CHAPTER 8
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Self-Confidence In Action
Above all, be of a single aim; have a legitimate and useful purpose, and devote yourself unreservedly to it. —James Allen
One of the most valuable exercises you can engage in, to accomplish any goal you can set for yourself, is to ask yourself, “What is my limiting step?” What is the one factor that determines the speed at which I achieve my goal, or whether I achieve it at all? Your ability to identify your limiting step is one of the best demonstrations of your intelligence. Your capacity to eliminate this limiting step is one of the best demonstrations of your overall competence in achieving anything you want.
Self-Confidence Is Critical- In studying everything that has been written or said about personal success, the conclusion I came to was that your level of self-confidence is probably the critical factor in everything you accomplish. When you have enough selfconfidence, you will try almost anything. Because success is largely a matter of averages, or probabilities, the more things you try, the more likely it is that you will achieve greatly. For many years, Amoco Petroleum was famous among oil companies for having consistently developed and maintained higher levels of oil and gas reserves than any other major oil company. The president of Amoco was asked why his company was so successful in this area. He replied simply that, “We drill more holes.” They didn’t purport to be better or smarter than their competitors. They just focused on drilling more wells, and by the law of averages, they ended up drilling more successful wells and becoming one of the most profitable oil companies in the world.
Try More Things-The same is true for you. When you set more goals, try more things, engage in more activities, and explore more opportunities, your probabilities of success increase dramatically. The only real limiting step that you might have is your level of self-confidence. When you reach the point at which you believe in yourself absolutely, the barriers that exist in your external world will not stop you. The major obstacles to success always lie within the mind of the individual. They are not contained in external circumstances, situations or people. As soon as you win the inner battle, the outer battle seems to take care of itself. The development of self-confidence has been the turning point in my own life. The reason I feel so strongly about the subject is because of what it has meant to me. The development of greater self-confidence has enabled me to go from rags to riches, from limited means and worries about money to national and international renown. I have been able to go from living in a small, rented, one-bedroom apartment and being deeply in debt, to living in a beautiful home on a golf course and driving a new Mercedes.
An Inauspicious Beginning-Talent and ambition have been very helpful, but without the development of self-confidence, my inborn abilities would have lain dormant and unused, as they did for many years. Before I gained enough self-confidence to commit completely to my goals, I was going nowhere with my life. I started with few advantages. I came from a home with three younger brothers, and while I was growing up, we never seemed to have any money. My father was a good man, but he was not always employed. I remember from my earliest days that we could never afford anything.My mother used to dress us by buying used clothes from the Goodwill and the St. Vincent De Paul Rescue Missions. We would wear pants and shirts that had been given away by other families. Sometimes the kids at school recognized that the clothes I was wearing were their old clothes that their parents had given away. Christmas and birthdays were not occasions of great celebration. We had little to give and little to share.
Early Behavior Problems-I became a behavior problem at an early age. I see now that I was just rebelling against my upbringing, but at the time, I was a real problem for everyone around me. I was constantly being kicked out of classes for misbehavior. I was suspended or expelled from four schools during my junior high and high school years. I had the sorry distinction of being the worst behaved kid in school, with more detentions, demerits, and failed classes than any other kid in the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grades. I learned later that my teachers had voted me “the most likely to end up in prison.” I began working at a young age. I worked at a part time job, and then full time jobs to earn my own money, buy my own clothes, and eventually get my own car. I worked as a dishwasher in a small hotel for eight hours a day during my 12th-grade year, and, although I didn’t drop out of high school, I failed out.
Failure from the Beginning- I continued going to school until the year was over, but I failed six out of my last seven courses. During the graduation ceremonies, they allowed me to go up on the stage in a gown, in front of the audience, and receive a certificate from the principal. The person in front of me received a diploma. The person in back of me also received a diploma. What I got was a “leaving certificate.” A leaving certificate is just a polite way for the school to say, “Goodbye, please don’t ever come back.”
