Talent without self-belief is useless

When gunning for a promotion, going after your dream partner, pursuing your dreams, applying for jobs or even simply navigating through life; too many of us assume that we need to have talent in order to move forward.

Sure, if you want to play professional sports, you’ll need a certain level of talent in order to even get a look in but even if you have all the talent in the world and you don’t believe in yourself, you will never reach the kind of heights that you are capable of.

Self-belief will trump talent in the long run. Those with self-belief will push harder, do what it takes and will always get back up when they’re knocked down. Plus, they get knocked down many more times than those who lack self-belief because they are constantly putting themselves out there.

The difference between the “self-believers” and the “non- believers” is pretty simply. Those that believe, think that they are already capable or they will always find a way to figure it out. Those that don’t will always find an excuse as to why it’s too hard and there are too many obstacles in place.

Self- believers see obstacles as a sign that they are getting closer, the more obstacles that are thrown their way, the more compelled they get to keep pushing forward.

As a reformed non- believer myself, I used to see obstacles as finish lines; they were there to “warn” me to turn back and to remain safe. If I ever did put myself out there and inevitably got knocked down, I took it to mean that the world is harsh and scary and I ought to get back into my little hole.

“The problem with our safe little holes is that we only attract more darkness when we are there. The hole will inevitably get smaller as our fear and doubt increase. We become locked in our own minds and feel stuck without a way out.”

Eventually something external happens, if you’re lucky it will be something small like a mild illness. If you’ve been ignoring all the alarm bells then you’re more likely to get a bigger wakeup call; death of a loved one, serious illness, eviction, divorce etc.

Life keeps teaching us the same lessons until we learn from it. The self-believers know this. They know that with each “failure” comes a valuable lesson and that if they learn from it, they will be even more resilient, powerful and their confidence will deepen.

Don’t let your own innate talent die inside of you. We all have talent; talent that is unique to each of us. No one speaks like you do, they can’t dance the way you do or parent the way you can. Yes, every one of us is unique just like everyone else and that’s what makes self-belief so critical.

Your light is waiting for you. Start to recognise that without self-belief you will forever be stuck, learn what you need to in order to change it and make a difference in your world.

Live the best version of you and become a self-believer!

Happy self-loving

Katie Nicole

Is a fear of failure holding you back?

As a child, I learnt that if you couldn’t do something right the first time, then there was no point doing it at all. As Homer says to Bart in an episode of the Simpsons after a failed attempt at a goal

“What’s the lesson here boy?  Never try”.

So I did just that, I stopped trying. If I knew that I could do it and be relatively successful at it, then I would give it a go. Things like peer support programs in school, drama and public speaking; I knew that I had a natural propensity towards these things so I did them more. I would confidently conquer activities and “challenges” that weren’t really a stretch for me.

I vehemently avoided things I wasn’t great at, for fear of looking stupid and failing. Even things that I really wanted to do like ice skating, I avoided so I didn’t have to fall and make a fool of myself.

It became an identity belief, the act of failing was not simply a behaviour but was a personality trait; a part of who I was. Failing = being a failure.

I trudged along like this for years, wondering why I felt so unfulfilled. To the outside world I was at times outrageous; skydiving, travelling the world alone, pursuing reality TV shows, moving interstate and talking easily to strangers. I displayed many characteristics of someone who was “out there” but the truth was that it was all within a comfort level I could handle.

The outcomes were predictable; they were open ended so that failure was not so obvious. These experiences rarely put me at risk of being a failure and as a result I was able to avoid what I really wanted to go after in life. I didn’t have to face the stark reality that I might not be good enough for what I really wanted.

Cue 2011; I fell in love with coaching and personal development. I began to learn that there is no failure only feedback, that if it (whatever it was) easy then everyone would be doing it, that you must fall down in order to learn how to get back up. These were all great sayings and intellectually I could rattle them off as philosophic meanderings; but I didn’t really believe it, deep down failing still meant that I was a failure.

Until as a 28 year old I decided to learn to roller skate, something that I had been scared to do my whole life. One of those things that I had desperately wanted to be able to do but was too terrified of looking like a knob. The coaching had propelled me to want to push myself, to really put myself out there and begin to put what I was learning into practice.

Clearly I really wanted to learn the lesson because not only did I embark on learning to roller skate but I decided I would play the all-female full contact sport of Roller Derby. I would have to learn how to run, jump, weave, skate backwards, turn from front to back, take a hit and give one all whilst skating within a 10 foot pack of 9 other skaters.

For years I cried- a lot! I fell down so many times that I was more familiar with the ground than the bottom of my skates. I broke both of my wrists in the first few months and had bi knee surgeries in years to come. Those first few years were both heaven and hell. I had to fall on repeat to learn how to turn around, to stop, to weave. 

