5 Actions That Will Help You Believe You Are Worthy of Success
Have you ever read a story about someone who’s incredibly successful in a field that you would love to be in?
What was your first feeling? Jealousy? Happiness that someone else could make it work? A surge of admiration and a newfound drive to try to follow this person’s path to your own success?
We’ve all been there.
We get a surge of energy and truly believe in ourselves for one moment.
So we sign up for courses, we print off worksheets, we purchase planners.
Then weeks go by with the courses barely touched. We read through the first few pages of the worksheets. We fill out our plans of attack in the first week or two of our planner. We purchase a few books on the topic, truly believing that we will read them cover to cover.
A week goes by — or a month. And we stall out with no — or minimal — action.
And each time we repeat this cycle we become more and more critical of ourselves.
If we view ourselves as failures, how will we ever convince the world that we have something important to say. How will we have the confidence to make ourselves vulnerable in the sharing of our thoughts and creations with the world?
I’ve repeated this cycle more times than I can count. Applied for jobs that would give me the freedom to work from anywhere. Jobs that would enable me to move and be closer to my partner who lives and works a fifteen-hour drive from me.
I’d get my hopes up and spend hours on applications and wait with my spirits soaring…only to receive a reply that I didn’t quite make it. Please try again.
That little voice has convinced me I’m a failure so many times.
Some days it has had me convinced that those dreams — the ones I want so much in my life — yeah they’re never going to come true.
And it breaks my heart thinking of how many others lose their drive by listening to that inner voice. You deserve better. We deserve better.
If you’re reading this then I know you’re ready to break the cycle. Here’s how we’re going to do it.
And surround yourself with them. Let their belief in you lift you up. Being at the beginning of a new career — a new path in life — it’s a scary and potentially solitary endeavor.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
As a writer, I’m my own worst critic, but in my partner, I’ve found my supporter. The person who believes in me even when I doubt myself. I agonize over my completed posts— on the verge of convincing myself that they’re garbage— and then my fiercest supporter asks if they can read it.
I wait, cringing, as they read. And then they turn to me, frustration clear in their expression.
And with that my confidence in myself is restored. Whether one person claps or no one claps. My partner — my supporter — they think I’m worthy of claps.
And that makes all the difference.
Whether you have partners who are supportive of your work, or if you can find online groups who are there to peer-read and lift each other up, find your supporters. Be a supporter. We’re not alone in this, and together we can succeed.
This one is common sense. But if you love your sleep as I do, this one can also suck a bit.
In order to make progress and achieve our own success, we have to put a little work in. Okay, more than a little work. And in order to put the work in every day and every moment that we can, we need to start some healthy and productive habits.
Wake up early. You want to be able to sustain this, so I’m not going to tell you to wake up before the sun comes up. But twenty minutes one day and an hour another day will give you a fresh new time slot that you can use to schedule in brainstorming time, writing time, planning time.
Be consistent with your habits. If you plan to spend an hour after dinner every day working on your dream, then schedule that hour for the same time every day.
This is your hour now. Protect it from other distractions and use it well.
If you’re going to be trying to cut out distractions, you have to recognize a distraction when you see one. My big distraction is my phone. I’ve had one person accuse me of being addicted to my phone.
They weren’t wrong.
But what actually really helps me in being able to put my phone aside to focus on my writing is actually thinking of it as an addiction — at least when it’s interfering with my writing.
It’s like when you’re on a diet and you can just picture that last piece of chocolate cake in the fridge. You know it’s bad for you at the moment, but you want it so much you can practically taste it. So do you eat the cake?
Or do you distract yourself and push the cake/phone/distraction to the back of your mind? Set it aside. Lock it away. It may make you happy for a moment, but the guilt will eat away at you in the end.
If we just change the way we look at and react to distractions, then we can take control of our time and our days. We can start making things happen one step at a time.
This is a big one. This is one that brings that inner voice — that little inner critic — out to play.
You’ll never be as successful as them. You’ll never receive thousands of claps when you don’t even have hundreds of reads on your works. Why…even…bother…trying.
Quiet, inner voice, who asked you?
It’s tempting to compare yourself to the people in your specialty or in your dream career who are already successful. But what we forget is that no one starts out as successful.
It’s not fair to compare yourself to someone who is at the peak of their career after months or years of honing their craft, while you’re still in the starting stages.
Don’t do that to yourself. Seriously, just stop.
You deserve better than that.
These people who have come before us are inspirational. But they are not us. We all have our own paths and journeys, and maybe ours will be more direct paths to success.
Or maybe our path will meander across a thorny field, take us traipsing through a hill of fire ants, down a slippery hillside face first, and have us climbing up a sheer cliff-face to reach the summit.
We won’t know our path until we start along it. And if the path gets rocky, just remember that at least we’re heading in the right direction.
This voice is not you. This voice is the negativity that’s trying to keep you down. When it starts to worm its way into your mind, when it tries to steal your drive, recognize it for the toxic presence it is and say out loud with me:
Make your response audible.
Inside your head, that voice can be pretty loud.
So here’s your challenge: be louder.
If the voice starts to overwhelm you, overwhelm it.
Focus on these steps for the next twenty-four hours. And the twenty-four hours after that. And then again. It will take a little bit of work every single day.
It’s not easy creating a new habit. But the habit of believing in ourselves— that’s worth the effort.
And I believe we can do it.
Chelsea Marie is a writer by night and graphic designer by day. She is a West-Coast Canadian with a bad case of wanderlust and a dream to travel the world with her severely airplane phobic partner. Why do the easy way when a complicated route makes a much more interesting story? She’s on Instagram @c.the.storyteller writing and posting poetry in her spare time.
5 Actions That Will Help You Believe You Are Worthy of Success
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