Laboring Jobs-While many of my friends who had graduated from high school went on to university to complete their educations, I began working at laboring jobs. Over the next few years, I worked as a dishwasher and a kitchen helper. I worked in sawmills and factories. I worked on construction crews and as a laborer. In one job, I dug wells. That’s when you start from the ground level and work down, rather than up. I worked at washing cars and as a galley boy on a ship. I worked in gas stations and as a mechanic’s helper. When I answered employment ads in the paper, I never even got a reply from anyone. My job applications were just thrown in the wastebasket. When I was 23 years old, I was an itinerant farm worker, sleeping on the hay in the farmer’s barn, and getting up when it was pitch black to eat with the farmer’s family before the workday started.
Selling from Door to Door- In my mid-20s, I was still drifting, and in order to eat, I began selling office supplies from door to door. I did poorly. From there, I went to selling other things. I remember making calls for an entire month without making a single sale. I lived on loans and charity from family and friends. I had virtually no possessions, very few clothes even, no money, no high-school diploma, no marketable skills, and no experience of any real value to anyone. I was going nowhere fast. Meanwhile, all around me, I saw people my own age, and younger, who were doing well. They were wearing nice clothes, driving nice cars, and working at well-paying jobs. They were moving onward and upward in their careers. They had offices and some of them had staffs. Several of them had gotten married and had homes and families and cars and furniture and what appeared to be pretty good lives.
The Big Question-From the age of 15, I had been wondering why it was that some people were more successful than others? Although I wasn’t making much progress on the outside, I continued to read and search for the answers to this question, and I began to experiment with some of the ideas I discovered. My first turning point came when I realized that my problems at school and in getting along with other people were as a direct result of my own personality. I realized that, if I wanted things to change, I would have to change. I began to understand that my unhappiness and anger and frustration at my childhood experiences had caused me to develop a negative personality that turned many people off. I accepted that any change that was going to take place had to begin with me, and it was up to me alone. No one was going to do it for me. No one would help me. No one else really cared. If I wanted to be successful and popular with others, I would have to go to work on myself and become a different person.
The Big Turning Point-The second turning point came for me when I was poor and 20 years old, living in a one-bedroom apartment and working at a laboring job during the day. I realized that I was completely responsible for my life and everything that happened to me from then on. If I wasn’t happy with my income, my work, my education, or my future prospects, it was up to me to go to work on myself and make the necessary changes. They wouldn’t happen by themselves.
The Importance of Goals The third turning point came for me when I discovered the importance of setting goals and of making clear decisions about what I really wanted in each area of my life. When I first stumbled across the subject of goals, I thought they were something that they had in sports. The idea of setting them for myself wasn’t quite believable. I had so many problems and excuses that I felt that goal setting was really just an exercise in futility. It might be a pleasant entertainment, but nothing would come of it, considering mysituation. Because I had low self-esteem and limited self-confidence, the first goals I set were not very high. They were consistent with what we talked about in Chapter 2 of this book, but I looked on the exercise as more of an entertainment than as an important stepping-stone to success. I remember sitting in someone else’s cheap hotel room many years ago. I took out a piece of hotel stationery, wrote out a series of goals, put deadlines on them, and then made a simple plan for accomplishing them. I promptly lost the sheet of paper, but exactly 31 days later, just as I had written, and as the result of a remarkable series of coincidences, my goals were all achieved. I was in my 20s at the time, and I still remember the feeling of astonishment I had at that time. I felt that I had learned about a secret power that I could use to accomplish almost anything.
Three Great Ideas-I had learned three important ideas. First, accept complete responsibility for yourself and for everything that you are and ever will be. Second, accept that you can change your situation only by going to work on yourself and learning the things you need to know to be better. Third, set clear goals with time lines for the things you want and then work every day to bring those goals into reality. For the next few years, I used these ideas sporadically. Each time I did, I would experience a burst of success and progress. As soon as I achieved a modicum of success, I would abandon these ideas and go back to simply reacting and responding to whatever happened on a daily basis. It took me several years before I finally began practicing these ideas consistently, along with many others that I’ve mentioned in this program. I then began to get results in a systematic and consistent way.
