The Incredible Power of Believing in Yourself Adapt these two daily habits that can help overcome failures and setbacks.
By Matt Mayberry Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
To live a life of high achievement, you must fully believe in yourself and your ability.
Find me an extremely successful person who doesn't greatly believe in themselves. It's not going to happen. Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King, Jr., Michael Jordan, Elon Musk and Mark Cuban are just a few highly successful individuals who benefited greatly from this confidence. However, it's not their levels of success that I want to talk about. It's their willingness to get up again and again when they failed or experienced a setback while in pursuit of creating the life of their dreams.
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They were only able to keep going and achieve success because of the level of belief in themselves despite the enormous amount of failures they had experienced for years leading up to their big breakthroughs. Their belief is what created a vision so big that they didn't care how many times they failed at something. They were eventually going to get to where they wanted to go.
Especially as a business owner and entrepreneur, you are most definitely going to fail and experience a loss or setback at some point. If it hasn't happened already, it eventually will. That's not to be negative or discourage you, that's just life. But when it does happen, and when your belief is strong, no failure or setback will have the power to completely wipe you out. Belief in yourself is the name of the game.
Here are two of my daily habits that have consistently helped me increase my belief in myself and shatter all self-imposed limitations.
Count your wins.
As human beings we naturally have the tendency to get stuck on the negative and think about all of our losses for the day, instead of counting our wins and finding all of the good that took place.
I use my gratitude journal to capture all of my wins at the end of each day. This can be the wins from today, last week, last month or even last year. It doesn't really matter when, but the key is to just get in the habit of capturing all of your wins. This will bring you a complete sense of joy that will let you know that you have done some incredible things in the past and remind you that even bigger things can happen in the future.
Whether big or small, it doesn't matter -- just count your wins!
Related: A Healthy Fear of Failure Makes Entrepreneurs More Likely to Succeed
Talk to yourself like a champion.
Just as my friend and bestselling author Jon Gordon always says, "Talk to yourself more than you listen to yourself." Just for one week, try talking to yourself like a champion instead of listening to yourself as a victim. I guarantee that you will be blown away by the results. It may seem weird to talk to yourself, but give it a try and then see if it's worth the "weirdness."
Thinking positive and empowering thoughts is one thing, but talking to yourself like a champion reconditions your thought process in an instant. When you form the habit of talking to yourself like a champion you don't give the negative and discouraging thoughts the time of day.
With power and conviction, repeat phrases such as, "I am the greatest at what I do," "There is nothing that I can't do when I fully commit myself," and "There is nothing ordinary about me. I am a champion."
If you don't have a huge amount of belief in yourself, then there is no way you can expect anyone else to believe in you. If you are an employee, you can't expect your boss to fully believe in you if you don't even believe in yourself. If you are an entrepreneur, you can't expect an investor to believe in your ideas if you don't even believe in yourself.
The men and women that change the world all understand the incredible power of belief.
