I think one of the biggest challenges we have in life, is believing in yourself and your potential. This feeling can be triggered by multiple variables: childhood, experience, your surroundings, past failures, a wrong community of friends around you that judge instead of support, a partner that doesn’t value you or pushes you to do better. Regardless if we want it or not, acknowledge it or not, all of the above have a huge effect on who we grow out to be. The only thing we can control, is how we feel about it, and how we let this affect us. Experience and the past are particularly tricky to manage, as our brain gets so easily used to “what usually happens”, based on a life’s worth of events and feelings, that literally it learns what to expect next…unless you intentionally do something to change this automatic pattern.

Napoleon hill once said “Whatever your mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve”. “In fact, the mind is such a powerful instrument that it can deliver to you literally everything you want. But you have to believe that what you want is possible”.

Most people fail because they do not believe in this. They do not believe in themselves, they do not believe that anything you set to do, can be achieved. Though if you think about it and look around you, you know this is true. It is a mix of laziness, lack of confidence and lack of belief that doesn’t allow you to break your own limits. Limits that you have imposed yourself.

Believing in yourself is an attitude. Something that you need to work on and develop over time. Like with everything in life that matters the most, it takes time, practice, hard work, dedication, passion…it is like a relationship. Any relationship that you cultivate in your life doesn’t happen on the spot, but grows over time. You nurture it, dedicate yourself to it, and it blossoms. And if for any reason you feel that it is not adding value to your life anymore, you cut it out ( like when you stop talking to that friend that doesn’t support you, or break up with that boyfriend that doesn’t love you the way you need to be loved ). The same principle has to be applied to the relationship with yourself: it seems easier as you are not dependent on anyone else, but it is so much harder to deal with YOU and your own thoughts, cut out those ideas that put you down, and open space in your mind for what drives you and makes you happy.

You have to give up the phrase “I can’t” – “it is the most powerful force of negation in the human psyche”. It disempowers YOU. And you are doing it all alone, by yourself, with no one to blame. And that is hard. “Your brain is designed to solve any problem and reach any goal you give it”. Try it, it works.

I never thought that I could learn to build a website alone, write a blog and publish it to the world. But I decided that I wanted to try and here we are. Am I afraid to fail? That no one will read it or like it? That my circle will not support me? Of course I am, but this didn’t stop me because it was something that I really wanted to do and it makes me happy. And I am still battling with my own insecurities in other aspects of my life, but I am trying to do something about it, to change my thoughts, change my behavior by taking action, both mentally and physically. I am trying to stop blaming circumstances and do something about the things I know I can control. And I feel better already.

“You need to base your decisions about what YOU want to do on YOUR goals and desires” and start from there. Most of the time, nobody is thinking about you at all, people think about themselves, not you. SO DO YOU!