THE POWER OF SELF-BELIEF
14 SEPTEMBER 2021 (15 MIN READ)
Strive to believe in yourself more than anyone could ever believe in you. I’ve held those words close to my heart as of late and they have served me well. How true do those words ring to you? The best test of this is whether or not the opinions of others get in the way of accomplishing your dreams. For instance, if you wanted to be a writer, and you got a bad grade on one essay, how would that affect the vision of your future? Would that immediately drop you down into a dark cloud of self-deprecating thoughts and crushed aspirations? If so, you have some work to do on yourself, and that’s perfectly fine. The more you let other people interfere with your dreams, the less likely you are to accomplish them. Every person I know who has properly made it in life has been told countless times that they are crazy. People judge them for going down a different path and get offended by the total disregard of their opinion. It still doesn’t matter to them. If you want to follow a crazy dream, different from what you are expected to do, you have to drop the sheep’s skin that most in society wear and embrace the lion inside you. If the sheep come to bother you, let them know you’re not one to be messed with. And the roar is your self-belief. The more you believe in yourself, the less likely others are to bother you and will eventually follow your lead. I only say all of this because I was once that insecure follower—doing what I was told and sticking to others’ opinions of me. I couldn’t take the chances I wanted to in life because I did not believe in myself. If a teacher told me I was dumb and could never do anything, I would genuinely believe that. And it took me a long fucking time to get out of that headspace.
Growing up, I permanently lived at the bottom of my class. Every parent-teacher conference consisted of a rant about how dumb and distracted I was. These painful sessions were then followed by complete silence at home, not even a complaint vocalized by my parents. Although I am grateful that I did not get abused for my failures, I did not receive any words of positivity or encouragement. My parents accepted me as a failure and left it at that. I did not have anyone telling me they believed in me for a long time. On the contrary, I only had people telling me they did not believe in me. Teachers would scoff at me when handing back a test, students would laugh whenever I got called on, and my parents refused to read my report card after a certain point. My lowest point arrived at thirteen, where I had to take a standardized test to get into schools in New York. My scores were so low that I could have been sent to special school. The silence at my house was deafening for the following days; my parents refused to believe it. I felt like an absolute failure and confidently believed I would never accomplish anything in my life. My heart aches just remembering the pain living inside me during this time. Things started to get a little better in high school as I started to get a few B’s, but it was still the same story. Flash forward eight years and I graduated with a 3.9 GPA from an Ivy League school. What the fuck happened?
Throughout all my failures and ridicule at school, I always believed deep down that I was better than everyone else. That may sound incredibly obnoxious, but it’s the honest truth. It wasn’t in terms of being above anybody on a personal level. Rather, it was rooted in me believing that although everyone told me I was a dumbass, I was the smartest person in the room. I never communicated to anyone with that energy, but it always gave me hope for a better future. Then, suddenly, when I turned seventeen, I stepped into that light. I realized that my identity became a collection of the voices that doubted me. How could I know what I was properly capable of if I was constantly acting through my haters? In that moment, I mindfully noted what voice was my own, full of love and encouragement, and what was not. I refused to listen to the wounded voice and only listened to the one coated in self-belief. I looked around my classroom and started to think, “How have these people outperformed me for so long? That ends today.” So, I got sober and put all my energy into work. I ended up doing incredibly well on my standardized testing and getting excellent grades that year. I sold my story of self-belief, and how the education system robbed me of it, to colleges, and it ended up working for me. They bought into my potential. Although I learnt the power of self-belief, I had not healed the wounded child inside of me, which led to me developing a massive ego at college. I only accepted getting 100% on tests and would kill myself to get to that place. I also looked down on those struggling academically and thought I was above everybody else. In other words, I reclaimed the power position that wounded me for so long. This tale points out two important lessons. One, the only thing that changed in my process was believing in myself—proving its immense power. I went from a bullied failure to a success story. Two, a lack of self-belief is rooted in deep trauma, and if you don’t heal what hurt you, if you end up succeeding, your ego will take over and lead you to more misery.
This article will show you how to heal the moments that damaged your self-belief and turn them into fuel for accomplishing your dreams. To truly believe in yourself, you have to understand what hurt you and tend to that with deep compassion.
