Validating your beliefs

An essential difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that the latter most often have to have their belief in themselves validated by outside sources: friends, neighbors, business associates. This, friends, is a killer.

You have to develop the resources inside yourself to the level that enables you to not need outside validation to know that you or your ideas have value. How?

Affirmations are NOT the answer

As I alluded to in an earlier post, positive affirmations probably won’t get you the result that you want, at least as fast as you want. Why? Because of your internal beliefs and the way it filters your day-to-day events, your mind will ‘poo-poo’ affirmations. It’s reaction will be, “yeah…right”. That is, until it reaches a stage that it begins to ask, “why?” in reaction to your affirmations. Then it will begin to look for reasons that support what you’re telling it, and it eventually will find them. But why not take a shortcut?

Questions ARE the answer

You have to begin to understand how your mind works in order to change your beliefs effectively. Your mind is always evaluating. Continually. It asks, “what does this mean and how should I react?” Learn to use questions to change what you focus on, what you believe. More on this soon.

What is rejection, really?

Rejection at its most basic level is the antithesis of belief. The reaction you have when you are told ‘no’ is in direct relation to your attitudes and feelings about yourself, your product, your lifestyle, looks, whatever.

If you’re having problems dealing with rejection, if the fear of rejection is overwhelming you, it’s because of one thing: you attach more validity to another person’s opinion than your own. Deep down, you think they are ‘right’, and you, somehow, are ‘wrong’. You question your own opinion of yourself, your ‘mental projection’.

You’re terribly afraid that people are going to find out you’re a fraud. That you’re not really who or what you say you are. That you don’t know what you’re talking about, or what you’re doing.

You don’t believe, at your core, in your own worth.

When you can build belief in yourself to strong enough level, you won’t have to ‘learn how to handle’ rejection — because it simply won’t exist. When you get to that stage, being told ‘no’ won’t trigger feelings of rejection, because by then you won’t require the opinions of others to validate your own beliefs.This isn’t to say that being told no won’t affect you in some way. It will. But if the ‘no’ answer doesn’t shake your sense of who you are and what you stand for, then the result of a no will be something much easier to handle, like disappointment, not devastation.

If you aren’t, why aren’t you? Any time you try something in which you risk failure, or even try something new, you risk having people laugh at you. When you sacrifice something in your life to pursue your dream, you are met with scorn, even pity. Your ‘friends’ pity you because you are ‘throwing away’ your time, your money, your self-respect even, to make your life, or the lives of others, better.

“As I had occassioned daily to pass to and from the shipyard where my boat was in progress, I often loitered near the groups of strangers and heard various remarks as to the object of this new vehicle. The language was uniformly that of scorn, sneer, or ridicule. The loud laugh often rose at my expense, the dry jest, the wise calculations of loss or expenditures, the dull repetition of Fulton’s Folly. Never did an encouraging remark, a bright hope, a warm wish cross my path. Not once.” Robert Fulton, from his published notes.

Fulton, of course, invented the steamship — he single-handedly transformed the world of transportation and, some feel, enabled the Industrial Revolution.

What if Fulton had listened to his critics? What if Alexander Graham Bell had paid attention to people who laughed at his idea of transmitting sound over wires?

If you are going to be at the forefront of any field, if you’re willing to raise your head above the crowd to go after a dream, you may as well accept and embrace the fact that you’re going to be a target.

Little people who know no better will heap scorn and ridicule upon you, detract and deride your efforts. In the end though, you can take comfort in knowing that whether you accomplish your quest or not, you have grown. You can rise to bigger and better things. And the little people are little people still.