Have you ever thought about how much believing in yourself makes a difference in your quality of life? We are faced with messages that cause us to doubt ourselves everyday. Marketing brands and products media inundates us daily which messages of how we ought to be, look , and think to sell us products. Unknown faces behind screens have become critics with a worldwide platform. People we look up too have social media profiles that make our lives look fruitless. No wonder self doubt is increasing among people. There is a way out of the craziness though.. Tony Robbins says, “I don’t have to get rid of the fear, I just have to dance with it. Achievers have mastered this dance and use their self-doubt as fuel to reach higher, go faster and be stronger – and you can, too.” Let’s look at the benefits of believing in yourself and tips to get you there.
A strong belief in yourself can bring you all these benefits and more:
You recognize your ability to accomplish goals.
You’re optimistic about the future as you set goals and achieve them.
Deep down inside, you know you can do anything.
You treat yourself kindly.
You feel uplifted and more satisfied with life.
You’re motivated to get things done.
You have faith, no matter what.
You see and enjoy the abundance around you.
Others feel attracted to you.
Wouldn’t you love to enjoy these qualities of confidence and well-being daily? The good news is you can! There are actions you can take to fortify your belief in yourself.
Whether you feel lacking in this area or just want to strengthen your belief for the extra benefits, try these ideas to further develop your belief:
Have confidence in your own abilities to get something done. Be your own best cheerleader and encourage yourself to get your tasks done. Learn to break large tasks down into achievable portions. Then, even when times are tough and your spirit is low, you’ll know you can do it.
2. Create dreams. Whether it’s getting the career you want, obtaining more training, meeting someone you admire, traveling to a faraway place, or setting a goal to save a million dollars, connect with your dreams.
Where you come from, the money you make, and the people you hang out with are insignificant to the dreams you create. Dreams are often focused on what you want for yourself in the future. When you believe in your dreams, you can also believe in yourself!
3. Establish goals and go for the gold. Believing in yourself means you’re motivated to get things done. Get into the habit of setting goals (both short-term and long-term). Then, you can take active steps to achieve them.
4.Treat yourself well.Treating yourself with a nurturing nature and understanding that you’re a deserving human being is essential to developing belief in yourself. Pamper yourself when you desire it. Recognize that others should treat you with respect and love.
5. Ensure motivation is high. Remember the childhood story about the little engine that could? When you want to accomplish your tasks with excellence and achieve your goals, it’s an incredible testament to your level of motivation. Build momentum to fuel your motivation.
6. During the tough times, keep the faith. No one is immune from experiencing rocky chapters in his life. But if you believe in yourself, you can meet those challenging phases with a positive, solid resilience. You’ll push forward, move through the trying moments, and know you’ll come out on the other side wiser, stronger, and more confident of your abilities.
7. Recognize the bounty you have. Regardless of what stage of life you’re living, search for the good all around you. Get the most you can from each moment.
Is the chair you’re sitting on comfortable? Are you safe and warm right now?
Whatever you love in your life, be thankful and have gratitude.
Believing in yourself is one of the most powerful choices you can make. Practice these strategies and you’ll discover the sheer joy and comfort of knowing you can do whatever it is you choose when you believe in yourself.
Comment below or email me to share how you are working to believe more in yourself.
Failure is something that stomps on our self-confidence and desire to pursue our goals. It has the power to make even the most qualified curl up and retreat, especially as news travels sooo quickly and trolls lay waiting to give uninformed and unwanted opinions. It is a part of life, but you can overcome failure, grow from it, and still achieve your dreams.
A few years back, Disney released an animated movie called Meet the Robinsons that had a deep impact and meaning: celebrate each failure you have because it gives you an opportunity to try again..wiser.
Most people make the mistake of thinking that when they fail at something, they should move on and take it as a sign they were never meant to succeed at it. Wrong, wrong, wrong!
When you’re trying to accomplish something, failure is the best thing that can happen to you. Seriously! Do you think the light bulb was invented the first time around? No! Thomas Edison took thousands of tries to get it just right!
What about the first wheel or the telephone? Of course, it takes multiple tries by multiple people to reach success, but the key point to remember is that you must fail first to know when you’ve succeeded.
Real-Life Examples of Failure
Think of a toddler learning how to walk. Although they give a fair share of tantrums during the learning stages, they pull themselves up after each fall and try to walk again. Instinctively, they’re teaching themselves how to perfect the movement based on their past mistakes. It’s a trial-and-error process!
