How do I believe in myself?

How do I believe in myself? This is something I hear so often and it’s a great question. For when life has thrown you setbacks, or hasn’t gone as you expected and you’re not where you imagined or thought you would be at this age, then life itself erodes at the fabric of your being and you doubt who you are.

Which sets the mind off to find all the reasons why you aren’t living this amazing life and comes up with the answer – well you are not good enough. It seems a feasible answer so you agree and before you know it you have stopped believing in yourself and started to doubt your abilities.

You have now created a level of self-sabotage to any new endeavours you may take on, as you cannot see beyond the belief that ‘I am not worthy of believing in myself’. Fear takes over and you put off trying something new. So you stay stuck in a cycle of repetitive behaviour of ‘I am not good enough’ and ‘I won’t believe in me’, which means nothing changes.

• Notice I have now stuck the word won’t in front of believe in me?

For what I have come to notice is we stop ourselves with this word, won’t. It often really is a choice. We all have a power within us and a choice. A choice to believe or not believe. And along the way we have decided to make a choice to not believe.

We see this as an absolute. Leaving the brain to decide that I am not worthy and therefore not worth believing in. Every new endeavour is judged by this measure, of ‘I am not good enough’. We live up to it and carry on with the belief. It is in effect a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What Can You Do?

If we go back to the idea that you have a choice and you choose what to believe, then you can choose to replace the word won’t with I will. Therefore, you have changed the whole phrase to:

• I will believe in me

A simple change of a small word can lead to dramatic consequences. For now you are inviting the brain to calculate how can I find evidence to confirm the idea that I will believe in me?

Look for the evidence. I will believe in me, so….

What can you find that lets the brain know that you do?

It’s just as easy to look for ways to believe in yourself as it is to say ‘I won’t believe in me’. Sounds too easy? In theory yes it is easy and because of that we dismiss it and carry on with our old ways.

Try to practice the idea of looking for evidence that confirms the belief: I will believe in me, every day for 7 days. Note what happens when you change the pattern of ‘I won’t believe in me’ to ‘I will believe in me’.

Awareness of your attitude can have a big impact on the daily actions you then take. Daily actions build up your belief and you change yourself to be someone that trusts themselves, their decisions and belief in who they are.

As this is such an often asked question, Raw Horizons has developed a special retreat programme called ‘Confident You’ designed specially to help answer this question. Click here to read more about it…