We Sabotage Ourselves- I learned later that our natural tendency is to work hard until we find a method or technique that works for us, whether in life, work, or relationships,and then, for some perverse reason, we promptly abandon the technique and go back to behaving in our old way, in a random and haphazard manner. A mental exercise program, like goal setting and positive thinking, is very much like a physical exercise program. If you expect it to really work for you, you have to practice it persistently, every day, and keep at it indefinitely. When I began to apply these proven success principles to my life, and worked on them every day, I was able to bring about almost miraculous changes in every area of my life. Here’s the point. I learned, in retrospect, that the reason that I suffered so many frustrations and drifted away from using these principles so often was because I lacked self-confidence. My conscious mind told me that these principles made sense. However, my subconscious mind, my storehouse of memories and emotions and previous experiences, was telling me that I wasn’t good enough and that success was not really for me. As my friend Zig Ziglar says, “I was engineered for success but programmed for failure.” I wanted success on the outside, but I didn’t believe I was capable of it on the inside.
You Can Develop Any Quality- The fourth turning point for me, and the reason that I have written this book for you, was my discovery that I could develop any quality that I thought was necessary for my success and happiness. I learned that, by hard work and repetition, I could overcome and override my feelings of inferiority and undeservedness and build up my feelings of self-esteem and self-confidence. I could identify and then alleviate my own bottlenecks or limiting steps. By working on myself every day, I could build myself up into the highachieving, happy person that I really wanted to be. By taking my foot off my own subconscious brakes and putting them onto my conscious accelerator, I could begin to move ahead rapidly in life. The key, the spark plug, was the conscious and purposeful development and maintenance of high levels of self-confidence, and the self-esteem that goes with it.
The Secret of Success-Every successful man or woman that I have ever talked to or read about has come to pretty much the same conclusion. By every measure, you have more talent and ability than you could use in 100 lifetimes. You, too, can step on the accelerator of your own potential and begin moving forward at a speed that will amaze you. Many people who have listened to my programs or gone through my seminars have come back to me and told me that they cannot believe how fast their lives began to improve when they began to apply these principles on a daily basis.
The Four Ds of Success and Self-confidence- How do you infuse your whole life with the kind of self-confidence that makes everything possible for you? The answer is contained in what I call the four Ds, which determine success in anything you really want to accomplish. The first D is desire. You must really want to become a totally selfconfident human being. You must build up your desire by thinking about it and talking about it, and working on it all the time. Your desire must become so intense that it overrides your fears of failure, rejection, and inferiority, and it becomes the dominant emotion governing your behaviors. Intense desire is the starting point of all personality modification and goal attainment. The second D is decision. You must make a do-or-die decision that you will go to work on yourself and keep at it until you achieve the kind of selfconfidence that enables you to do, be, and say whatever you want. You must burn your mental bridges. Many people want things but they never make the clear, unequivocal decision that they are going to do what it takes to get them. The third D is determination. Once you have started to make significant changes in the way you act, your internal gyroscope will try to take over and bring you back into your comfort zone, into your old ways of acting. Sometimes, progress will be slow, and, often, you will see no progress at all. Nonetheless, you must persist in the positive and constructive behaviors that you know will lead to making you into the kind of person you wish to become. Your determination must be as unshakable as the self-confidence you desire. The fourth D is discipline. Underlying and surrounding all great achievement in life is the quality of self-discipline. This is the ability to make yourself do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not. Every practice of self-discipline strengthens your discipline in every other area of your life. As Napoleon Hill said, after more than 20 years of research into the lives of successful men and women, “Self-discipline is the master key to riches.” It is self-discipline that makes everything else possible. If you have the desire to change, the decisiveness to take action, the determination to persist on your forward track, and the discipline to make yourself do whatever you need to do, your self-confidence and your success are inevitable.
Positive Knowing versus Positive Thinking- We said earlier that self-confidence comes from positive knowing rather than from just positive thinking or hoping. It is only when you have a firm conviction or belief in your abilities, based on experience, that you really know that your self-confidence is not an act. This is why every act of self-confidence builds your self-confidence. Every success you experience builds your self-confidence and your ability to achieve further successes. Every mental exercise that you engage in to improve and strengthen your personality, builds your self-confidence. Everything that you learn and practice from the lives of other self-confident people improves you own self-image, increases your self-esteem, and raises your self-confidence.
The Gallup Success Survey-Some years ago, in the mid-1980s, the Gallup organization conducted one of the most extensive surveys into the reasons for success ever conducted in America. They selected 1,500 men and women whose names and biographies had appeared in Marquis’s Who’s Who in America, the most prestigious register of noteworthy individuals in the country. They asked them, at great length, what they felt were the reasons why they had become so well known and respected in their lifetimes. This group included Nobel Prize winners, university presidents, heads of Fortune 500 corporations, leading academics, writers, inventors, entrepreneurs, and even a high-school football coach, a man who continued to have a significant impact on the lives and personalities of the young people he trained.