People struggling with weight loss often feel like failures when they gain weight while dieting. Keeping a weight loss journal can help them track their progress and learn to recognize what triggers backslides, including emotional or physical triggers that can be prevented—learning from these mistakes will teach them how to combat those same problems in the future.
Failure offers another benefit: it opens doors that will allow you to find out what you’re really destined to do. This happens in college all the time.
How Your Experiences Help You Find Yourself
Certainly, you know at least one person who went to college to pursue one degree and as they went through their course work, experiencing successes and failures, they discovered a new career interest and changed their major.
Think of a student who started college to become a nurse, but soon realized what they really enjoy is teaching. The whole reason they were going into nursing was to help educate people to improve their lives. Ultimately, they found the best way to do that is not as a nurse, but as a teacher. There’s nothing wrong with that!
As long as you can learn from your “mistakes,” they’re not mistakes at all – they’re opportunities for success! There’s always something to learn from every situation. Once you understand the lesson, it will make you a better person.
Become Stronger and Wiser
Failure makes you a stronger person. Imagine what it would be like if everything you did always went your way. Imagine that you were successful at everything you attempted your whole life and then one day it happened: you failed! You failed so severely that it caused you to lose everything. How would you deal with that failure if you’d never had to overcome an obstacle before?
Failing allows you to become more resilient, so you can always figure out a way to move forward.
The first wheel may have been square, and it moved, but it was wobbly and eventually fell over. But the inventors never gave up! They figured out how to make it rounder so it could roll smoothly. You can do the same in your life! You can’t give up; you have to pick yourself up and figure out a way to roll forward, stronger than ever!
Action Steps To Overcome Failure:
Learn from failures. Evaluate missteps and brainstorm alternative ways to achieve your goal.
2. What are your takeaways? What skills were you missing? What new can you learn to improve the outcome?
3. Keep a journal of your progress and remind yourself to never give up on yourself. If not this, God has many other accomplishments ahead for you!
There is so much more ahead for you if you invest in the uncomfortableness of gaining strength by learning how to overcome failure. You can do this and succeed!
Let us know how your personal development journey is going… Connect with us and join the Sheila M Community to be the first to receive helpful FREE resources, product updates, and support for your journey!
Recently, I’ve met several individuals who struggle with low self-esteem. It’s no wonder living in a supercritical world, unrealistic expectations set by media, and the overwhelming drive to be and do better. Low self-esteem is diabolical as it creeps into other areas of your life and sabotages success because of a lack of worth and confidence. I often see the internal pain and feel my eyes begin to well up as I listen to stories of the struggles of low self-esteem, reminded of my own experiences. Before long, however, hope and excitement build for them because I know change is possible. Like anything with staying power, there needs to be a strong foundation. I believe it is no different with self-esteem. What are you basing your feelings and beliefs on that speak to your value, ability, and worth? Are you letting others determine your values and how you feel about yourself?
Self-esteem also and communicating are connected in that when you feel good about yourself and have confidence, you are better equipped to effectively communicate and experience thriving relationships. Without that connection, there will always be a disconnect. I could teach online workshops where you learn skills about how to do things, but if you don’t have an underlying foundation, your change will not be lasting, effective, or authentic to you.
I like to use a framework I call “SOW Principles” to discuss and break down topics. When you think about SOW, you’re pouring into something; it’s a type of investment that you’re making, with the expectation that you’ll get something back. And so, SOW Principles is about how we invest in ourselves, others, and use wisdom to overcome the challenges we face. And so, S stands for Self, O stands for others, and W stands for wisdom.
I believe we all start at the same place…filled with promise and wonderfulness, I like to say, “You got it going on – you have inside of you what God intended for you to share with the world and to make an impact.” The challenge is, in life we come across stuff, all kinds of stuff-the good, bad, and ugly! What we experience impacts our perceptions, our thinking, and how we react to things and people.
For many of us, including me, my past wrecked my self-esteem. In fact, I would commonly tell people that my self-esteem was somewhere under a rock deep at the earth’s core. It was pretty bad. I found the lower my self-esteem got, the more negative self-talk occurred resulting in a vicious cycle that continued and developed into depression and a loss of desire to communicate and connect with others. Low self-esteem is a battle that wages war on you feeling lovable, capable, and successful. It will hold you back from achieving your goals and living a confident, fulfilled happy life. So let’s get to work and build your self-esteem for a brighter future!
Self is the first SOW principle for S.
Consider and ask yourself what in you is valuable and can positively impact others?
