Have you ever listened to a passionate speaker or leader, and wondered how they attract so many ears and hearts?
People follow strong believers even to their graves. Maybe the content of their speech is ambiguous or you don't agree with what they are saying, yet they still manage to persuade hundreds or even millions of people to believe. Many people follow the belief that the great leaders of the world preach, whilst paying little attention to questioning the substance of what they hear. Why? Put simply, people often get caught up in a speaker's confidence and charisma, caught up in crowd psychology, and rarely critique the substance.
Similarly, our mind and body is no different. If we believe our own words like we do other great leaders then the rest of our body will fall in line.
All great speakers, leaders, artists, athletes and performers back themselves when the going gets tough. Every time they step up to perform they have to believe in themselves as they know they cannot hide. No one will be there to rescue them. They either back themselves or don't do it. The bigger the profile, stage, and audience the harder it is to hide and perform well without backing yourself.
Do you ever think great performers go into every performance or competition thinking that they will win/nail it every time, off course not. Humans are humans, and the psyche will always conjure a string of doubt no matter how small or big. The great athletes who may not even believe they will win, however, still go out and back themselves knowing that the possibility is there.
If you look closely at a lot of great performers it is not till some way after the start of the event that they hit full confidence and start playing at their best. Sometimes full-throttled self-belief comes as a result of a good start or some other stepping stone; it is always there from the start. Often it is not until we back ourself into the act, then surprise ourself by our ability, then we truely allows ourself to embody a high level of confidence.
Backing yourself doesn't mean that you need to know that you will accomplish the task 100% of the time, without a shadow of doubt. It simply means that you have the courage to trust yourself; you will find an outcome along the way.
"But although I have confidence, sometimes I don't think the task ahead of me is achievable and I lack that belief".
Being your best fan does not need to be a statement of arrogance or show of superiority, it is simply accepting the reality that if you don't believe in yourself then it is unlikely others will. A great example of this is a high school basketball player who trained hard but got dropped form his high school team for not being good enough. A lot of people would have given up or found a distraction, but this basketball player kept backing himself and became the legend we know as Michael Jordon.
If you find yourself doubting yourself, know that you are either facing a life threatening experience and you should probably listen to your instinct, or you are listening to the doubts of your conscious mind which has rooted itself in a pattern of doubt.
When this situation occurs, for me, I often laugh at myself. I know that all I need to do is look at how incredible my subconscious body actually is in order to thwart the intruding doubt. For example, the complexity of the tasks the subconscious performs, minute by minute, is often far more complex than the task ahead. Imagine if you had to take on a fraction of the tasks the subconscious does in a few seconds. Imagine having to control the blood flow of your body, making sure every organ is performing at its best, servicing parts of the body that need more blood than others. Or imagine how precisely each of the thousand of muscle strands has to move in order to lift a drink to your mouth, walk across the room to turn on a light, or hit a golf ball. Every second the body is sending thousands of messages through your nervous system, stimulating different parts of the body, and turning oxygen into energy as you effortlessly breath and maintain the correct levels of gasses in your body. All the above is a fraction of what is going on inside the body every second; and the unconscious does this without question–in fact it can handle a hundred fold more. Simply put, the brain is far smarter and faster than the most powerful computer known to man, and it awaits our directives.
This incredible innate ability, waiting at our finger tips, if used correctly, can open up a world of possibilities and potential. When we think of this ability inside us, that is already active, suddenly the overbearing task ahead seems a lot simpler.
Keep believing in yourself and your innate ability, regardless of the situation.