Tuesday, August 11, 2009

How to Believe In Yourself - A Four-Step Plan

Written by Noah St. John

Believe in yourself. You've heard that the secret to success is to "believe in yourself." But have you ever noticed that no one ever tells you HOW to believe in yourself?

Today, more and more people believe in themselves less and less. That's because we've lost so much (money, wealth, prestige) in recent years. Loss leads to lack of self-belief, which leads to more loss, which leads to even lower self-belief.

The four main reasons people don't believe in themselves are:

1. Lack of accurate mirroring
2. Lack of positive experience
3. Lack of self-confidence
4. Lack of empowering daily habits

You can believe in yourself starting today by following these four proven steps:

1. Find a Loving Mirror.

A Loving Mirror is a person who believes in you, even when you don't believe in yourself. The Naturals of Success each had at least one person who showed them their potential, even when they didn't believe it themselves.

You can find Loving Mirrors in your own family, your friends or even work associates. Start by acknowledging the good you see in others, then ask for the support you need.

2. Transfer your experience.

If you've never done something, how are you supposed to believe you can do it? The first time you do something is, by definition, something you haven't done before. Yet, most people don't realize you can believe you can do something before you ever do it.

Let's say you're about to appear on TV for the first time. Remember when you succeeded at other things, like driving a car or landing your first job. You'll start to realize you've got more experience than you think.

3. Build your self-confidence muscles.

It's true: some people are born with more innate self-confidence than others. But even if you weren't lucky enough to have been born with natural self-confidence, just like a muscle, you can build your confidence by working on it.

What builds self-confidence? Use Afformations like "Why am I so confident? Why do I believe in myself? Why do I trust my intuition?" because these empowering questions focus your mind on why you are, in fact, confident.

4. Install empowering habits.

We each perform a number of habits every day. Most are unconscious, many are disempowering. When you exchange your disempowering habits of thought and behavior to empowering ones, and your self-belief will naturally increase.

The irony is that if you look up the word "self-belief" in the dictionary, it's not there yet. That's because I had to create that term to describe the level of belief a person has in themselves. Self-belief is different from the misleading "self-esteem" or even "self-confidence", which itself is a subset of self-belief.

Because positive self-belief leads to positive actions, which lead to positive results, which lead to even higher self-belief, building positive self-belief is critical to living a life of more wealth and happiness.

Once you break the code of having unstoppable self-belief, you can turn the tide and make the changes you really want in your life faster, easier and with far less effort.