Inform Yourself

Once you have your new Roal (congrats by the way), now there is just one more thing you have to do in order to be finished with the Choose Thyself evolution. You have to believe in yourself. To have self-belief requires that you are satisfied with yourself, and as Thoreau said, “The man who is dissatisfied with himself. What can he do?” Self-belief is one of the most crucial traits we found all successful people to possess. Psychologists sometimes refer to it as self-efficacy, which is our belief in our ability to succeed in specific situations. Some refer to it as self-confidence that you have an innate sense that you will succeed. Still others call it a sense of entitlement wherein the individual simply expects that they deserve the best. This does not mean they expect to be handed the best, just that they deserve it, so they go and get it. They succeed because they feel they have just as much right as anyone else to be successful. Regardless of the various names given to it, for our purposes here we call it self-belief, and it is defined as, “one’s ability to believe they deserve to succeed and that they will succeed.”

Successful people believe strongly that they can make desirable things happen in their lives, and that they deserve them. All of the successful people we studied had high levels of self-belief and as a result they not only felt they deserved to succeed, but that they would. This self-belief creates in them a certain sense of independence as they view their success as their own birthright and not something to be left to chance, or in the hands of others. Successful people are their own SEO’s, guiding their own fate.

A significant part of self-belief is self-acceptance. As humans, we will all surely fail – many times. We likely fail more than we succeed in many ways. To learn a new thing requires that we fail more than we succeed, but geniuses don’t worry about failing. Many people carry a false impression that to be good they must be perfect and as wise as possible, admitting only those failures that are insignificant. But this simply isn’t possible. To become wise one must first make all the errors he can. It has been said that, “To be wise requires good judgment, and good judgment requires experience and experience requires poor judgment.” To be the best you have to make lots of mistakes. Many people, however, would rather erase their mistakes and acknowledge only that which they did well. They hold out a false hope that they can create an image of themselves that only consists of their successes. In order to truly appreciate yourself, however, you have to appreciate all that you are – including your mistakes and your weaknesses.

“A great attitude does much more than turn on the lights in our worlds; it seems to magically connect us to all sorts of serendipitous opportunities that were somehow absent before the change” ~ Earl Nightingale

~ The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continuously fearing you will make one ~ Elbert Hubbard

There is an old Chinese saying that goes, “Recognize beauty, and ugliness is born. Recognize good, and evil is born.” In other words, it is impossible to qualify something as good without accepting the existence of things that are not good. You can’t learn to love yourself, and truly believe in yourself, until you are willing to accept that which is not good about you as well. You can’t appreciate yourself fully without acknowledging all that is you – both good and bad. The Chinese concept of Yin-Yang depicts this dichotomy. The image represents this duality, one that exists in all of nature, in all things and even in you. It represents the light and the dark, the positive and the negative, the right and the wrong – and the balance between all things that exists.

The enlightening aspect of this concept is that just as the circle itself is not whole without both the light and dark sides of the circle, so too is your acceptance of yourself not complete without acknowledging both the good and the bad of who you are. You cannot feel whole about yourself until you acknowledge both, and without being whole, you will struggle to have true self-belief.

By acknowledging the dark side of your circle you remove its power. You demystify it, and you take control over it. And by gaining control over it, you strip it of much of its power to undermine your confidence, your self-belief. We fear things we don’t know or understand, therefore not knowing or understanding your mistakes and failures empowers them by making them fearful. We end up fearing them; that we’ll make more of them; that perhaps all we can make are mistakes. This can be the impetus for self-limiting beliefs like the self-doubt that many suffer from.

If it is true that we fear things we don’t understand, then if we can come to understand something better, we will fear it less. Just as understanding your talents is a part of self-awareness, so is understanding your non-talents. Geniuses understand their non-talents. They shine big bright lights on their mistakes, acknowledge them readily and instead of wishing they weren’t so, they consider them learning opportunities that help them refine their authenticity even that much more. Their mistakes help them find their quiet path. Thomas Edison once said, “I am not discouraged [by failure], because every wrong step discarded is another step forward.”

When Geniuses shine the light on their non-talents, they aren’t obsessing over how bad they are. Rather they are telling themselves that it’s OK to be flawed. They see the acknowledgment of these flaws as Edison did – as just another step towards the right answer.