Five Essential Success Qualities
After many months of research and interviews, they were able to isolate the five most important qualities for success and self-confidence in America. Their findings turned out to be consistent with virtually all the other research that’s been done in this area.
Common Sense- The first and most important success quality was defined as, common sense. It is said that the average person has an enormous amount of common sense because he or she hasn’t used any of it yet. Common sense seems to be something that a person accumulates as the result of experience over a long period of time. Common sense was defined by the participants in this survey as the “ability to cut to the core of a matter, to recognize and deal with the essential elements of a problem or a situation, rather than getting sidetracked by smaller issues or symptoms.” Another definition of common sense was “The ability to learn from experience and then to apply those lessons to subsequent experiences.” Common sense was seen as a core quality that enabled a person to become increasingly more effective over time.
Wisdom Is Essential- Perhaps another word for common sense is wisdom. Aristotle once defined wisdom as an equal combination of experience plus reflection. He suggested that you need to, first, have the experience and, second, take an equal amount of time to think about what happened to you and what you could learn from it. You are far, far wiser than you know. In fact, based on your experience, you probably have the ability to be far more effective than you are just by applying what you have already learned. The problem for most people is that they simply do not take enough time for reflection. They do not take the time to sit, write, think, and dialogue with others about their experiences. Socrates once said that “We only learn something by dialoguing about it.” You only really understand something to the degree to which you can discuss it with others or explain it to a third party. Your ability to translate your experience into words, which only comes through thinking and reflection, is essential for your growth and wisdom and common sense.
Gain Additional Knowledge- I would add one more ingredient to Aristotle’s definition of wisdom, and that would be knowledge. Wisdom comes from equal parts knowledge, experience, and reflection. First you learn, then you practice what you learn, then you take time to think about what happened. When you turn off the television or radio, or put down the newspaper, and begin spending more time talking and thinking about what has happened to you, you begin to grow at an exponential rate.
Two Magic Questions- Perhaps the two best questions I have learned for personal growth are these: After every experience, successful or unsuccessful, stop and do an instant replay of the experience, preferably on paper, and ask yourself first, What did I do right? and second, What would I do differently?
If you take a piece of paper and write at the top of the page, What did I do right? and then write down every single part of the experience that you did correctly, you will be accelerating your development of common sense. By analyzing your immediate past performance, like football players do on video, you will find yourself improving at a rapid rate. The very fact that you take time to reflect will cause you to improve in the areas you pay attention to.
When you ask, What would I do differently? you begin to see all kinds of possibilities for improvement. The wonderful thing about these two questions is that the answers to both are positive and constructive. And when you dwell on the positive, constructive parts of your performance, present and future, these ideas sink deeper into your subconscious mind and program you to act in a manner consistent with that information the next time out.
Review Your Performance- One famous football coach would sit down with his better players and replay videos of their last games. He showed them running or passing or catching on the video, but without comment. The players, whose egos were very sensitive, were quite aware of their mistakes and weaknesses. Nothing needed to be said. As a result of reviewing the videos together, the players became better and better, and the coach was seen to be a great builder of men. After every sales call or interview, do an instant replay, alone or with someone else, and ask yourself quickly, What did I do right? and What would I do differently? You will be amazed at what you see and how fast you begin to improve. This simple method will probably assure that you make more progress in one month than the average person makes in a year, or even two years. Just try it for one day and prove it to yourself.
Be Good at What You Do-The second quality for success and self-confidence that came out of the study was that of expertise. I talked about this at great length in Chapter 3. Most successful, happy men and women are very good at what they do and they know they are very good. They have learned and practiced and reflected and gotten better and better until they are recognized by their peers as being among the very best in their fields. This feeling of being the best is an absolute prerequisite for deep and lasting self-confidence.
Self-Reliance-The third quality identified in the study was that of self-reliance. Men and women who are respected by others tend to look primarily to themselves for the answers to their questions and for the solutions to their problems. They are highly self-responsible. They do not blame others or make excuses when things go wrong. They regard themselves as the primary creative forces in their own lives. They volunteer for tough assignments, and they are willing to take charge when something needs to be done.
