The Power of Belief

Your beliefs determine your experiences, so beware of what holds your thoughts. Your belief system is a mechanism that is uniquely yours. What you believe is powered by your desires and controlled by your thoughts and actions. In other words, your beliefs may limit your success.

What do you want? What is it that you desire? More often than not, when you approach people with this exact question, they will respond with what they don’t want. They can rattle off a list of things they want to change and the countless ideas that are not wanted, but most people struggle to tell you what it is that they want.

Most people have never sat down to think about what they do want. Now is an excellent time to evaluate the life you’re living. What are your goals? Take time to visualize your life that you aspire to have, now picture the end result. Think about how it feels to live in that moment. What is your attitude at that moment? Describe in detail what you see. How do you feel at that moment? What do you feel? Are there any smells or colors you notice?

Now write down all of that information. What you have written down on your paper is the desired outcome that you will have to transform into smart goals. List these goals in detail. Think about the big picture and wrote down action steps to get there. These will be your goals.

Your goals should be written down and placed somewhere you can see them and see them often. You should be able to read them more than once a day. You also need to read them. Think about what you pictured and find photos in magazines or words that speak to you and create a vision board. You want your vision to become more and more vivid. You want it to be well-defined and easily pictured in your mind.

• Be curious. Absorb as much information as you can on how you can achieve your goal. Study the subject carefully. Use all available resources, such as books, CDs, courses, and people. Yes, people. Speak to as many people as possible who are already successful in your area of interest. Ask questions. Then ask the follow-up questions. And then ask some more questions about what they did to master their field. Do not limit your connections to only people you already know. Introduce yourself by phone or e-mail. Even handwritten communication is available. Explain your purpose for reaching out to them and ask for advice. The worst scenario is that you don’t receive a response. You have nothing to lose when the answer was already a no if you had chosen not to contact them. The most helpful thing that can happen is that they become your mentor and offer support and encouragement. You end up on the positive side even if you only get one tip from everyone that you reach. This process is the least expensive and most rewarding.

• Be your individual. Take the beliefs and advice that you acquired from your research and change them to fit you. Come up with your original process. Visualize yourself reaching your goal in a way that no one else has done. Dare to dream big. Don’t let fear keep you from taking risks. If you fail, you still learn. What do you have to lose? If that statement makes you nervous, then try listing the worst possible outcomes that could happen if you dare to say yes and write another list with the best conceivable outcomes. Remember to stay focused on the desired goal.

• Strive to be ahead of your competitors. When my youngest brother was in first grade, he would watch his older cousins ride a bike without training wheels, and wanted to partake in play so much that he would run alongside his bike to keep up with them. While everyone else rode in the breeze, he was huffing and puffing alongside them, gripping his handlebars moving only as fast as his feet could carry him. He never observed their scraped knees and elbows and responded, “Nah, I’ll pass. I might get hurt.” No. Instead he tried to do it himself. He practiced on his own, enduring pain and sometimes even defeat. He started with sitting on the bike and then soon learned to balance for a short amount of time and fast he was riding along with his cousins. Each time he fell, he got back on and tried again with an even more enormous amount of determination. From the first time he sat in the seat, he believed in his mind that if he got back on, you would learn to ride. He envisioned himself beside his cousins riding bikes; he felt the wind in his face and believed he could do it. He believed in himself so much that soon he was doing tricks and beating them in bicycle races.

• Be positive. Plan for obstacles and have a plan to overcome them. If you start with a negative attitude, you will only see problems. If you have uncertainties that the project will work, then it won’t work. Don’t allow the power of negative people to influence you. Believe in yourself and what your capabilities.

When your ambition to achieve far exceeds any pain, fear, or frustration of failing, you have no choice but to move forward. I challenge you to see your goals just like you did when you were a child. Before you learned about self-doubt and negative criticism, remember when you knew what you were capable of before the first time someone told you couldn’t. Remember how much power the word ‘yet’ holds. Believe that anything is possible. Commit that you will not let anything or anyone, including yourself, stand in your way of reaching your goals.