f you’ve spent much of your life dismissing your talents and doubting your capabilities, it can seem like an impossible goal to begin believing in yourself. Since believing in yourself is such a vital part of goal achievement, overcoming your doubt and disbelief is crucial if you want to improve your life.
Believing in yourself is a simple matter of changing the way you think about yourself and your capabilities. Remember that negative thinking is a habit, whether it applies to you or the circumstances of your life.
In order to develop a strong belief in yourself, try these 3 steps:
Acknowledge your potential.
Self-doubt is often the result of an ongoing barrage of assumptions. You assume you cannot succeed at your goals because you haven’t succeeded at many things before. You assume you have no talent because your third-grade teacher once told you so. You assume you are destined for a mediocre life because you’ve never pushed yourself beyond your limits.
It’s important to understand that your assumptions are not necessarily true! You have accepted them as truth, but if you take a few minutes to really think about them, you’ll probably be surprised to realize that you may not have considered all possible angles. Be willing to revisit your assumptions and challenge them. You don’t have to change your mind about them yet, but be open to the possibility that you were wrong about yourself.
Be willing to try anyway.
Even worse than making assumptions about yourself is when you don’t even TRY to do something better for yourself, simply because you believe it would be a waste of time. This is the worst disservice you could do to yourself!
Starting right now, make a pledge to give everything your best shot from now on. Don’t worry about whether it’s possible or not. Don’t worry about whether you’ve failed in the past or whether you’ve got what it takes to succeed this time around.
Simply make a promise to TRY – no matter what comes of it.
Prove it to yourself.
If you really want to shatter your illusions of inability, take a sheet of paper and make a list of all the things you believe you cannot do. They can be little things or big things; it doesn’t matter. Just write down every single thing you believe you are incapable of doing.
Then, make it a point to prove yourself wrong by going out and doing them. Notice I didn’t say “doing them well.” I said simply, “doing them.”
You’ll never know until you try!
One word of caution with this method: be sure you don’t sabotage your own efforts in order to prove yourself right. For example, perhaps you believe you can’t get a better job than you have now. In order to “prove” that your belief is right, you go out and apply for jobs that are far beyond your skill or experience level. Of course, you don’t get called for interviews since you weren’t qualified for those jobs, and you conclude that your original suspicion was correct.
Don’t do that to yourself. The idea is to move slightly beyond your comfort zones, not to overwhelm and sabotage yourself.
With every positive result you achieve, you will eventually build up a stronger belief in yourself, and you can keep expanding your comfort zones to achieve more and more!
