Why Self-Belief Is Essential and How to Develop It

Do you have self-belief? 

How do you actually come to believe in yourself?

And how does this work exactly to help you get what you want?

These are the questions that I’d like to answer, drawing from my experience as a confidence coach. I want to help you move from wanting to believe in yourself to genuinely believing in yourself and leveraging the amazing power of self-belief.

Let’s start by taking a look at the mechanisms of self-belief.

How Self-Belief Works

 

Self-belief has a very interesting way of functioning. There are several positive things that it does, which in turn facilitate getting the results you want.

1. Self-belief helps you see opportunities. It is said that having clear goals helps you to notice those elements around you that can assist you in reaching them. Because the clarity of your goals gives meaning to those elements. And then if you make use of those elements, you will reach your goals.

That is true, but clear goals by themselves are often not enough to help you spot opportunities. Many times if you have a clear goal but you don’t actually believe that you can achieve it, your mind will still fail to identify the opportunities around you. Lack of belief blinds you.

Conversely, if you have clear goals and you believe you can reach them, then your mind has the highest possible amount of receptivity to elements that can help you reach your goals. Thus you’ll detect them quickly, even the subtle ones, and you’ll be able to employ them.


2. Self-belief facilitates finding creative solutions. When you approach a goal from with disbelief, you feel anxiety and your thinking gets clogged by it, which makes finding good solutions to reach that goal less probable.

On the other hand, self-belief makes you relax and think clearly. It stimulates reasoning, memory and, above all, creativity. This makes it more likely that you’ll find good solutions to reach your goals. In particular, you’ll be able to think outside the box and come up with creative solutions that work really well.


3. Self-belief stimulates action and persistence. It’s hard to take action towards a goal if deep down you don’t truly believe you can achieve it. And it’s even harder to put in the consistent work that you need to put in, in order to reach any worthwhile goal. And when you fail to accomplish your goals, this way unfortunately confirm your lack of belief.

However, if you believe in yourself, you’ll feel motivated to take action, you’ll stay motivated over long periods of time, and you won’t be discouraged by mistakes or setbacks. You’ll be inclined to simply see them as a part of the process, and you’ll keep going despite them, until you get what you want. This, of course, will reinforce your self-belief.


4. Self-belief makes others more responsive. Other people frequently play an important role in achieving your goals. In fact, many of your goals may refer to other people. And in general, others tend to react to you the way you believe they will.

If you ask a person for something and you believe they’ll give it to you, they will sense the conviction in your voice and they’ll be more inclined to respond your request. Conversely, if you lack belief, your request will be hesitant, which will make it more likely to become rejected.

If you talk to someone and you believe they will like you as you are, you’ll have a positive vibe, which will likely make them like you. But if you lack belief, you’ll act shy or you’ll try too hard to impress them, which will make them not like you.

So that’s how self-belief works. In my view, it’s not sufficient by itself in order to get what you want. You still need to take action, persevere, and learn from your mistakes. Nevertheless, it opens up a wide path towards getting what you want.

This leads me to my next point.

 

Developing Self-Belief

There are four ways to develop self-belief that work especially well.

1. Set bold but realistic goals. Sometimes when we set unrealistically high goals and we try to achieve them, we fail and our self-belief plummets. We demand too much, too fast, and it backfires. So from very high goals, we end up at having no goals whatsoever because we’ve lost faith in ourselves.

The key for building self-belief is to set bold but realistic goals, and seek to achieve them. You will succeed in achieving most of these goals, which will build your self-belief. When you reach a goal, it’s okay to set an even higher one and push yourself even more. But the whole process is incremental. You gradually aim higher, and with each step forward you build self-belief.


2. Learn to see your accomplishments. In my experience most people who lack self-belief have a strong inclination to filter out the positive aspects about themselves.

What about you?

Do you see or acknowledge your achievements, or do you obsess about all your failures? If you do that, then when you look at yourself, all you see is failure, which means that you don’t believe in yourself.

