6 SIMPLE STEPS TO GUIDE YOU TO VICTORY!

People who are able to successfully bring about positive change in their lives are, not surprisingly, the ones who believe change is possible.  This belief is a fundamental prerequisite for gaining control over your life and your future.  When you believe change is possible, you make that change more likely because you take the steps necessary to bring it about—with the life you want firmly in your view, you acknowledge your strengths and weaknesses and make concrete plans to enhance the former and, strategically, eliminate the latter.

Self-Doubt Is Part of the Human Condition

All of us experience self-doubt—it’s the natural result of our prior failures, and everyone, including the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, has experienced failure or been victimized by someone at some point in his life.  But even among people who have been seriously traumatized, there are those who choose to view themselves as victims, and those who decide to fight back, determined that what they have experienced, no matter how egregious, will not define who they are.

You probably know, among friends and family members, both types of people.  Your goal should be to emulate those who overcome their self-doubt, and learn from the mistakes of those who don’t.

Can I Really Demolish Self-Doubt Forever?

The answer is, unequivocally, “yes.”  How do you know this?  You know it because many other people before you have already done it, and what one person has done, another person can do.  The question is, how do those who demolish doubt succeed?  What have they done that you haven’t?

6 Tips that People who have DEMOLISHED SELF-DOUBT Have in Common:

1. They Acknowledge Their Self-Doubt

Many people don’t recognize self-doubt in their lives.  They simply accept doubt as an inherent aspect of their personalities, rather than what it in fact is—a personality distortion that results from specific life events.  Because doubt has become deeply ingrained in the way they view the world and their place in it, they can’t step back, distinguishing between who they truly are and the doubt they feel—their doubt, in other words, becomes who they are.  You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge, and recognizing, with as much specificity as possible, your own self-doubt is the first and most important step in removing it.

2.  They Understand Why They Doubt Themselves

Self-doubt is not something that comes from nowhere—its causes can be identified and understood.  Perhaps you grew up in a home in which one or both of your parents doubted their own ability to overcome the challenges in their lives.  Alternately, you might have had parents who were positive and supportive, but you’ve experienced some major trauma or failure in your own life.  The point is that the causes of self-doubt are something you can recognize and understand.  Being able to understand the causes of doubt means you can also understand how to alter the way you think about those causes and reverse them.

3.  They Learn That, When They Doubt, They Only Cheat Themselves

People who overcome their self-doubt not only acknowledge that doubt and its causes—they also see the ways in which doubt is negatively impacting their lives and relationships.  If there’s a prize job you’re hoping to be chosen for, but you doubt your ability to get that job, or even to do it if you’re hired, those beliefs will affect your actions.  Believing the odds of winning are small, you might not adequately prepare for the interview, or dress to impress, or follow through to impress your interviewer.  Understanding the ways in which doubt is cheating you out of the things you want provides a powerful incentive to eliminate those negative feelings.

4.  They Become Doubt Demolishers

Let’s say you’re disciplined enough to demolish doubt in that one instance and obtain the job of your dreams.  That single win, especially if it follows a long string of losses, might not be sufficient proof to change your self-beliefs such that you continue to recognize and remove self-doubt in subsequent circumstance.  Doubt demolishers are people who learn to use their successes as evidence that what they’ve done once, they can do again.  If the strategies you used to remove self-doubt in one instance were successful, you must believe they will be equally successful in what you do next.

5.  They Get Rid of Doubt—Forever

If you leverage your early successes to fundamentally alter the way you view who you are and what you’re able to do, you will, over time, remove more and more self-doubt in every subsequent action you take.  Eventually, you’ll notice that doubt has become a dim memory, something which used to trouble you, but which you’ve learned simply can’t stop you from achieving your goals.  When you reach this stage of development, you will have removed doubt from your thinking forever.

6.  They Start Winning at Everything They Do (The Little Engine That Could)

You remember the children’s story about the little engine that gets to the top of a hill by repeating, “I think I can, I think I can.”  It’s a powerful story, so much so that psychologists have coined a phrase to describe it: “self-efficacy.”  It’s the belief that you can achieve a desired result based on your previous successes, and it turns doubters into people who tend to win at everything they do.  Psychology Today describes self-efficacy in this way:

“…people high in self-efficacy take better care of themselves, see tasks as something to be mastered, and they feel more empowered. They’re not controlled by circumstances. They see setbacks as challenges to be overcome and can cope with hardship better than those with low self-efficacy. They learn from failure and channel it into success, like Thomas Jefferson, Walt Disney and J.K Rowling.  People higher in self-efficacy also have a greater sense of motivation and persistence.”

Noted industrialist, Henry Ford, with his usual gift for brevity and wit, described self-efficacy more simply: “Whether you think that you can or you can’t, you’re usually right.”

Conclusion

Just as a single failure increases the odds of subsequent failure, success tends to breed success.  Removing self-doubt from your thinking begins by recognizing its presence and ends with the conviction that you can remove it entirely from your life and win at everything you do.  You owe it to yourself to take that first step today.  What you envision, you can achieve.  Create that vision of success today, and work every day to remove self-doubt and achieve the success you deserve.