CHAPTER
1

Believing in Yourself

Three vital words: believing in yourself. If you don’t believe in you, it’s nearly impossible for others to do so. How many times have you heard phrases like If you want it badly enough, you can do it! If only it were that easy. As a matter of fact, magically getting something because you want it so badly not only is a cliché but it clearly holds you back.

You hear it in sports all the time, particularly after a team has won a big game: “We just wanted it more than they did!” The thought of wanting something more than others seems to answer many questions, but to me it seems trite and misleading. If only succeeding in life were as easy as just wanting things more than those around you do.

Don’t get me wrong: wanting something badly is not a completely useless attitude; it’s just overrated. I have coached soccer and basketball teams for more than 25 years, and I could never attribute a team victory to just wanting it more. As a matter of fact, I am quite sure that if I ever wandered into the losing team’s locker room, I would not hear that they just didn’t want to win as badly as we did. When we were well prepared, practiced hard, and had an intelligent game plan, we were usually successful—but we did not pin our aspirations on just wanting it more. That would have provided a false sense of hope and been a waste of energy.

One of the most defining qualities we can possess is the simple capacity for self-confidence. It sure sounds simple, but for those who grapple with this humble notion, it can be life altering. Those who struggle have no doubt heard these encouraging words from family, friends, and coworkers: “You just have to believe in yourself.” If only it were that easy.

Believing in you cannot be accomplished simply by wanting it or by being told to do it. It requires preparation, practice, and execution involving a set of skills that, over time, can be mastered. Having mentored those who wrestle with this fundamental life principle, I’ve discovered a clear set of skills that are natural for some and require practice by others—but they are obtainable by all!

I find it helps to break the process of believing in oneself into five steps, but you can sum them up in one big shift: you’ll get there when you are willing to take the actions that others have taken to believe in themselves.

Commit to Believing

It always amazes me how determined those who struggle to believe in themselves can be. If not believing increased our chances of success by even 1 percent, I’d make it a competition and I would put it in every curriculum I deliver, but that is not the case. Not only is it logical to believe in oneself but it’s completely within our power. Even the most hesitant human being can probably remember a time in childhood when it was easy to believe they’d grow up to be a firefighter, an astronaut, or anything else they aspired to be.

When you believe in yourself, it becomes a whole lot easier to get others to believe in you, as well. That means trusting yourself with the decisions you make—and that involves risk. But you can’t believe halfheartedly; you must commit to believing in yourself all the way. That means deciding to believe and staying committed to that belief. Oh, if you don’t, you might fall into something I call the squirrel syndrome.

It turns out we can learn a lesson or two from a squirrel. When you stop and think about it, the squirrel is an amazing animal; nature thought about almost everything when putting this furry creature together. Squirrels are fast, strong, agile, and clever; but, like many other creatures, the squirrel does have one significant imperfection: an inability to decide. The results of this tragic flaw can be clearly seen on many of our roadways.

We have all probably seen this sad scenario play out: We are driving along and see a dot in the distance. It darts into the road with lightning speed and ample time to make it to the other side—and then something happens: The squirrel begins to question its decision. As the gap between your car and that squirrel closes, the squirrel decides that maybe this isn’t the time to cross the road. It chooses to race back to the other side.

Behind the wheel, we mutter to ourselves, “Come on, little buddy, commit.” As if on cue, the squirrel does decide—to once again change its mind. The ample cushion of time has now shrunk, resulting in a dangerous dash for the other side. As our car bears down, the squirrel could still be successful if only it didn’t again question the choice it had made. What makes matters worse, the animal is so lost in its indecision whether to go right or left that it stands lost in the middle of the road. Even when we hit our brakes, it is often sadly the last decision that poor squirrel ever makes.

But there’s a lesson to be learned from the squirrel syndrome, and this lesson plays out in much of what we do. When it comes to believing in ourselves, we are faced with two distinct paths to take. All we need to do is decide—and yet we often get caught up in our inability to commit.

Surely, there are times when good, solid, responsible decision-making assures us that the risk before us is worth taking. Now is the time to step off the curb and make a committed decision to believe in yourself. A well-known quote by John A. Shedd that hangs in my office reads:
“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”

That dot in the road is now you, and your desire to overcome your hesitancy pushes you forward. Your inner voice tells you to take a courageous leap of faith and bound across that road. As the time to commit and act looms, another voice tries to horn in, encouraging you to step back and reassess this potentially risky decision. Neither voice is necessarily right or wrong, but the cognitive dissonance can have devastating results. We lean toward the act that requires risk, yet we attempt to mitigate that risk by taking a somewhat safer position to protect us if we fail. In so doing, we wind up committing to nothing. We are in the weakest, most vulnerable position: stuck in the middle of the road with no place to hide.