You need to reverse this process.
Consciously work on identifying and acknowledging your results and strengths. Spend some time each day thinking about them, even if you’re not used to it and it feels unfamiliar.

This will help incorporate your strengths and successes in your self-image and thus you’ll gradually begin to believe in yourself more and more.


3. Cut down on comparing yourself. Comparing yourself to others is like losing a battle. Because no matter how good you are at something, in this vast world, you will always find somebody who is better than you. Thus a lot of comparing yourself to others will make you feel as if you’re not really good at anything, which will sabotage your self-belief.

That’s why it’s best to reduce comparing yourself.

You will never eliminate it completely since it’s part of human nature, and you don’t need to either, but you can reduce it significantly. And you do so by giving your mind better things to do than to contrast you with others.

Keep it busy with meaningful tasks and challenges, and it won’t have time for making futile comparisons.


4. Develop yourself. Last but not least, be a life-long learner and continually aim to better yourself. After all, self-belief is a reflection of how good you are at handling the various aspects of life. And the more you grow as a person, the more of a reason you have to believe in yourself.

A word of caution, though…

Developing yourself will not necessarily make you believe in yourself more. Because, as I said previously, your mind can filter out your achievements. So you have to combine developing yourself with consciously recognizing the ways you grow as a person.


It is this combination of developing yourself, challenging yourself and deliberately thinking about yourself in more constructive ways that represents the ideal recipe for building self-belief.


Put into practice these ideas and you’ll see your belief in yourself steadily improve. With more self-belief, you’ll be more confident and more motivated to go for what you want, and you’ll make better use of the resources existing all around you the get what you want in life.

The world is your oyster and self-belief is the key that opens it.

What is your experience of self- belief? Please share your thoughts and feelings in the comments Section.




Source: http://goodlifezen.com/self-belief-essential-develop/

40 Quotes That Will Inspire You To Lose Yourself And Travel

“I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown, eat interesting food, dig some interesting people, have an adventure, be careful. Come back and you’re going to see your country differently, you’re going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You’re going to get a sense of what globalization looks like. It’s not what Tom Friedman writes about, I’m sorry. You’re going to see that global climate change is very real. And that for some people, their day consists of walking twelve miles for four buckets of water. And so there are lessons that you can’t get out of a book that are waiting for you at the other end of that flight. A lot of people — Americans and Europeans — come back and go, “Ohhhh.” And the lightbulb goes on.”  Henry Rollins

“I’ve been homesick for countries I’ve never been, and longed to be where I couldn’t be.”  John Cheever

“We travel for romance, we travel for architecture, and we travel to be lost.” Ray Bradbury

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves, and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” Pico Iyer

“Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” Paul Theroux

“Travel is little beds and cramped bathrooms. It’s old television sets and slow Internet connections. Travel is extraordinary conversations with ordinary people. It’s waiters, gas station attendants, and housekeepers becoming the most interesting people in the world. It’s churches that are compelling enough to enter. It’s McDonald’s being a luxury. It’s the realization that you may have been born in the wrong country. Travel is a smile that leads to a conversation in broken English. It’s the epiphany that pretty girls smile the same way all over the world. Travel is tipping 10% and being embraced for it. Travel is the same white T-shirt again tomorrow. Travel is accented sex after good wine and too many unfiltered cigarettes. Travel is flowing in the back of a bus with giggly strangers. It’s a street full of bearded backpackers looking down at maps. Travel is wishing for one more bite of whatever that just was. It’s the rediscovery of walking somewhere. It’s sharing a bottle of liquor on an overnight train with a new friend. Travel is “Maybe I don’t have to do it that way when I get back home.” Nick Miller

“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” Maya Angelou

“Hiking – I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains – not hike! Do you know the origin of that word ‘saunter?’ It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, “A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.” John Muir

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance.” Cesare Pavese

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” Jack Kerouac

“If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness, and fears.”  

