If you are going to be successful in creating the life of your dreams, you have to believe that you are capable of making it happen.
How do you develop self-confidence like this?
You have to believe you have the right stuff, and that you are able to pull it off.
Self-confidence is a deep-seated belief that you have whatever it takes. @JackCanfield (Click to Tweet!)
You have the abilities, inner resources, talents, and skills to create your desired results.
Here are five tips that can help you develop maximum self-confidence.
1. Make the Choice to Believe in Yourself
That’s right, believing in yourself is a choice.
It is an attitude you develop over time. Although it helps if you had positive and supportive parents, the fact is that most of us had run-of-the-mill parents who inadvertently passed on to us the same limiting beliefs and negative conditioning they grew up with.
To be successful, you have to remember, the past is the past and there is no payoff for blaming your parents for your current level of self-confidence. It’s your responsibility to take charge of your own self-concept and your beliefs.
You must choose to believe that you can do anything you set your mind to, because the reality is, you can.
2. Use Positive Self-Talk and Positive Visualizations to Persuade Yourself
The latest brain research indicates that with enough positive self-talk and positive visualization combined with proper training, coaching and practice, anyone can learn to do almost anything.
If you choose to believe in yourself and act as if anything is possible, then you will do the things that are necessary to bring about the result.
On the other hand, if you believe that it is impossible, you will not do what is necessary, and you will not produce the result. Either way, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
3. Give Up the Words “I Can’t”
If you are going to develop maximum levels of self-confidence and success, you need to give up the phrase “I can’t” and all of its cousins, such as “I wish I were able to.”
The words “I can’t” disempower you.
They actually make you physically weaker when you say them. Your brain is designed to solve any problem and reach any goal that you give it, and the words you think and say affect your brain and body.
Let me give you an example:
When you were a toddler, there was no stopping you. You thought you could climb up on anything. No barrier was too big for you to attempt to overcome.
But little by little, your sense of invincibility was conditioned out of you by the feedback you received from your family, friends, and teachers, and by the decisions you made in response to that, until you no longer believed you could.
To undo your past conditioning and move towards a future of confidence and success, you must take responsibility for removing the words “I can’t” from your vocabulary, and replacing them with the words “I can” and “I will.”
4. Ignore What Others Think of You
If having others believing in you and your dream were a requirement for success, most of us would never accomplish anything.
You need to base your decisions about what you want to do on YOUR goals and desires–not the goals, desires, opinions, and judgments of your parents, friends, spouse, children, or co-workers.
Quit worrying about what other people think about you and follow your heart.
In fact, most of the time, nobody’s thinking about you at all! They are too busy worrying about their own lives, and if they are thinking about you, they are wondering what you are thinking about them.
Meanwhile, all that time you’re wasting worrying about what other people think about your ideas, your goals, your clothes, your hair, and your home, could be better spent focusing on doing the things that will actually get your closer to achieving your goals.
5. Constantly Acknowledge Your Positive Past
Most people in our culture remember their failures more than their successes.
One reason for this is the “leave ‘em alone — pounce” approach to parenting, teaching, and management that is so prevalent in our culture.
When you were a young child, your parents left you alone when you were playing and being cooperative, and then pounced on you when you made too much noise, were a nuisance, or got into trouble.
There was almost always more emotional intensity around your errors, mistakes, and failures than there was around your successes.
And because the brain more easily remembers events that were accompanied by strong emotions, most people underestimate and under appreciate the number of successes they’ve had, compared to the number of failures they’ve had.
The best way to counteract this phenomenon is to consciously focus on and celebrate your successes. Research has shown over and over again that the more you acknowledge your past successes, the more confident you become in taking on and successfully accomplishing new ones.
Remembering and acknowledging that you have had successes in the past, will give you the self-confidence that you can have more successes in the future.
Create a Victory Log for Yourself
Keeping these five strategies in mind, I want you to create a victory log.
A victory log is a list of all your daily successes. You can keep your list in a notebook, your iPad, your smartphone, or on your computer, but the point is to keep a running list that you can add to each day.
Begin by writing down your successes from yesterday and those from today, and keep the list going in order to log these victories into your long-term memory. As simple as this exercise is, it is extremely powerful in building your maximum confidence.
To hold yourself accountable, leave a comment below with the first five items in your victory log.
Develop Maximum Self-Confidence
Imagine exuding self-confidence in any situation, asking for what you want, believing anything is possible… and, taking more risks. Now imagine you have already achieved any goal you desire. What would it feel like? How would you be thinking?
This simple imagination exercise is something you can do right now to take you faster to the actual manifestation of that experience.
That’s because when you feel good about yourself, you begin to attract the people and events that empower you to achieve the exact success you imagined.
As the beloved originator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul® series, Jack Canfield fostered the emergence of inspirational anthologies as a genre—and watched it grow to a billion dollar market. As the driving force behind the development and delivery of over 100 million books sold through the Chicken Soup for the Soul® franchise, Jack Canfield is uniquely qualified to talk about success. Jack is America’s #1 Success Coach and wrote the life-changing book The Success Principles: How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be and Jack speaks around the world on this subject. Check out his newest book The 30-Day Sobriety Solution: How to Cut Back or Quit Drinking in the Privacy of Your Own Home. Follow Jack at www.jackcanfield.com and sign up for his free resources today!
Image courtesy of Peter Lobozzo.
