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!