Contents
Foreword — 11
Preface — 13
Acknowledgements — 15
Introduction — 17
Chapter 1 Realize Who You Are — 19
Chapter 2 Explore Your Possibilities — 43
Chapter 3 Choose Your Future — 67
Chapter 4 Imagine You Are There — 87
Chapter 5 Talk Yourself Into It — 107
Chapter 6 Believe You Can — 123
Chapter 7 Make Life Work For You — 141
Chapter 8 Say What You Mean and Sound Like You Mean It — 159
Chapter 9 Establish Your Look — 183
Chapter 10 Associate for Success — 207
Chapter 11 Overcome Life’s Obstacles — 227
Chapter 12 Achieve Power Through Faith — 241
A Final Thought — 255
About the Author — 256
Chapter One ~ Realize Who You Are
“No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he has arrived at his present place.”
— Maya Angelou, Poet, Educator, Historian
Why is having confidence in ourselves and our abilities so hard? Why do many of us have the tendency to overestimate other people’s abilities and power and underestimate our own? Why are we so concerned with what other people will think about us?
If we are to understand these things, first we need to understand why
we think, feel, and act the way we do. We need to understand why and how we have become who we are, as well as why we react or respond in certain ways. When we understand ourselves, we can either accept the way we are or make changes so we will be able to accept ourselves.
What we believe and accept about ourselves determines our behavior
and performance. These, in turn, create our results and our results affect our confidence levels.
We behave in accordance with our beliefs about ourselves. If we have
self-limiting beliefs, we will have self-limiting behaviors. If we have self-empowering beliefs, we will have self-empowering behaviors. In other words, if we think we can, we can and if we think we can’t, we can’t. If we think we can, we will find a way. We perform as well as we believe we are capable of performing.
Most of our beliefs about ourselves have come from outside sources:
people, education, and experiences. Many of us have allowed the opinions of others to become our opinions of ourselves. We’ve listened to people tell us we are incompetent, inadequate, unworthy, bad, or stupid. We’ve internalized, processed, and often believed what others have told us.
There is a direct correlation between the quality of our relationships
and our levels of self-esteem and self-confidence. If we are like most people, how we feel about ourselves, good or bad, is largely dependent upon the degree of acceptance we have felt from the influential people in our lives.
In the beginning, we learned our beliefs and values from our parents.
If our parents’ self-esteem levels were low or they had poor self-concepts, values, and beliefs, then that’s what we learned. If they felt inferior, inadequate, or unworthy, we probably adopted those qualities. When we are children, we go through an “imprint period” where we formulate our behavior patterns based on what is impressed upon our thought patterns by the adults who are instrumental in our development.