Compliments of the season. Last week we discussed on Believe in Yourself. Today we shall continue the discussion. As I stated last week, in my humble opinion, believing in yourself is the mother of all motivational and inspirational articles.

During the course of this article, we shall be inspiring ourselves with different quotations; we shall also be discussing how we can believe in ourselves using different resource medium. We shall conclude using different inspirational quotes to keep us fired up. Believing in yourself can be a difficult task in the face of difficulties and adversities especially when the odds are against you. The question now is, will you give up when the odds are against you or will give it a shot? If you care for my opinion, here are my thoughts:

Talking to the people you love:

Sometimes, we have difficulty seeing the best in ourselves, but the people who love us will never struggle to see those things. We all have friends and enemies of progress who you can call haters. Friends and haters all have a role to play in our lives. Your true friends spur you to greatness by encouraging and criticizing you constructively where necessary. According to Henry Ford “My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me” Haters, on the other hand, inspire you never to give up. The best way to defeat haters is never to give up on any task or project you are passionate about. Just think of how far you have come in life and the people who want to see you fail and you will be inspired. Therefore, talking to a friend or people you love is a good way to gain confidence.

Find a cause you believe in:

Nothing strengthens any individual more than pursuing a cause he or she believes in. True confidence comes with believing in a cause you are passionate about. The passion you feel for this projects will help you to work harder and see how much you can achieve. Benjamin Franklin stated, “If passion drives you let reason holds therein”. You must always have the courage to pursue your dreams. According to Ruth Gordon, “Courage is very important, like a muscle, it must be strengthened by use”. It may be difficult to believe in yourself if you are always trying to please others.

Be Consistent:

It should be noted that inconsistency is inconsistent with the lifestyle of all great men. All great men are not only consistent with their thoughts, words, and action, they make consistency their lifestyle. They say what they mean and mean what they say. It is their consistency that gives them credibility and belief in their product which in turn creates value and income for them.  

The big question now is how do you improve yourself?

Learning how to believe in yourself will open up endless opportunities in your life. At times, you may find this difficult to do. The truth is that we have been conditioned throughout our lives to doubt ourselves. We must retrain our minds to get rid of our fears and self-doubt in order to build self-esteem and self-confidence.

Here are two most important steps to learning to believe in yourself. Practice them and you will be amazed at the result.

Believe it’s possible:

Believe that you can do any task regardless of what anyone says of feels about you. It doesn’t matter where you are in life. Believing all starts from the mind. According to Napoleon Hill in his book“Think and Grow Rich” “whatsoever the mind can conceive, believe it can achieve it”. During the 2008 USA presidential election campaign, President Obama encouraged us to have hope in the face of difficulties. He was able to become one of the greatest US president because he believed in himself and was able to doubt his doubts. According to Jim Rohn “If you are unwilling to risk the usual, you will settle for the ordinary”.

Visualize it:

Vision is of the greatest strength of all leaders. Visionary leaders are always inspired by their convictions and plans. Once you have a vision, you have to work towards it every day in order to accomplish the vision you have in mind. Isn’t true that the whole world sets aside for the man who knows where he’s going to? It doesn’t matter where you are coming from, or the mistakes you have made in the past, all that matter is where you are going. Mistakes are part of success. According to Theodore Roosevelt “The only man who doesn’t make a mistake is the man who never does anything.

Take Action Towards Your Goals:

Plans are nothing if we don’t put them into action. This is because talk is cheap. Believing in yourself entails taking action. We live in a society where every is judged by what they have done or achieved and not what they say they’ll do. In order to believe in yourself, you must first of believe that what you want is possible. In fact, minds is such a powerful instrument. It can literally deliver whatever you want through the power of positive expectation. For example, Zander Fyer was an anordinary person, but he made an extraordinary decision that made me to live an extraordinary live. Zander worked for a large technology company whose used byFacebook, Disney, NBC, and at 27years, he decided to quit his job after reading the Principles of  Success. His mentor asked him, What will you do if you wouldn’t fail? Zander immediately said he will a mentor and trainer to others. It should be noted that one of the biggest reason why people don’t achieve their goal and realize their dream is that, they don’t take action, and the number one reason why they don’t take action is that of fear. What I do tell them is that fear is normal, as soon as you experience fear, you need to take action.

According to toMat Mayberry: To live a life of high achievement, you must fully believe in yourself and your ability. All the great men that ever existed really believed in themselves. Examples are: Steve Jobs, NelsonMandela, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Hussein Obama, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Michael Jordan, are just a few highly successful individuals who benefited greatly from this confidence. However, it’s not their levels of success that I want to talk about. It’s their willingness to get up again and again when they failed or experienced a setback while in pursuit of creating the life of their dreams. They were only able to keep going and achieve success because of the level of belief in themselves despite the numerous rmous amount of failures they had experienced for years leading up to their big breakthroughs. Their belief is what created a vision so big that they didn’t care how many times they failed at something. 

If you don’t have a huge amount of belief in yourself, then there is no way you can expect anyone else to believe in you. If you are an employee, you can’t expect your boss to fully believe in you if you don’t even believe in yourself. If you are an entrepreneur, you can’t expect an investor to believe in your ideas if you don’t even believe in yourself.

In our contemporary society today, the personality and attitude an individual disposes  speaks a lot about the person. It’s doesn’t matter your profession or business. For example, in order for a politician to convince an individual to support his/her candidacy, one will have to show proof or evidence of personal conviction. Once you believe in yourself, you don’t need anybody’s confirmation or opinion because your value does not decrease based on someone’s inability to see your worth. You can’t really change a person’s opinion about you, the best you can do is to influence them.”

Here are some interesting quotes to get you inspired to believe in yourself.

In the journey of life, you will pass many roads, some will be bumps, some red light, some caution lines, and others green light. Depending on your situation, always remember the words of Dough Larson “The problem with learning from experience is that you never graduate. The more you fail in a fail, the more you learn and the more you learn, the more you gain experience which gives you an affirmative belief. Oscar Wilde puts it more succinctly, Experience is simply the name we give we give our mistakes.

Are you going to fail? Knocked down? Scorned and humiliated? The answer is yes. The question now is will you allow your experience to define you or elevate you? The choice is yours. According to Vince Lombardi “It is not where you get knocked down, it is whether you get up”.

I encourage you today to have the courage to pursue your convictions and beliefs regardless of what maybe starring at you at the face. It is the energy and how resilient you are that you are that will make people to believe in you. In the words of Julie Andrews “Perseverance is failing nineteen times and succeeding the twentieth”

I will conclude with the words of Mark Victor Hansen “Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges,obstacles, and less than perfect conditions. So what? Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident, and more and more successful.” –Mark VictorHansen

Henry Ukazu is the author of Design Your Destiny- Actualizing Your Birthright To Success. He writes from New York. He works with the New York City Department of Correction as the Legal Coordinator. He can be reached via henrous@gmail.com