Of course, you have various options to help you decide: You can read this book, or seek the advice of others, or conduct research, or look to benchmark, or assemble whatever data you may wish to collect. The problem is, you may find that you’re right back where you started and you still need to decide. Your committing to a decision is as challenging and as critical as it is for the squirrel.

You know what decision I want you to make—I’m waiting for you on the other side of the road! When you make it across, regardless of what other struggles await you, own the decision you had the courage to make.

Once you commit to believing in yourself and summon the courage to trust that decision, you can shift the focus to your personal effort. You will find a lot more success by redefining it as “making the personal effort that I can control.” And in the words of John Shedd, it really is what you are built for!

Allow Yourself to Try—and Fail

For those who do not know me personally, I am a highly competitive human being, to put it mildly. I enjoy winning and have never been a fan of losing. It’s the third option, however, that really disappoints me: not trying at all. If you think back to some of your greatest accomplishments, I would bet that they were not achieved without the risk of failure. As a matter of fact, I am sure you’ll agree that the greater the achievement, the greater the risk of failure. In a strange way, failure is a teammate of success, as opposed to being its evil twin. I have never met a person who hasn’t experienced both, and yet failure—or the fear of failure—often seems to be the louder and stronger of the two.

The fear of failure sneaks
into our subconscious and
undermines our desire to try.

Once inside our minds, the fear of failure paints a series of worse-case scenarios, and before we realize it we retreat from whatever it was we were about to try.

But what if we redefined success as a willingness to fail? What if we celebrated both our wins and our losses by the effort we extend and the courage we display in our brave attempt to try? I would wager that we’d be celebrating a whole lot more victories! What’s more, our success would clearly be under our control, which would then breed more confidence, which would underpin more faith in ourselves.

Once upon a time when we were young, we truly believed that if we tried as hard as we could, we would be victorious. We weren’t afraid to try because success was defined by what we learned from our experience, whether we won or lost. We not only believed in ourselves but also improved each time we tried. Somewhere along the way, that was coached out of us. Consider this simple Japanese proverb: Failure teaches success.

I think we had it right when we were too young to even question it. Believing in yourself has everything to do with allowing yourself to try. You must encourage yourself to try. The worst that could happen is that you fail. But don’t you agree that doing nothing due to the fear of failure is worse than failure itself? With that encouragement and your willingness to attempt something new, you will ultimately find one of the greatest successes you can ever achieve: a belief in yourself.

Try to See Yourself as Others See You

Most people are unable to see themselves as others see them, and a by-product of this blind spot is doubt. You usually cannot attribute doubt to one particular aspect but rather a handful of them. When these aspects are addressed one by one, that doubt monster shrinks back under the bed. Shifting the angle of your own personal observation, much like an artist, can help.

We can learn a lot from artists. For example, have you ever watched an artist examine their own work of art? Part of the evaluation of that artwork occurs just by looking hard at it or walking past it. You might be surprised to learn what my wife, an artist, considers her two favorite ways to evaluate her work.

One of her methods is to go to the biggest mirror in our house. She holds up her painting for a long time, and she scrunches up her face, as though she is seeing that work for the first time. In fact, from the perspective that the mirror provides, she is seeing it anew. The image is in reverse, so she views the composition in an entirely new way. It gives her objectivity and the ability to see her work with fresh eyes.

The second way is with her camera. She’ll shoot a few digital pictures of the work and either print them out or look at them onscreen. You would think that a picture of a picture would not be of much value, but she swears that she can see aspects of her work that her natural perspective just doesn’t perceive.

She is working through a problem that is a challenge for many artists: it’s difficult to see their work as others see it. The mirror and the camera are two classic ways to address this. Those of us who are not artists must learn to manage a similar situation.

Most people are unable
to see themselves
as others see them.

This is not just a minor blind spot; it can be a significant roadblock on our path to success. Without an alternative perspective, like an artist has, it’s nearly impossible to see things as others see them.

When Xerox had its instructors conduct two-week training programs, every day the trainees would be video-recorded role-playing sales calls. The script each student followed was detailed and measurable, and instructors meticulously critiqued every behavior.