FAILURE
I want you to reflect and think about the moments where you tend to doubt yourself. For me, it used to be academically, athletically, and romantically. If you’re finding it hard to come up with an answer, think about what specific areas of life you’re especially hard on yourself about. Personally, in college, if I got below an A on a test, I would be much harder on myself than if I was an asshole to somebody. That fucked up value system sheds light on where our wounds lie in terms of self-belief. Once you have found that area or multiple areas of self-doubt, connect with a time that you deeply failed in that field. Or a time where somebody doubted you in that field. Or even a moment where someone put too much pressure on you to succeed in that area. I have found myself in each one of those situations, especially academically. As stated earlier, I was the biggest academic failure in my school growing up, everyone actively disbelieved me to improve, and my father’s incredibly high intellect, as well as academic achievement, inadvertently put pressure on me to succeed. Becoming aware of these woundings is what allowed me to heal; it will do the same for you as well. In the present moment, none of these stories hold any truth anymore; they belong in the past. However, our brains evolved in that past reality, making it hard to break the mental pattern without conscious effort. This is where counter-advertising comes in.
In college, when I would get insecure and doubt myself on an upcoming test or assignment, I would immediately jump into my younger self’s pattern of thinking. There’s no way I can do this. I’m going to fail and everyone will laugh at me. My father will continue thinking I’m a failure. In that moment, I would visualize me holding my younger self and telling him that I understand his feelings. Sometimes I would cry at the sheer amount of pain I was in. Once that energy was expelled, the past way of thinking started to dissipate, but there was still some smoke in the mirror. I would then look at my report card, see the good grades, and remember the times professors have commented on my intelligence. This is what counter-advertising looks like: comparing the ego’s stories to real evidence. I was soon transported into reality and put my head down, producing high-quality work. However, I was missing one key step in this process, which was contemplating my fear of failure. Simply put, the fear of failure is an illusion. What are you actually scared of? I always thought it was simply failing a test, but unconsciously it was a whole other story. I was scared of being bullied again and laughed at as an idiot. I needed to prove wrong those who did not believe in me. And most importantly, I was terrified of bringing home another terrible grade and having my father think I was not worthy of his love. That’s what I was fucking scared of—not a stupid letter on a page. Fear time travels unless you unpack the hurt that caused it. And by unpacking, I mean properly connecting with the grief you felt at that moment, empathizing with that younger version of yourself.
By the time I got to my last year of college, I had done all that work and allowed myself to properly learn. Thus, I wasn’t doing work for the sake of my ego; rather, I was trying my best to learn, which is the way it should be. Whatever I wrote came from the heart and away from any external expectations. I took feedback professionally, not personally, and believed in myself to bounce back from failure. (Giving yourself constructive feedback is essential, but that doesn’t have to turn into self-doubt). What resulted was my only good academic experience in college, and surprisingly, the best results I had ever gotten. Although the answer to this change came down to solely self-belief, as you can see, it wasn’t as simple as saying, “You got this.” It took a whole lot of grief work and self-reflection. That’s what self-belief really entails: believing in yourself to leave the old stories at the door and trying your best to enter the present moment with a fresh perspective.
POTENTIAL
What do you think your highest potential is? In other words, what is the most you think you can accomplish and how hard are you willing to work to get there? The answer to this question is what you should be competing against your whole life—not the achievements or work of anyone else. I learned this mentality from Michael Jordan, and look where it got him. He knew what the best he could accomplish looked like, so he battled against that potential every day. Any day that he failed to reach it was a step backwards. Unfortunately, many of us are too insecure to understand what our highest potential is—my past self included. To combat this, I want you to think of the moments in your life where you worked the hardest—where you felt like you defied some sort of odds. The biggest moment for me was overcoming drug addiction and wanting to kill myself. It was the hardest two months of my life getting sober and finding the right mindset, but the feeling of redemption afterwards felt like I was in a movie. A personal hero of mine, David Goggins, calls moments like these pieces of a “cookie jar”—where you can dig into at any point in your life for motivation. Whenever I am struggling to complete a task and getting insecure about my capabilities, I take a bite out of that cookie I just described, driving myself back into what I am truly capable of. The more moments you create like this, the more drive you will have to succeed in the future. Get out there and do things you could never imagine yourself doing, and you will see the reality of your potential. Although I dislike many aspects of higher education, the insurmountable amount of work I had to do at times showed me what I am truly capable of when I push myself and believe. David Goggins also has a quote that goes along the lines of, “I don’t want to die without seeing myself drained of my potential.” I think that should be everyone’s life goal: to see what they are truly capable of. Although looking at that quote and getting pumped up is a start, two key steps must be taken to actually accomplish it: visualization and hard work.
