Everything You Want Starts With Believing You Can Have It
By: Wendy Miller
Tags: Self Love, Self-awareness, Goal Setting, Confidence, Self

I’ve been working on a goal-setting workshop for my clients recently. In the process, I came across this quote:

The strongest single factor in prosperity consciousness is self-esteem: believing you can do it, believing you deserve it, believing you will get it. — Jerry Gillies

I share this quote in my workshop because of how deeply it resonated with me about setting goals and achieving them.

We make the mistake of thinking that we need external things to accomplish what we want. We think we need:

· Money

· Experience

· Education

· Talent

· Specific relationships

· Other resources that come from someone or somewhere other than us

And it’s not entirely wrong to think so. You can’t buy a yacht without money. You can’t be a lawyer without the education and training. You can’t be a singer if you can’t sing.

But here’s the raw truth: those are all secondary to what you have inside you.

Do you believe in you?

You have to believe you can do something, that you deserve it, that you’ll get it, in order to accomplish anything you want in your life. If you don’t believe in yourself, in your ability to do it, in your worthiness of having it, you won’t achieve it.

You could have all the money, experience, education, talent, contacts, and everything else you could ever possibly need at your fingertips. But if you don’t believe you can do it, that you’re worthy of it, and that you can get there, all that money, experience, and everything else is worthless. It won’t help you achieve that goal because you don’t believe in yourself.

You could have a red carpet laid out at your feet that would lead you directly down the straight path from where you are to what you want with complete ease and no obstacles. But if you don’t believe in yourself, you won’t pick up your foot to take that first step.

There’s just no shortcut around this: you must believe in yourself first.

Photo by Katie Harp on Unsplash

Do the external things make it easier?

Absolutely! Put two people side by side, one with money and one without but both believing in themselves, and the one with money is likely to accomplish the same goal much more quickly and easily. The same applies to education, experience, and anything else external.

Those resources will always make things easier. Not having one or more of them is always going to be an obstacle to achieving your goal.

But that’s why belief in yourself matters so much. Because it’s that belief that will push you to take on the challenge of finding those resources or finding a way to get what you want without those resources. It’s that belief that keeps you going when the path to your goal gets a little bumpy or gets cut off and requires a major shift.

It can be a struggle after divorce

I’ve been there. I can remember the days after my divorce when I questioned every decision I’d ever made. I wondered how I could move forward. I wondered what I wanted to do with my life now that the dreams I’d always pursued had been shattered.

And it was because I had so much self-doubt that I spent so long just drifting along and not really getting anywhere. I didn’t believe in myself, so even when I thought of something I might want to do with my life, I’d shrug it off and think it wasn’t possible.

It doesn’t matter whose idea the divorce was or why it came about. Self-doubt and lowered confidence happen to almost everyone after a divorce. What matters is not that you feel them but that you recognize them and start working to overcome them instead of letting them linger on.

How to build your belief in yourself

When you’re struggling with self-doubt and lacking confidence, it often feels easier to just go with it. It doesn’t feel good but finding the strength to change it just feels too hard.

So that’s why you start small. You don’t need to take gigantic steps to turn this around and start believing in yourself. You can start with tiny steps.

Start by reminding yourself of everything you’ve accomplished before. Make a list. Write down all the things you can think of that you’ve ever done in your life. Write down stuff like passing each grade in school, getting your driver’s license, learning to cook, keeping your house clean, even getting out of bed every morning.

By reminding yourself of even the simplest things you’ve managed to achieve over the course of your life, you start to build that confidence back up. And as you continue to remember these simple things, you’ll start to remember bigger things, like having your children, surviving the loss of a loved one, attending and graduating college, and so many other things you’ve done.

Each thing you remember accomplishing in your life is another brick in a wall of self-confidence and self-esteem. And eventually that wall will be high enough for you to stand on top and see the vastness of how incredible you are and all that you can achieve.

Wendy Miller is a Single Mom Coach & meditation teacher. She helps moms use mindfulness and meditation to create the life they really want. She lives in Florida with her two sons, where she homeschools while solo parenting, while surrounded by what feels like a zooful of animals.

You can follow her on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. You can also sign up for her newsletter where she offers more insights, tips, tricks, advice, and information to help single moms find purpose, creativity, passion, and peace.

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