Yessss, start thinking like that – be kinder to yourself and focus on your positive qualities. It was common for me to use negative self-talk and say things like stupid or failure, and you’ll never get it right. I said all these things that stripped me of confidence, dignity, and self-respect. My words caused me to hate who I was. Little did I know that these negative emotions have their resting place in our brain. And our brain treats these emotions differently based on how we act and feel. Make sure to look for next week’s Vlog – I’ll go more into emotions and our brain. My research revealed super interesting studies about how the brain treats self-esteem. I can’t wait to share what I learned. Low self-esteem is not a simple fix-it’s entrenched battle of the mind so we will spend adequate time in the coming weeks on mindset changes and strategies to win the battle. 😊 Today, we start on an uphill journey of laying the foundation of improving our self-esteem.
Let’s begin by stopping negative self-talk. I strongly believe in affirmations; if you were to go in my bathroom, you’d see all kinds of notes posted. Additionally, I have maintained an ongoing list in my journal to remind myself of my qualities when my head gets a little cloudy or all I see are negative things. Affirmations are descriptive nouns, not verbs about you. Even if I don’t feel it at that moment, I am reminded of who I am. There are times the mirror reflection is pointing at me, saying failure, loser, and other negative things…. I’ve learned to refer to my affirmations and point right back and declare I’m valuable, lovable, successful, and many other of my positive qualities.
For Self this week, I want you to work on eliminating negative self-talk. When the voices tear you down, boldly fire back with something positive, use affirmations that cancel out that negative thought. Start observing when you are using negative language and hold yourself accountable for constructive criticism but not demeaning behavior. Believe you are valuable and that you have something extraordinary to offer the world. When we talk about others, typically, we’re talking about how you can do things to positively impact others.
Others is the SOW Principle for O.
What impact do others have on your self-esteem?
If you struggle with self-esteem, you know where I’m going. It’s bad enough to battle internally…in addition, you have to deal with others who are not always kind, sometimes controlling, or just mean. Even if they mean well, hurting people, hurt people. My charge to you today is to take back your power! I often talk about the importance of what you internalize, exposure yourself to, listen to, or accept. Start changing the channel, letting certain calls go to voicemail, locking the door, or go a different direction. Whenever possible, scrutinize what and who you allow into your space.
When faced with people who tear you down, say hurtful things, or attack your self-esteem, trust in your affirmations and values to build up your confidence. Who you are isn’t based on what other people say. Establishing your own set of values provides standards to rely on despite the situation. What they think or feel won’t have power over you any longer, empowering you to stand fiercely on your own.
Negativity will always be around, so you need to be prepared and understand your value. At one point in my life, my identity was built upon what I accomplished. I’m one of those – a worker and doer. So, while I might not have been very verbal, I showed you by what I completed and achieved. There came a time in my life where I had heartbreak, was in between jobs, and became seriously ill. You know, it was one of those seasons where life was in upheaval. Suddenly, everything that I had built, my identity and self-worth and self-esteem disappeared. I was like an empty shell because I believed my value had to do with what I produced. That was a really, really painful experience.
As I share, I think about so many others who are there. I want to encourage you – you are more than what you do! This leads back to consistently affirming who you are (not what you do) and having a set of values that help you align your thinking with what is important to you versus the expectations of others.
This week in your journal list all your accomplishments and commit to write five new affirmations (descriptive nouns) of who you are. None of us are perfect. So we might not always act like we want to be, but claim who you are and stand on that. And don’t let anyone steal that away from you.
Wisdom is the SOW Principle for W.
Are you using wisdom to establish your values?
As we strengthen our personal development skills, we always want to use wisdom. Looking at different seasons in my life, when I was younger, my values were what everybody told me that they should be. I came to a point in my life when I began to create values based on what I wanted. As my faith grew in God, my values changed from ever-changing world views to be what God established that they should be. And that became my foundation. When your values are set, they serve as a foundation that no matter how crazy your day, year, world, family, friends, living situation, finances get, your values ground you and provide a strong foundation to gauge your thoughts.
So my wisdom challenge to you is to outline your values. They will become a valuable tool in building and maintaining your self-esteem. When the voices are telling you something different, you can go to your value statements for assurance.
Download my Outlining Values Handout, a 2 page fillable pdf to get started.
Negative energy and yucky people will always be around so be prepared and armed with affirmations and your value statements. If you have to work or live with them, stand confidently on who you are, despite what they might say.
Make sure that you prioritize investing in yourself so that you can have a brighter future. DM or post comments living a life on your terms-improving your self-esteem as you base on your values and not others.
Food for Thought:If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. -Alexander Hamilton
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