If you cannot believe something, you will not accomplish it. This means that if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, for instance, then you have to genuinely believe that shit. Your subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between a thought and reality, which you can use to your advantage. If you keep visualizing yourself as a successful entrepreneur—whatever that looks like to you—then your mind will start treating it as reality, sending that energy into the world and forcing you to believe in your work. Meaning, you have to buy into your potential to see any results. However, entitled New Age Gen Z softies get this whole concept completely wrong. No, you cannot simply visualize and manifest success and expect it to fall in your lap. You must set up a plan and do the work that it takes to get there. I hate to break your dreams, but you cannot get anywhere without working hard—unless you want to go viral and live a miserable life of external gratification. Unfortunately, our addiction to our phones and their powerful hold over our egos make us prone to prioritizing comfort. Yes, rest and relaxation is important, but it has to be seen as a form of recovery, not a permanent lifestyle. I go back to this concept every day when I have to get work done and I hope it will serve you well: you must stop prioritizing what you want now over what you want in the future. Living with that mentality will separate you from the true hard workers and those constantly bathing in comfort.
While all this is true, burnout is a real thing—which means you have to take care of yourself. Meditation and exercise are the two best things that help reset my body and mind, putting me in the ideal mindset to work. I highly recommend them to be implemented into your daily routine. Additionally, try your best to avoid stress and anxiety at all costs. Most people learn to work from a state of anxiety due to the time-pressured structure of the education system, but anxiety will not help you work better by any means. Personally, I go for calm, yet alert. Because the more stressed and anxious you are throughout the day, the more likely you are to burnout, so tread carefully.
DARKNESS INTO LIGHT
The biggest compromising factors of self-belief that lead to insecurities and procrastination are negative feelings, specifically anger and anxiety. Connect with a time you had been trying to get a challenging piece of work done, but it got increasingly difficult the more you got frustrated with yourself. That anger then leads you to shove the work away and procrastinate for a long time. What if I told you that this anger you feel is actually the cheat code for motivation? As was described earlier, whatever doubt you have in yourself comes from a time where someone severely doubted you. For me, it was mostly my teachers, coaches, and fellow students. That voice you hear in your head telling you that you cannot do something is actually their voice on replay. Channel your anger towards their doubt in you and prove those motherfuckers wrong. Although the phrase “haters are my motivators” sounds super corny, there is a lot of truth in that statement. The more you prove your internal and external doubt wrong, the less likely it is to keep occurring. So, channel that anger into your craft and skip the self-deprecating procrastination we tend to fall into.
Next, in terms of anxiety or indifference, see it as a test that’s attempting to hold you back from your potential. In an ideal world, we would feel like working whenever we needed to and never have to worry about negative feelings. Unfortunately, that world does not exist. We cannot control the way we feel, but we can control our reaction to it. If we constantly try to change our negative feelings and wait for them to pass, we will waste a lot of time, as well as good opportunities to gain resilience. When I find myself indifferent towards my work or anxious about something, I tell myself, “Legacy over feelings.” What the fuck could I possibly mean by that? If I keep prioritizing the way I feel and put it over what I want to accomplish in life, I will never accomplish anything. And if I don’t accomplish anything, then I will leave no legacy on this earth and my children will have nothing to look up to. This sounds severe, but we cannot always prioritize how we feel, or else we will not go very far in life. The phrase “emotions make bad masters but good servants” is genius. If emotions constantly control our behavior, then we will be eight different people, at least. Stick to who you are and use your emotions for your own benefit. Emotions can really change people’s viewpoint of their potential and decrease their self-belief. You must try your best to not let that happen. I am not telling you to ignore your emotions and push them down; that’s called repression, and that shit will kick you down eventually. On the contrary, mindfully tolerate your feelings with love and try to understand where they are coming from. But this does not have to be a separate hour-long process constantly taking you away from what you have to do in a day. Control your feelings, don’t let them control you. The way you view yourself and your potential is so delicate that you must not let anything interfere with that, especially your own emotions. See anxiety and indifference as the same old bullies who put you down in school. Note their presence, but don’t let them take you away from your center.
LIGHT INTO DARKNESS
I believe that pleasure is more threatening than pain. When we are in pain, our conscious and unconscious minds tend to team up to try and find a solution to make us feel better. However, when things are going well for us, our mind can freak out and try to bring us back to old mental tendencies. In other words, it’s not working for the right team. So, if you get to a place where you feel like you are believing in yourself more than usual and producing excellent work—be very careful. The work on yourself will never be done if your self-worth is rooted in trauma, all you can do is be aware once the trauma comes back up. The better and faster you get at doing that, the more healed you become. Try your best to not relapse into bad habits and mental loops. Always stay on the lookout for those negative thoughts entering your direction. Treat them like mosquitoes, swatting them away but knowing they can come back at any time. It’s a never-ending battle, but you usually come out on top with quick hands.