Intelligence Is More Than IQ- The fourth success quality identified was that of intelligence. Intelligence seems to be a key requirement for success and self-confidence in any field. However, when they looked at this subject, they found that intelligence was not necessarily measured in terms of IQ. Many of the most notable men and women alive today did poorly in school. They got low grades or no grades, and many of them had not completed university or even high school. One gentleman in the study could not even read or write, and yet he had gotten all the way through university by covering it up and getting others to do his assignments for him.
Income and IQ- In a recent survey in New York, 1,000 adults were selected at random and tested for IQ. It was found that between the person having the highest IQ and the person having the lowest IQ, there was a difference of only two-and-a half times. But between the person earning the greatest amount of money and the person earning the least amount of money, there was a difference of more than 100 times the income. And the person earning the most was by no means the person with the higher IQ.
How Is Intelligence Defined? If intelligence is not necessarily IQ, grades, or years of schooling, what is it? In my estimation, intelligence is really a way of acting. If you act intelligently, you are intelligent. If you act stupidly, you are stupid, regardless of your IQ or your education. Smart people take the actions necessary to get the results they want. They are effective in whatever situation they find themselves in. Intelligence is more a matter of doing the right things rather than doing things right.
Intelligence Defined- What then is an intelligent way of acting? Here’s the answer: An intelligent way of acting is acting in a manner that is consistent with the achievement of your own self-professed goals. Whenever you do something that moves you toward achieving a goal that is important to you, you are behaving intelligently. You are smart. However, whenever you engage in a behavior that moves you away from one of your own goals, you’re behaving stupidly. The world is full of people who are behaving stupidly, hour by hour and day by day, because they are doing things that are guaranteed to bring them the opposite results of what they say they really want.
Make Your Actions Congruent- If one of your goals is to live to be 80 or 90 years old and have a happy, healthy life, then everything that you do today, in terms of your eating, drinking, exercise, rest, and especially avoiding unhealthy behaviors, is smart. However, if you don’t exercise, if you eat the wrong foods, smoke cigarettes, and neglect your health in any way, you are behaving stupidly, by your own definition. If you are in sales or business, and you learn how to manage your time well so that you get a lot done in the course of your working day, you are acting intelligently. If you do things that undermine your productivity or move you away from your goals, you are acting foolishly, in terms of your own goals. Here is a key insight: Everything you do is either moving you toward one of your goals or moving you away from it. Nothing is neutral. Everything counts. Each act you engage in is either a positive act that goes on the positive side of your personal balance sheet, or it is a negative act that goes on the negative side of your personal balance sheet. A great life is simply a life that has far more marks on the positive side than it does on the negative side. This means that an intelligent person is one who does far more things that move him or her toward the things that he or she wants to be, have, and do than an unintelligent person does.
Avoid Self-Delusion-Don’t fall into the trap of deluding yourself into believing that only what you want to count counts. Many people think that if they don’t count it, it doesn’t have any effect on them. They think that if they don’t read a book or listen to an audio program, if they don’t spend time with their families and play with their children instead of playing on their computers and watching television, if they don’t do the things that are leading to a happy, healthy successful life, then somehow, it doesn’t matter. It won’t count. The fact is that everything counts. Nothing is neutral. Everything you do or don’t do contributes toward making your life a great life or a mediocre life. Everything counts. With regard to your self-confidence, every time you do something that is moving you in the direction of something that is important to you, you feel a “winner.” However, every time you don’t do things that move you forward toward something you want or, even worse, moves you away, you feel like a loser. These behaviors are not only progressive, they are habitual. The more you engage in one behavior or the other, the easier and more automatic that behavior becomes. The more you engage in winning behaviors, the more consistently you act and feel like a winner, the higher will be your selfconfidence and the greater will be your belief in yourself and in your goals. Your actions shape your character.
Getting the Job Done-The final quality of success identified in the study was that of result orientation. This means that you know that you are capable of getting the results for which you are responsible. All highly respected men and women are recognized as being the kind of people who can get the job done, whatever it is. They are invariably decisive, results-focused, action-oriented people. They are performance oriented. They have a bias for action and a sense of urgency. They have trained themselves to be extremely capable at doing whatever is required. Bigger and better jobs and responsibilities seem to flow to them. The world tends to step aside and make way for the person who knows what he or she is doing and knows where he or she is going.
