ledge, as one person described it, to strenuous exercise to deal with the excess adrenaline. Some people are able to use relaxation techniques or meditation to calm themselves while others seek the help of a range of physical therapies that often results in them being able to talk about their fears.

Why do we need strategies to cope with IMAGINATION?

Having established that most fears are about thing we only imagine MIGHT happen or how we imagine we’ll cope if our worst fears are realised it seems a little strange that we need external coping mechanisms.

If we create the fear in our heads, surely we can get rid of it the same way? The six ghosts of fear (or however many we allow ourselves to have) are just that – GHOSTS. They aren’t real, they only exist in our heads.

Human beings have control over only one thing – our thoughts. Whatever we allow into our heads creates emotions and physical reactions and so the person who is able to discipline their thoughts has a huge advantage in controlling how they deal with both real and imagined situations.

This is not the same as the parroted phrase that has become popular with fans of The Law of Attraction – the one that says “Thoughts Become Things”. If that were true, teenage boys would get lucky several times a day, no-one would be sick and everyone would have as much money as they wanted.

Many unexpected and unwanted things happen to us in a lifetime and they are not the result of what we think. It is the way we choose to deal with them that is in our control and this means we need to exercise discipline over our thoughts. To catch a thought as it is formed and ask, “Is this useful to me or not?” and develop it or reject it accordingly means that the time wasted on fearful thoughts that paralyze and impoverish us can be freed to use on creating new ideas and enriching our lives.

When we believe and prove to ourselves that by controlling out thoughts we will cope with whatever life throws at us we truly have nothing to fear.