Glenn Clark

“Please be a traveler, not a tourist. Try new things, meet new people, and look beyond what’s right in front of you. Those are the keys to understanding this amazing world we live in.”   
Andrew Zimmern

“There’s an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It’s when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.” Chuck Palahniuk

“Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” Cesare Pavese

“Wanderlust, the very strong or irresistible impulse to travel, is adopted untouched from the German, presumably because it couldn’t be improved upon. Workarounds like the French passion du voyage don’t quite capture the same meaning. Wanderlust is not a passion for travel exactly; it’s something more animal and more fickle – something more like lust. We don’t lust after very many things in life. We don’t need words like worklust or homemakinglust. But travel? Anatole Broyard put it perfect in his essay Being There: Travel is like adultery: ‘One is always tempted to be unfaithful to one’s own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live…in our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.’”  

Elisabeth Eaves

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” Robert Louis Stevenson

“If you’re brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting, which can be anything from your house to bitter, old resentments, and set out on a truth-seeking journey, either externally or internally, and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher and if you are prepared, most of all, to face and forgive some very difficult realities about yourself, then the truth will not be withheld from you.” Elizabeth Gilbert

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” St. Augustine

“Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.” John Berger

“All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet’s hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man’s way of heading home.”  

Paul Theroux

“Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life – and travel – leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks – on your body or on your heart – are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.” Anthony Bourdain

“Travel is like love, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.” Pico Iyer

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” Mark Twain

“No road offers more mystery than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you mount it of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own coffee tin of wrinkled up dollars – bills you’ve saved and scrounged for, worked the all-night switchboard for, missed the Rolling Stones for, sold fragrant pot with smashed flowers going brown inside twist-tie plastic baggies for. In fact, to disembark from your origins, you’ve done everything you can think to scrounge money save selling your spanking young pussy.” Mary Karr

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” Lao Tzu

“Not all those who wander are lost.” J.R.R. Tolkien

“No one realises how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” Lin Yutang

“I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” Mary Anne Radmacher

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” Terry Pratchett

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life” Jack Kerouac

“The farther you go, however, the harder it is to return. The world has many edges, and it’s easy to fall off.” Anderson Cooper

“I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every states I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move.” John Steinbeck

“The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you’re not a traveler. You’re a fucking tourist.” Guillermo del Toro

“Perhaps one day, tired of circling the world, I’ll return to Argentina and settle in the Andean lakes, if not indefinitely then at least for a pause while I shift from one understanding of the world to another.” Che Guevara

“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” Aldous Huxley

“It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.” 

Cheryl Strayed

“Remember that although they may speak a different language, they are still the same kind of people as the folks you know at home, have the same mental processes, are just as kindly and just as friendly. Remember that, quit talking and start over again – in pantomime.”  Wally Byam

“Once a year go someplace you’ve never been before.”   

Dalai Lama

“The ideal is to feel at home anywhere, everywhere”  Geoff Dye

“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.”  Bill Bryson

Source: http://thoughtcatalog.com/koty-neelis/2013/08/40-quotes-that-will-inspire-you-to-lose-yourself-and-travel/ 

21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity

1. This picture of Chicago Christians who showed up at a gay pride parade to apologize for homophobia in the Church.

(Michelle Gantner / Maladjusted Media)

… and the reaction from the parade.

(Michelle Gantner / Maladjusted Media)

2. This story about Japanese senior citizens who volunteered to tackle the nuclear crisis at Fukushima power station so that young people wouldn’t have to subject themselves to radiation.

bbc.co.uk

3. This picture of two Norwegian guys rescuing a sheep from the ocean.

4. This sign at an awesome bookshop.

helsinki-syndrome.tumblr.com

5. This poll about what Snooki should name her child.

6. The moment in which this Ohio athlete stopped to help an injured competitor across the finish line during a track meet.

The Daily Call, Mike Ullery / AP

17-year-old Meghan Vogel was in last place in the 3,200-meter run when she caught up to competitor Arden McMath, whose body was giving out. Instead of running past her to avoid the last-place finish, Vogel put McMath’s arm around her shoulders, carried her 30 meters, and then pushed her over the finish line before crossing it.