Get Onto the Fast Track- One of the most intelligent things that you can do is to get better at the most important things you do to get the results that determine your success. The better your results, the higher will be your self-confidence and self-esteem. You will be promoted more often and paid more because you will be producing a higher quality and quantity of work. You will receive more and better job offers. You will be immune to economic downturns because your services will be so valuable. By becoming intensely result oriented, you will guarantee yourself a future of success and prosperity.
Do What the Top People Do- You will notice that everything we have talked about in this book somehow impacts on the five qualities for great success in America. I explained earlier about the importance of selecting your values and organizing your entire life around what you believe to be right and good and true. As long as you know that you are living consistently with your highest principles, your selfconfidence rests on an unshakable foundation. I have talked throughout this book about the importance of setting clear goals and deciding exactly what you want in every area of your life. You know that big, important, challenging goals, clearly defined, with written plans for their accomplishment, improve your overall self-concept and build your self-confidence.
Plan Your Work and Work Your Plan-When you plan your work and work your plan, and dedicate your energies to completing high-value tasks, you start to make rapid progress toward the attainment of your goals; your self-confidence goes up. Every time you resolve to go the extra mile, to do more than you’re paid for, to put in more than you take out, to go beyond what is expected of you in your job and in your relationships with others, you feel terrific about yourself. You feel more like a winner. Your level of self-confidence increases and you feel motivated to contribute even more of yourself to what you are doing. When you dedicate yourself to becoming better and better at performing the important tasks in your life, you feel an enhanced sense of mastery and competence. Your belief in yourself deepens, and your ability to get the results that are important to you increases. The development of excellence or expertise in what you do is a wonderful form of positive knowing that leads inevitably to higher self-confidence.
Do Your Work Quickly and Well- There is virtually nothing that will bring you the respect and esteem of the people you respect faster than being result oriented and doing your job in an excellent fashion. In study after study, it’s been shown that lasting recognition from the important people in your work only comes from being very good at what you do. It is only excellent performance in your job that raises you above politics and gives you the kind of power and influence that really makes a difference in any organization.
Dedicate Yourself to Continuous Learning- Your ongoing commitment to personal and professional development gives you a feeling of continuous growth. Whenever you feel yourself growing as a person, you feel internally motivated and energized to achieve even more. The more you learn, the more you can learn. The more you develop yourself, the more capable you become of further development. By the law of correspondence, as you become better and more capable on the inside, the outer aspects of your life improve as well. As you see and feel your life getting better, you feel more positive and in control of your own destiny. You like and respect yourself more, and your self-confidence increases.
Take Continuous Forward Action -Any positive, constructive, and self-determined action that you take in the direction of your dreams improves your self-image and raises your selfconfidence. When you discipline yourself to do exactly those things that lead you in the direction of what is most important to you, you develop a sense of strength and self-assurance that is evident to the people around you. Every positive action generates the positive emotion that goes with it. When you keep your thoughts and your actions consistent with your highest aspirations and your most valued goals, you are progressively building the unshakable kind of self-confidence that enables you to accomplish almost anything.
Be Your Own Cheerleader- When you get up each morning, say to yourself, This is going to be a great day! Make the development of a positive personality your over-arching goal and organize all your behaviors in that one direction. Remember, you are demonstrating the highest intelligence when everything you do contributes toward generating the feelings of self-confidence and self-esteem that you desire. Talk to yourself positively all the time. Say to yourself, “I can do it, I can do it!” Or say, “I feel healthy, I feel happy, I feel terrific!” In your conversations with others, keep your words positive and upbeat. Get away from people who complain and criticize. Make it a game to find something nice to say about everyone and everything. Positive words lead to a positive mental attitude. Create a positive suggestive environment around yourself. Create clear mental pictures of the person you want to be and the things you want to have. Read books that expand your mind and increase your abilities. Listen to educational audio programs in your car. Get around positive people and get away from negative ones.
