Hi friends, this is the first chapter of my latest book Self-Confidence for Success: How to Believe in Yourself and Become a Winner. I hope you like it.
Introduction
We have the potential to achieve anything we set our minds to. We have powers hidden inside so big that the average person is only using a very small fraction
of them. That’s because the key to use all our internal abilities is self-confidence.
Confidence in our own strength makes us capable of using it. With a great amount of belief in oneself, no mountain seems too big to climb, no obstacle too hard to overcome. We can find solutions, fix problems, adapt and progress in any way to make our winning possible. The only major difference between people that win at life and achieve massive success, and those that live an empty life is their amount of self-confidence.
How you can become more confident and use it to your own success in life, either if we talk finances, health or love, is the purpose of this book. I wrote this book because I realized that knowledge is not a problem anymore. We can easily find out how to achieve something and we mostly know what we have to do to achieve it anyway. But even with the best plan in the world, you need to take action to make something happen. And as we are emotional creatures, the amount of our taken action is proportional to the amount of confidence we have in ourselves.
I truly believe that this book will greatly serve you to access the inner potential that you have inside. Imagine what you can accomplish in life if you have the confidence that you can achieve anything. No dream will ever be too big for you, nothing will scare you anymore. It doesn’t matter if you have been confident in the past or not, here you will find all the tools and principles necessary to create an unshakable self-confidence.
With this renewed belief in yourself, you can go on to create the life that truly makes you happy, while inspiring others to do the same. After reading this book with your heart, not just with your mind, you will never be the same. Prepare yourself. You are only 15 chapters away to become the person you are destined to be.
Chapter 1: What Is Self-Confidence and Why It’s Important
Let’s imagine for a moment that you have unlimited power to achieve anything. That no matter what happens around and what obstacles come your way, you are strong and you have an unshakable will. This power makes you fearless and basically undefeated because you never give up. How much more you could accomplish with this kind of power? How your life would be compared to what it is now? What dreams would you pursue to make them a reality?
The truth is you already have this power. It is in your heart. With the help of self-confidence, you can harness it to your own advantage. In this book, you are going to learn how. It resides in your soul. You can call it your character, your soul, your heart, whatever you want to call it. The idea is that you have it. We all do. But maybe you are wondering why not a lot of people use it? I believe that is for two reasons. The first reason is that it requires discipline to be harnessed, is hard. And the second reason is the fact that most of us simply forgot we got it. I said that we forgot on purpose. I didn’t say we never knew this because if you watch a baby learning to walk you can see how we have the instinct of harnessing our own inner power. You never see a child giving up on learning something new.
Yet, the vast majority of adults give up on a task as soon as the first difficulty comes up. This is what it’s called learned helplessness. Here is the definition we find on Wikipedia:
“Learned helplessness is behavior typical of a human or an animal and occurs where the subject endures repeatedly painful or otherwise aversive stimuli which it is unable to escape or avoid. After such experience, the organism often fails to learn or accept “escape” or “avoidance” in new situations where such behavior would likely be effective. In other words, the organism learned that it is helpless in situations where there is a presence of aversive stimuli, has accepted that it has lost control, and thus gives up trying. Such an organism is said to have acquired learned helplessness.”
In plain terms, it means that we accepted defeat and we don’t even try anymore to improve that situation. This is used as a technique to train animals at the Circus, which I truly believe it’s sad. They take the baby elephant, for example, tie a rope around its neck and that rope is tied to a stake into the ground. The baby elephant struggles and struggles to escape, but after countless attempts, it simply gives up and accepts defeat. And after years you see this huge elephant that could easily rip the entire Circus tent not even trying because it acquired learned helplessness. That’s what we do as humans too.
We face failures, rejection, and adversities as we grow up. We always hear as a child “don’t do that, don’t touch that, you can’t do that”. We grow in a society where is not only socially acceptable but also encouraged to give up on our dreams, to don’t shoot too high because we might fall, to take the easier and safest path and to generally avoid anything that is difficult. Therefore, we grow up accepting these limitations as being our reality, and they become our reality.
When we realize that limitations are just inside our head and that we have the potential to achieve anything we want, we can start using our inner strength.
What Is Self-Confidence
Self-confidence is the opposite of learned helplessness. Self-confidence means we believe in our ability to achieve things, judge situations and overcome obstacles. It is that true belief in ourselves and in our own strength. When we believe that we are capable of anything we put our mind into, our mind will push us to do it and help us find a way. Self-confidence is the key to using our inner power, which by the way is unlimited.
Any great achievement of the humankind was obtained with the guidance of self-confidence. There is a false impression that successful people get confident after they win or obtained a certain victory. The truth is we cannot achieve great things without the persistence that self-confidence gives us. The relationship is ordered the other way around. The more confident you are, the better you feel and more action you take. The more action you take, the better the results are. Better results give you even more self-confidence, and the cycle goes on and on.
