3 Tips to Beat Your Lack of Self-belief, Confidence and Motivation

Lacking self-belief, confidence and motivation

You may have heard of imposter syndrome, and it can feel like uncertainty and hesitation, but it goes a little deeper and can be more disempowering.

Everybody starts as a student and will have their first moment on stage. Am I good enough, will they like me, who am I to think that I can do this? All of these doubts occur when we start a new phase of growth in anything.

Confidence comes from practice, self-belief comes from the certainty of the path you are following, and when you have both, you become motivated to move forward. There are three components to creating motivation – belief, self-esteem and the environment around us.

What we believe is possible and what we believe we can accomplish comes from the narrative or story we have about ourselves and the circumstances we find ourselves in.

Self-esteem is derived from what we believe and our perception of what others think of us and what we are trying to achieve.

The environment is made up of the stimuli that we pay attention to, the ones that resonate with us. Because our prehistoric lizard brain is programmed to identify threats and anomalies, we tend to react to negative stimuli more than positive stimuli. 

These three elements, belief, self-esteem and environment are in a state of equilibrium and constantly influence each other. If something negative occurs in the environment it will influence our belief which in turn changes our perception of how others think about us. This is what demotivates us from taking that next step.

Environment – we have all heard Jim Rohn’s saying that “you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” As a business owner, this is a vital part of keeping you motivated. 

Perry Marshall, a US business leader I admire greatly put it really well when he said in a recent email, “Being in a high-level mastermind group where you are NOT the smartest person in the room is the best way to avoid stupidity spasms.” But it’s not just the people you have surrounding you, it is your mindset, behaviours and your physical space.  

All of these environmental elements impact your belief and your self-esteem either positively or negatively. This may be hard in the pandemic because so many of us are isolated at home. Make sure that you have lots of positive stimuli around you to reduce the negative stimuli.

Tips for increasing self-belief, confidence and motivation

1. Clear your mind of negative thoughts or stories about what you can achieve. Create a simple daily mantra about the person you need to be each day and say it out loud every morning and at moments in the day when you feel uncertain.
2. Surround yourself with people on a similar path to you or who have travelled the path before. If you regularly come into contact with negative people try to minimise contact and definitely don’t listen to their advice.
3. Create a morning routine to set up your day and to prepare your mind for the goals and tasks ahead. (You can download my FREE weekly and daily planning sheets here and you will receive 3 emails outlining how to use them.)

Barriers to Increasing self-belief, confidence and motivation

The greatest barrier to taking action to improve your self-belief, confidence and motivation is F.E.A.R. False evidence appearing real. The evidence is manufactured in the narrative you have about yourself and importantly the narrative you have about what other people think of you.

The power to overcome these narratives is realising that the ‘false evidence’ does not exist yet. This is fear about something that might happen in the future. You can watch my short video explaining how our brain can mistakenly advise us what to do based on F.E.A.R, and it is how we interpret that information that makes all the difference.

My mentor gave me a great piece of advice when I just turned 30. They said, “What other people think of you is none of your goddamned business unless you choose to make it so“. The problem is we fail to realise that there are many times more people in the world who want us to succeed or actually don’t care either way than there are people who want us to fail.  The problem is, we are much more likely to listen to the naysayers, the critics and know-it-alls than we are to listen to the people who passionately want us to succeed.