Control Your Mental Pictures-Prior to every event of importance, mentally rehearse and see yourself performing at your best in the upcoming situation. Recall and relive a previous excellent performance. Before falling asleep, think about the things you did right during the day and the things you are going to do better in the days to come. Soak your mind in positive images of you at your personal best. What you “see” is what you get. Whenever something happens that throws you off balance, stabilize yourself by thinking about your goals. Because of the law of substitution, you can only think one thought at a time, and if you think about your goals, your mind will instantly become positive again. Make a game of rising above the petty frustrations of people and traffic and unexpected setbacks. Say to yourself, “What can’t be cured must be endured.” Get back to thinking about your goals and about what you can do, right now, to move toward them.
Develop Discipline and Courage-Whenever you have the choice of doing what is fun and easy rather than what is hard but necessary, force yourself out of your comfort zone in the direction of your dreams. Consciously resist the temptation to go easy on yourself. Remember that the comfort zone is the great enemy of human performance and human potential. It is only in the areas of challenge and risk that you force yourself just beyond what is comfortable and easy for you, that the possibilities of success await. Each act of courage and boldness on your part not only builds additional courage and boldness, but it also builds your self-confidence. The more often you dare to go forward, even in the face of uncertainty, the more likely it is that this type of courageous behavior will become a habit for you. You can gradually act yourself into feeling unafraid in almost all situations. There will very little that that you won’t risk or try. You will develop such confidence in yourself that you absolutely believe in your ability to succeed, even against difficult odds. Because success is based on the law of averages, you will ultimately succeed and succeed greatly.
Take Excellent Care of Yourself-Be sure to take good care of yourself physically, every hour and every day. Eat the right foods, drink lots of fluids, get lots of sleep, and exercise regularly. If you’re not happy with your physical appearance, go to work to improve it. Set a series of goals to be at your perfect weight, to wear the ideal clothes for you, and to be perfectly groomed in every respect. Your self-confidence is strongly affected by your self-image. Your selfimage, on the other hand, is largely determined by the way you think that other people see you. When you work hard on yourself and take the time to produce an image that you know is attractive to other people, you feel wonderful about yourself and your self-confidence goes straight up. It doesn’t matter where you’re starting from. Your main job is to decide where it is you want to go and then make a plan to get there.
Speak Up with Confidence and Clarity-In your conversations with others, be sure to speak up clearly, and express yourself openly and honestly. In one-on-one conversations, in meetings, or with groups, the more competent you are at speaking out, the more competent and more confident you will feel. If shyness is a problem for you, set it as a goal to get over it. Take a Dale Carnegie course on human relationships or join Toastmasters and learn to speak on your feet. Either one, or both, will make you a far more positive, outgoing, and self-confident person.
Practice No-Limit Thinking -You can develop unshakable self-confidence it if you really want to and if you put your mind to it. You can develop within yourself any personality characteristic that you really want. You’re always free to choose. Everything you are and everything you become is under your own control. The final key to self-confidence was put forth by Dorothea Brande in 1935, when she said, “The high road to success is to act as if it were impossible to fail, and it shall be.” The real difference between the winners and losers in life is the difference between taking action and making excuses. It is between the people who do and the people who talk about doing. It is between the movers and shakers and those who just watch the world go by. Perhaps your greatest responsibility to yourself is to become a person of action—to act yourself into feeling the emotions that are consistent with high-performance. Your primary job is to make any effort, overcome any obstacle, and scale any height to become the dynamic, unstoppable, irresistibly self-confident person that you are capable of becoming. When you have developed in yourself this unshakable, irresistible quality of self-confidence, everything else will be possible for you. Action Exercises
1. Resolve today to act as if you had all the self-confidence in the world. Say what you think, ask for what you want, and persist until you succeed.
2. Write down your three most important goals in life right now. Then write down three steps you could take to achieve each of these goals, and take immediate action on at least one step.
3. Identify the three most important results you achieve in your work, and resolve today to work on those activities most of the time.
4. Create a clear mental picture of yourself performing at your best— calm, confident, and optimistic—and replay this picture over and over throughout the day.
5. Dedicate yourself to continuous personal and professional improvement, getting better every day.
6. Accept 100 percent responsibility for everything you are today, and for everything you become in the future. Refuse to blame anyone for anything.
7. Resolve today that you will never give up, that you will persist over all obstacles until you succeed in creating the wonderful life that is possible for you.
Good luck!
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