7. This exchange between a 3-year-old girl and a shopping center.

8. This note that was handed to a waiter along with a $20 bill by an elderly lady in his restaurant.

9. This sign at an awesome Subway restaurant.

10. This picture of a villager carrying stranded kittens to dry land during floods in Cuttack City, India.

Biswaranjan Rout / AP

Biswaranjan Rout / AP

11. This sign at an awesome drycleaner’s.

Plaza Cleaners in Portland, OR, helped over 2,000 unemployed workers who couldn’t afford dry cleaning. The store’s owner estimated that it cost his company $32,000 dollars.

12. This photograph of a man giving his shoes to a homeless girl in Rio de Janeiro.

13. This picture of a firefighter administering oxygen to a cat rescued from a house fire.

(TOM BAUER/Missoulian)

14. And this one.

Chris Butler / AP

15. This interaction between a Guatemalan girl and a tourist she just met.

16. This gesture from a neighbor.

17. These photos of two children collaborating to rescue a dog who had fallen into a ravine.

18. This note on a young family’s check.

19. This exchange between a protester and a soldier during a protest in Brazil.

(Imagens/ TVBA)

20. These pictures of a man jumping into rough waters to rescue a stranger’s Shih Tzu in Melbourne.

Via news.com.au

Sue Drummond was walking her beloved Shih Tzu, Bibi, on a pier in Melbourne, when a fierce gust of wind picked him up and hurled him into the rough waters of the bay. A passerby, Raden Soemawinata, who happened to be on the pier that day to scatter his grandmother’s ashes, wasted no time in stripping down and diving into the bay to rescue the animal.

(Photos: Chris Scott)

21. And this photograph of two best friends on a swing.

 

Source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/

Business Motivation from Sir Alan Sugar (Video)

23 Incredibly Successful People Who Failed At First

Rejection can feel devastating, but you shouldn't let it crush you.

 

Some of the world's most successful people have failed - sometimes more than once.

We've put together a list of highly successful people, from movie stars to scientists, who experienced massive failure before they found fame and fortune.

Weaker people might have given up. Instead, these folks remained focused on their goals. 

Scroll down to see the underdogs who went on to change the world.

Winston Churchill was estranged from his political party over ideological disagreements during the "wilderness years" of 1929 to 1939.

At the outbreak of World War II on Sep. 3, 1939, Churchill was appointed to the British Admiralty, thus ending his "exile." The next year, he was elected prime minister at the age of 62.

Thomas Edison's teachers told him he was "too stupid to learn anything."

Edison went on to hold more than 1,000 patents and invented some world-changing devices, like the phonograph, practical electrical lamp, and a movie camera.

Oprah Winfrey was fired from her first television job as an anchor in Baltimore, where she said she faced sexism and harassment.

But Winfrey rebounded and became the undisputed queen of television talk shows before amassing a media empire. Today she is worth an estimated $2.9 billion, according to Forbes.

Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because he "lacked imagination and had no good ideas."

Several more of his businesses failed before the premiere of his movie "Snow White." Today, most childhoods wouldn't be the same without his ideas.

Steven Spielberg was rejected by the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts multiple times.

He went on to create the first summer blockbuster with "Jaws" in 1975, and has won three Academy Awards.

R.H. Macy had a series of failed retail ventures throughout his early career.

But at the age of 36, Macy launched R.H. Macy & Co., which grew to become Macy's, one of the largest department store chains in the world.

Soichiro Honda's unique vision got him ostracized by the Japanese business community.

Honda was a mechanical genius who idolized Edison and rebelled against the norm. His passion for aggressive individualism was more fit for the United States, and thus alienated him from Japanese businessmen, who valued teamwork above all else. Honda then boldly challenged the American automotive industry in the 1970s and led a Japanese automotive revolution.

Colonel Harland David Sanders was fired from dozens of jobs before founding a successful restaurant.