I love this quote by Muhammad Ali, “I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was.” It illustrates clearly that a champion is made, first within, then after great effort acknowledged outside.
Self-confidence is proportional to being self-reliant. You count on yourself to solve problems and achieve things, regardless of what happens around you, and that makes you trust yourself and your own strength. It shouldn’t be confused with arrogance. Self-confidence is dependant upon own self, while arrogance is a dependence upon someone else. Confidence is empowering and it encourages others to practice it too, while arrogance is disempowering and it can only exist at the cost of other human beings. Arrogance is only a fake confidence, that only exists in comparison with other people’s failures. Self-confidence is a noble trait that helps and empower those around you as well. When you truly believe in your abilities and you use them to their full potential, you also encourage and help others to achieve their inner greatness. True inner strength states that I can work to become the best person I can be and I have unlimited potential, exactly like any other human beings have.
Confidence is also tied to taking responsibility. A strong confident person is one that takes full responsibility for his or her own actions, thoughts and feelings. That’s why we associate confidence with maturity because maturity involves being responsible. A lot of people want to be more confident, but they don’t want to feel the shame or embarrassment of accepting their own mistakes. It simply doesn’t work like that. Recognizing my own inner strength also implies to accept the fact that I didn’t use it to the full potential until now. Truth to be told, we will never reach our true potential. Still, we can see the bright side of it and realize that we can always grow and develop more.
Therefore, inner strength comes alongside with being humble. Exactly like you imagine a superhero, like Superman, that is the strongest alive yet doesn’t consider himself more important than someone else. Being humble is crucial to self-confidence because we cannot grow without having an open mind and accepting our own flaws. If we believe we are perfect and we stop growing, the results we will get in life will degrade. That will have a huge impact on how we feel about ourselves. Feeding a big ego actually kills our inner strength. There are two opposing forces that cannot thrive together, one negative and one positive. A big ego feeds on illusions while self-confidence feeds on reality.
Mistakes are a natural part of being human. We all come to this world naked and with zero knowledge. True confidence never states that I am perfect and I do everything well. What it does say is that I can always find a way to achieve what I want because I don’t give up on it and I am constantly growing and improving. Failures are just moments that hold pearls of wisdom for improvement. We cannot learn something from winning.
It is a beautiful and reassuring feeling to honestly believe in our capacity that God had bestowed upon us. Yes, we can also believe in His blessings and help, but at the same time understand that life is a result of our day to day actions. Yes, blessings happen, but it does to the one that invests himself or herself to the full potential of current capabilities. That means you have to give your best first to achieve great things and blessings. And you can only do that when you trust yourself.
The Importance of Self-Confidence
Without having a strong belief in your own abilities you can’t do anything worthwhile in this world. Just like the elephant in the previous example, you will give up on even trying at even the slightest difficulty. The catch is that anything that it’s worthwhile is obtained with struggle. Obstacles aren’t meant to stop us, they are made to empower us to become a better person to achieve the things we want to achieve. That’s why it’s crucial to have this faith in our own selves.
It’s much better to trust something that you can control, and that is your own actions and choices. If you put your hope that things outside will align for you, you will waste a lot of time and also you will be disappointed. Rarely things work out perfectly the way we want them to work. Nature itself isn’t made to be comfortable. The strongest and most striving species share one common trait: adaptability. Stephen Hawking said that “intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” I believe that. That is the purpose of our minds, to find solutions and fix things. If everything was perfectly working out we wouldn’t need such intellectual capacity. We would be simple robots doing the same things over and over while getting the same results.
There are a lot of things that happen around us without our control. You plant the crops the best way you can, but you cannot predict if the weather will be favorable to you or not. Frustration is born with the expectations we have towards our surroundings. We can control what kind of life we ultimately have and build ourselves a surrounding that is more suitable for our needs, but we have to work with whatever we have around us. We have to make the best out of good and the good out of the worst. We must take charge of our own lives by taking the responsibility for our own actions.
Don’t wait for your boss to change, your government to change, your circumstances to change, your loved ones to change and so forth. Change yourself, the main authority in your own life. Life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we react to it. As you can see, the major proportion goes into our own abilities. That’s why personal development is such important to one’s success and happiness. Because it’s all in our hands. When we change ourselves and become better we make better decisions and we take better actions. With better actions, the results will not delay showing up. But you cannot harness your own true potential without believing in it first.
Self-confidence is truly the foundation of anything great we achieve in life. I am talking about the kind of life that is built while helping and serve people, not at the expense of them. God made us strong and capable to achieve great things in life. We must believe in ourselves to use this unlimited human potential we have. If you believe that you are a failure, you are going to act like one. On the other side of the coin, if you believe that you are a winner, you are going to act like one. Be strong and believe in yourself, you will achieve greatness!
The book is available for purchase right now at CornelManu.com/books, where you can find universal link for Amazon, Apple, and many others retailers.
