You can do anything you want to do in life, you just have to believe it. Self-belief is a skill that we all need to be taught and practiced over and over. Self-belief is about saying ‘of course I can do that’ instead of ‘you’ll never manage to do that, it’s impossible’. It’s about letting go of the negative thoughts and replacing them with a positive ones. But how do we do that? Catch yourself every time you think a negative thought and immediately replace it- over ride it with a positive one. ‘Yes I can’ or ‘I can do it’.
‘Excutitis’, is a phrase that means you can always come up with an excuse not to do something. It’s easy to fall into this trap – we can be very good at coming up with excuse after excuse about why we should or shouldn’t do something. Let’s say I want lose weight and I’ve been doing well running a few evenings a week for a few months – it’s now a habit that I go running. But soon I start to say to myself ‘you’re too tired to run’ or ‘you have a cough’, ‘your running gear isn’t clean’, ‘you need to study’ I will continue to come up with excuses as to why I don’t want to run, until it becomes my habit not to run, and I stop. It only takes 3 weeks to break a habit.
Motivation is key – Why are the reasons that I decided to start running? This is what I must remember when motivating myself – I want to visualise myself at the end when I’ve reached my goal. Perhaps I see myself fit and healthy, wearing something that I look good in, I use it to motivate myself to get up and get out there keep running. You have to really want it and believe you can have it. You have to find the picture or image in your head that motivates you and believe that this can be you.
So in order to have self-belief we need to stop the negative self-talk, stop the excuses and stick to a plan, which should become your habit, and use the picture or image of the end goal to motivate yourself.