The instructors were trained to make few or no comments about trainees’ personal traits, such as appearance, gestures, and facial expressions, because each night the students’ homework was to evaluate their own performance and provide written feedback in the morning.

Watching the videos gave them a different perspective on how they looked and acted. The objective feedback was every bit as powerful as comments from the professional trainers.

To this day I frequently use that tool when I am coaching individuals or small groups. I bring out my smartphone or iPad and record their role plays or presentations, and I make the videos immediately available to them. I want them to see themselves as others see them, which is usually vastly different from the way they see themselves.

Sometimes this takes a little creativity. Whether it’s a mirror, a photograph, a video, or a friend, we cannot trust our personal instincts alone. When you can see yourself as others do, you can make great strides—including chipping away at self-doubt, which enables you to take another step forward to believing in yourself.

Balance Your Personal Feedback

It never ceases to amaze me just how tough we can be on ourselves. That toughness is front and center when it comes to self-evaluation. We just aren’t that nice to ourselves. Maybe it’s human nature to focus on negative feedback, but positive observations are critical as well.
If someone is unaware of something positive that they fail to see in themselves, even though others see it, that strength can easily be lost.

Improving your ability to coach yourself is another important step in removing doubt and believing in you. Performed halfheartedly, the results can be minimal at best; but when done properly, the results can be powerful. Here I share a three-step exercise designed to not just improve your own performance but to gain confidence and evolve. When you have an opportunity to self-access while standing in front of a mirror or watching a clip of yourself, consider the following steps.

Step 1 Ask yourself to identify two areas in which you felt you did well. It’s natural to be overly critical of our own performance, so get ready for a tussle with yourself. But remember: if you do not focus on a couple of positives, what guarantee do you have that you can repeat those positives? Making yourself consciously aware of your strengths puts those behaviors ahead of the need to be aware of both the good and the bad. The positives default to the forefront.

But there’s another, more subtle reason why I always recommend starting with the positives. By doing so you are conditioning your mind to look for and focus on your strengths. It will be challenging at first, but think of how healthy it will be when the first observations you instinctively make about yourself are positive ones.

Step 2 Ask yourself to identify two areas in which you feel you could improve. Net out these deficiencies and dig deeper for ideas on how you intend to fix them. Sometimes a good way to get started is to ask yourself, What would I do differently if I performed this task again?

Remember: your goal is not to just identify areas that need improvement but to strategically address them. When you identify what needs improving, choose solutions that are actually obtainable. That might mean breaking the solution into smaller steps. You can’t, for example, get a college degree overnight, but you can enroll in a night class to help you fill in some gaps in your training.

Step 3 Finish with an encouraging remark or a pat on the back. This allows you to feel motivated, positive, and upbeat.

What should you have accomplished when this exercise is over? First, by limiting yourself to two positives and two areas for improvement, there is just enough to feel good about and just enough to work on. Consider the adage If you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing.

Typically, after two or three times, this self-evaluation exercise becomes second nature. You need only sit back and listen to yourself methodically lay out what you did well, what you need to improve, and how you intend to make that improvement.

The strength in balancing your personal feedback is that it ensures fairness in sensitive areas. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t in the habit of being nice to ourselves, and you are not helping if you beat yourself up or make sweeping criticisms like What do I need to improve? How about everything!

Control the Negative Voices

A few years ago, Time magazine ran an article titled “What Our Internal Voices Say about Ourselves,” and sadly these aren’t always productive conversations. Once these voices turn negative, it can be a slippery slope—but not if we stop underestimating this inner dialogue.

We all hear the voices, and we usually hear them when we’re alone. They wait until they sense a vulnerable opening, like a bacterium seeking to infect a wound, and they can affect our ability to believe in ourselves. The voices seep into our conscious mind from our subconscious; they can begin as whispers, and before you know it can turn into shouts.

These negative voices are insidious and they exaggerate. They tend to pick at our confidence and belief in ourselves, and many of us underestimate them. As a matter of fact, often they disguise themselves as humorous personal barbs. We’ve all heard them.

  When you stub your toe, they can sound something like this: Really? Have you lost your ability to walk into a room without hurting yourself?

One poke seems harmless enough, but the voices are not harmless—and they never stop at just one poke. They pick up steam and wait for the next opportunity.

  When you can’t figure out an answer to a question, they can sound something like this: Oh, come on now; even you can figure this out.