Something to be careful of, though, when you acknowledge your flaws, is not to go too far in the other direction. While you must acknowledge your mistakes and flaws to learn from them, at the same time you don’t want to fixate on just those flaws. You have to strike a healthy balance between acknowledging your non-talents and not obsessing over them. If you go back to the image of Yin and Yang think of the ideal target as a balance between both sides of the circle. You don’t want the black space to be absent (completely ignoring your non-talents) but you don’t want that black space to take over the majority of the circle either. Either way, you are not fully whole.

This process of exploring yourself or introspection leads to self-talk, which is what you say to yourself about yourself. We each develop habits for talking to ourselves about ourselves. Psychologists call the messages we play to ourselves cognitive scripts and they can be either positive or negative. You have to develop positive, healthy, well balanced scripts in order to achieve the best levels of self-belief.

Next: Cognitive Scripting!

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius?

C3 - Lose the role altogether:
One of the most common reason for chronic failure is chronic inauthenticity, and as I said earlier, the first step in creating your authentic self is acknowledging your inauthenticity. Kierkegaard said it best when he said, “Face the facts of being what you are for that is what changes what you are.” Many times people feel that their roles are just too inauthentic, too far from your quiet path. They would have to delegate or modify the majority of their responsibilities in order to make it authentic enough. If this is the case for you, the best thing to do may indeed be to find another role altogether. If your role is so inauthentic, if you are forced to be more of what you are not than what you are – all day long, then getting out is probably your best solution. The problem with quitting, though, is that it is scary. We’ve all heard the same old saying, “Winners never quit!” As scary as it may be, though, shouldn’t living a life where you feel you are always making mistakes, and never feeling fulfilled or satisfied be even scarier?

Quitting is difficult. Quitting requires you to acknowledge that you’re never going to be #1 in the world, at least not at this. So it’s easier just to put it off, not admit it, and settle for being mediocre. To quote Seth Godin, the problem is that, “you grew up believing that quitting is a moral failure. Quitting feels like a go-down moment, a moment where you look yourself in the eye and blink. Of course you were trying your best, but you just can’t do it. It’s the whole Vince Lombardi thing. If you were just better person, you wouldn’t quit. “ In reality, Geniuses quit all the time. They know what they are good at and what they are not good at, and they quit focusing on that which they are not good at all the time, and instead pour that energy into getting even better at what they are very good at.

We can take a lesson from the pages of wisdom that Jack Welch, former Chairman of General Electric, has left for us. His philosophy was that if GE couldn’t be number one or two in any category or market, either figure out how to be number one or two, or get out of that category. He knew that, at least as a company, when you were number one you controlled your own destiny. So forget the humiliation of failure associated with quitting. Realize that quitting the stuff that you don’t do well frees up your resources to obsess about that which you are naturally good at. Many will tell you that “Quitting is for losers,” but as Seth goes on to say, “quit or be exceptional…average is for losers!”

We promise you this. Once you shine that light on your inauthenticity, once you embrace the truth of your own quiet path and once you decide to take back control of your own success and stop accepting what you get (even if this means quitting your job), the relief and excitement you will feel will be incredible. The positive emotions associated with such a life-changing decision will far outweigh any trepidation you have for the risks that quitting or changing may create. Can you sense just the smallest amount of excitement deep inside you right now at just the thought of being in a whole different place one year from now? Is there a little voice whispering inside right now saying, “Man wouldn’t it be so great to be…?” The question you have to ask yourself is, “Why not?” Why should you continue to settle? Why should you continue to accept less than what you deserve?

Why should you be just above average in one role when another role out there holds the promise to unleash your real genius? Sure you can come up with lots of rational lies, but in the end…why? Get real. Get authentic. Get satisfied. Quit trying to do that which is not you, and…just do you!

To become aware of what your Roal should be I’ve created a simple Roal Building workshop that you can complete through an online account at http://www.whatsyourgenius.com . Click on resources and select Workbook from the menu. Your task will be to take your existing goals (ones which may not take into consideration your natural talents), and adjust them so that they are authentic for you. Once you merge your authentic role with your goals, you will have your new Roal.

~ Quit trying to do that which is not you, and…just do you! ~