Many a trainings I stood face to face with my partner with horrible thoughts going around in my head because I felt like such a failure. I couldn’t do it right away so therefore I was doomed.

I cried because I thought I would never improve. I cried because “everyone” was better than me or progressing faster. I cried because I broke bones. I cried because squatting for 2 hours hurts. I cried because I wanted it so badly that I had to face my own limits in order to overcome them.

With my partner as my coach, I kept getting up and at times I was literally getting knocked down by other people. I had to learn how to get up fast and move on even faster in fear that someone might hit me again. I became agile, resilient and conditioned to failing.

I soon found out that in order to learn the new skill, I would need to fuck it up sometimes hundreds of times before I got it right but when I finally did the thing, it was the most rewarding and fulfilling thing I had ever experienced.

Playing it safe all those years and fearing looking like an idiot had severely limited the depth of my life. I was unable to grow and my self-belief was in the shitter. I had never done anything that created any kind of reference points of success and as a result had nothing to work with.

I learnt how to skate, I learnt how to play roller derby but most importantly I learnt that:

“If you’re not falling over, then you’re not trying hard enough”

Get out there and fail. You only become a failure if you decide to take on that identity. Ultimately, success is the sum of tonnes of failures, each taking you a fraction of a step closer to your goals- without it; you’ll forever stay safe and unfulfilled.

Allow failure, adversity and pain to become your best friend and your greatest ally.

Love,  

Katie Nicole

Believing in yourself is a game changer

When you really think about it, the term “self-belief” seems a little odd. When we are asked if we believe in god we are talking about faith, whether we believe in aliens or ghosts we are talking about opinions,  neither of which (at the time of writing) can be unequivocally proven true or untrue. When we ask these questions we are asking if these things actually exist.

Without getting too woo woo about it, it’s pretty easy to assume that we as people, do in fact exist. We have bodies that age, grow and deteriorate. We have minds that create and can interact with others. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that we do actually exist.

Yet for many of us we struggle to believe in ourselves. Is it that we question our very existence? Or when it comes to humanity are we actually questioning whether or not we believe in our ability to achieve?

We’ve all asked ourselves that question “who am I?” at some point in time. Perhaps you were lucky enough to leave that in your adolescence, but for a vast majority of first world humanity we are left with a void and at times an existential crisis of identity. How can we honestly expect to believe in our ability to achieve when we don’t even know who we are?

Self- belief comes when we know who we are and are confident that we can navigate our lives according to our dreams and hearts desires and that despite setbacks, we are able to pick ourselves up and continue on.

We question alien existence because we have no “proof”. Things are generally accepted by the world once sufficient evidence is provided. Imaging telling the average person in 1850 that in the future you will be able to connect to the entire world using invisible waves of current, you’ll be able to have an instant face to face conversation with someone on the other side of the planet and you can get in a huge chunk of steel with hundreds of other people and fly over oceans. You would be labelled insane and probably locked up.

Yet here we are. We do the same thing for ourselves. Without reference points of success we fail to have “proof” that we are worthy/ can achieve the thing we set out to do, so without proof we lose faith. We think that simply because we can’t see it, then it must not be true. We even have a tried and tested saying for this “I’ll believe it when I see it”.

Oh how wrong we are. We actually wait for the self-belief to show up before we take any action. We fail to realise that self-belief is created by doing the very thing that we think we can’t. Our brain needs reference points of success or in other words, it needs proof. There are some lucky souls out there who have been taught to believe in themselves from day dot, but it’s unlikely that they’re reading this article.

For the rest of us, we need proof. We need to see it before we believe it.

Sometimes that’s a matter of shifting our perspective so that we can see the evidence that already exists. We have all been successful at something at some time in our lives but often we down play it because our automatic response is to put ourselves down.

At other times we need to create new reference points of success. We need to go out there and attack our world, fail a lot and break through to success; then we have created proof that we can and our self-belief grows.

When you learn to believe in yourself, you become unstoppable. You will try things that seem impossible; you will go after things in your life that you previously had never dreamed of having or doing. People will believe in you more as a result of your own self-belief and you will get better jobs, more money, better relationships and have a better life.

Create new reference points for yourself by taking action irrelevant of your self-belief and start to notice where you have already had success in the past. Gather all the proof you can and the self- belief with improve.

Doing this on your own can be tough so if you want to learn how to believe in yourself again but have struggled a bit on your own then take advantage of your

 Free discovery call coaching session valued at $197.

Get clear on what’s been holding you back and make way for the real you to shine.

Click here to secure your place today.

Happy self loving

Katie Nicole

moreconfidence.com.au