  When you get lost: Maybe you should tattoo the directions on your arm because you can’t seem to remember anything anymore.

The voices may seem teasing, but do you still think their words are harmless? Do you think they cannot undermine your self-worth? They are, after all, your words—and sometimes you might actually say them out loud.

I suppose if they chirped in your ear only now and then, they wouldn’t be so damaging, but they come in waves.

If you listen to them, your mind can become an echo chamber, reinforcing the negative and drowning out the positive. Would you like them to stop? They won’t. And the more you listen to them, the meaner they get.

  When you feel defeated, they can sound something like this: You aren’t good enough to win.

  When you feel lonely: You deserve to be alone.

  When you feel insecure: You aren’t smart enough to succeed.

I reject the premise that these voices are teasing, I don’t find them funny, and I am asking you to agree with me. It’s difficult to stifle the voices while they hide in your subconscious, but the moment they infect your conscious mind, you can choose to not listen—and you can certainly choose to not say them out loud. The voices may very well try to convince you that you can’t resist them, but you sure as heck can.

In the movie A Beautiful Mind (2001) starring Russell Crowe, when Professor John Forbes Nash Jr. is asked about the things he sees and hears, he does not declare himself free of their torment. Instead he says, “I’ve gotten used to ignoring them and I think, as a result, they’ve kind of given up on me. I think that’s what it’s like with all our dreams and our nightmares…We’ve got to keep feeding them for them to stay alive.”

There are other voices you can choose to listen to, and these are the ones I encourage you to feed. These are the voices that tell you that anyone can stub a toe, or struggle to answer a question, or get lost, or feel defeated, lonely, or insecure. It’s part of the human condition, part of being alive. It’s also part of being kinder to yourself that contributes to believing in yourself, and we can all benefit from kinder voices.

Don’t Wait to Celebrate

When you take the five steps—commit to believing, allow yourself to try and fail, try to see yourself as others see you, balance your personal feedback, and control the negative voices—you will probably stumble once or twice. Let’s face it: when we struggle to believe in ourselves, there seems so little to celebrate because victories can be few and far between. But there’s nothing like a well-deserved celebration after a hard-earned win. One seems to feed off the other; and like peanut butter and jelly, victory and celebration just seem to be made for each other. Call me a contrarian, but I think when there seems little to celebrate, a celebration is even more important.

During times of struggle, acknowledging and celebrating small victories makes sense—and there is no downside. Think of the last time you celebrated any victory; were you stronger or weaker from the experience? And please don’t tell yourself that there is nothing to celebrate because that’s just not true. That’s the negative voices talking.

There are a lot of things you can celebrate and pat yourself on the back for—even amid great struggles. What about your resolution to keep trying? How about celebrating the amount of effort you’ve put into something? Why not acknowledge the courage you’ve displayed by putting yourself in uncomfortable situations in your quest to succeed? Why shouldn’t you feel good about how you continue to learn from your mistakes? How about giving yourself kudos for following your plan and pursuing your goals—regardless of the results?

When we struggle,
we aren’t starving for food;
we’re starving for joy.

A few years ago, I was hired to coach a team of 10 sales-people for a year. One of my favorite members of that team was a woman who had a tremendous will to succeed, but it had been battered by the company’s sales manager, who could only see her failing sales numbers and not her potential. She was treated poorly and, having spent the previous two years as the lowest-performing sales rep on the team, lost faith in her ability to succeed.

Interestingly enough, her first year with the company was very profitable. I wanted to find a victory of sorts for her, so one of the first things I did was design a contest that involved the sales process this team was learning, rather than the actual results of selling. I felt that this would allow her to focus on something that was completely under her control: her effort. It worked, and she stormed past her teammates and won the contest.

What happened next was even more remarkable. The victory spurred in her a different, more confident mind-set that began to pay big dividends in the way she approached her clients. She went on to lead her company in sales for the next four years.

Allowing yourself to seek out and celebrate victories, no matter how small, will nourish your mind and body at a time when you need that sustenance the most. That in turn will have a direct impact on your ability to be more competitive in your larger, all-important challenges to come. So, don’t be afraid to give yourself a pat on the back. Here’s to your impending celebration!

To get others to believe you, you must first believe in yourself. The mind is your most powerful ally, and I can assure you that for its own self-preservation, it wants you to believe. Don’t overthink it, and don’t let doubt get in the way. Are you ready to keep going? Then follow me.