He traveled across the U.S. looking for someone to sell his fried chicken, and after finally getting a business deal in Utah, Kentucky Fried Chicken was born. KFC is now one of the most recognizable franchises in the world, with over 18,000 locations.

After having trouble adjusting to the culture and his classes, Dick Cheney dropped out of Yale — and then returned, only to drop out for good.

George W. Bush once joked: "So now we know if you graduate from Yale, you become president. If you drop out, you get to be vice president."

Sir Isaac Newton's mother pulled him out of school as a boy so that he could run the family farm. He failed miserably.

Realizing her son was not meant to till the land, she let Newton finish his basic education and was eventually persuaded to allow him to enroll in Cambridge University. Newton went on to become one of the greatest scientists of all time, revolutionizing physics and mathematics.

Vera Wang failed to make the U.S. Olympic figure-skating team. Then she became an editor at Vogue and was passed over for the editor-in-chief position.

She began designing wedding gowns at age 40 and today is one of the premier designers in the fashion industry, with a business worth over $1 billion.

When Sidney Poitier first auditioned for the American Negro Theatre, he flubbed his lines and spoke in a heavy Caribbean accent, which made the director angrily tell him to stop wasting his time.

Poitier worked on his craft and eventually became a hugely successful Hollywood star. He won an Academy Award for Best Actor and helped break down the color barrier in the American film industry. 

As a child, Albert Einstein had some difficulty communicating and learning in a traditional manner.

Of course, Einstein's communication and behavioral problems were not indicative of a lack of intelligence. He won the Nobel prize in physics for the discovery of the photoelectric effect, and his special theory of relativity theory corrected the deficiencies of Newtonian physics.

In one of Fred Astaire's first screen tests, an executive wrote: "Can't sing. Can't act. Slightly balding. Can dance a little."

Astaire went on to become a Hollywood and Broadway legend.

J.K. Rowling was a single mom living off welfare when she began writing the first "Harry Potter" novel.

Rowling is now internationally renowned for her seven-book Harry Potter series and, in U.S. currency, became the first billionaire author in 2004.

Charles Darwin was considered an average student. He gave up on a career in medicine and was going to school to become a parson.

But as Darwin studied nature, he found his true calling and traveled the world to uncover nature's mysteries. His writings, especially "On the Origin of the Species," fundamentally changed the world of science by spreading the discovery of evolution.

Vincent Van Gogh sold only one painting, "The Red Vineyard," in his life, and the sale was just months before his death.

If he had given up his artistic career after it proved to strain his financial and emotional well-being, the art world would be missing hundreds of paintings from a true master.

After Harrison Ford's first small movie role, an executive took him into his office and told him he'd never succeed in the movie business.

Ford's career went on to span six decades, and has included timeless starring roles in blockbuster films like the "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" series.

Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, had his first book rejected by 27 different publishers.

Dr. Seuss became a legendary children's author known around the world for classics like "The Cat in the Hat" and "Green Eggs and Ham." His books have sold over 600 million copies.

Lucille Ball appeared in so many second-tier films at the start of her career that she became known as "The Queen of B Movies."

Then she got her big break when CBS picked up her and her husband Desi Arnaz's vaudeville act and turned it into the highly influential sitcom "I Love Lucy."

A young Henry Ford ruined his reputation with a couple of failed automobile businesses.

However, after conducting a search, he was finally able to find a partner who had faith in him. Ford proved he had learned from his mistakes when Ford Motor Company forever changed the automotive industry and culture with his assembly line mode of production. 

While developing his vacuum, Sir James Dyson went through 5,126 failed prototypes and his savings over 15 years.

But the 5,127th prototype worked, and the Dyson brand became the best-selling bagless vacuum brand in the United States. He is now worth an estimated $4.5 billion, according to Forbes.

Stephen King grew so frustrated over his attempt to write the novel "Carrie" that he threw away the entire early draft.

King's wife Tabitha found the manuscript in the trash and took it out. "Carrie" became a hit and launched his career. His novels have since sold over 350 million copies.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/successful-people-who-failed-at-first-2014-3?op=1