Creating Belief in Yourself

Welcome to Navigating Your Career, the only podcast that blends personal development, professional skills, and psychology to help you get happy at work and live the life you want. If you want to stop feeling stuck and start feeling better, this is the place for you. I’m your host, Melissa Lawrence. Let’s get started.

Hello, and welcome to the podcast this week, this episode is near and dear to my heart. Believing in yourself sounds so cliche, right? Does it sound soft to you? Did you push play today? And you were like, what are we even going to be talking about?

Are we in a Disney movie or were you like, this is definitely something I need. I think by the time we get to the end of this episode, you’re really going to be looking at belief in yourself differently and what you’re capable of differently. And it isn’t just about Disney movies and magic, although there’s nothing wrong with that either. And speaking of Disney movies, have you watched Encanto? It is so good.

My daughter and I, she’s twelve. We waited for it to be available on Disney. Plus my wife and son, they weren’t that into it, but we waited to able to watch it and watch it as soon as it was available. We played a soundtrack all the time. And my wife and son, they’re more into Cobra Kai.

I don’t know if that is more of your thing. That is from Karate Kid. It’s on Netflix, but that’s a totally different experience. And if you haven’t caught Encanto, it has such a lovely message and it actually ties into what we’re going to talk about today, which is believing in yourself. Now, believing in yourself is such a game changer.

When you believe in yourself, you show up to the world differently, to your meetings differently and your relationships when you aren’t just focused on what is missing or what others have and really believe in what is possible for you and your capabilities. It changes the way that you experience your life from the time that you wake up in the morning until you go to bed at night and all of the decisions you make in between. So let’s define what it means to believe in yourself. Believing in yourself means that you trust yourself to handle any obstacle that you believe in, your capabilities. And really important part of this is that you don’t let the doubt that you have or other people’s opinions stop you from what you really want.

You believe in your ability to handle whatever comes your way on your journey to having and being what you want. It’s actually a lot. It’s very similar to confidence. So when you’re a high achiever, really good at what you do, have a lot of accomplishments under your belt, you can think, I totally believe in myself. Look at what I’ve done, look at my track record.

But I want you to think about how you are when someone you love insults you or hurts your feelings if a colleague minimizes your accomplishments or takes credit for your work. When you’re sitting around a table of executives or leaders and you have something to say and you talk yourself out of it. How you talk to yourself when you make a mistake or when you think something isn’t as perfect as it could be, or when you want to do something new. How quickly and confidently can you make those decisions? Now, the last one is a big one and one that I’ve had to master myself, and I’ve talked about that before.

When you want to think about something, wait on something you want, go through pros and cons. You aren’t really trusting yourself. You aren’t believing in yourself to get the results that you want. You’re focused on whether or not you’re making a wrong decision. And if you’re going to let yourself down, you’re trying to come up with the logical reasoning, which is something outside of you, right?

Who else has done it? What other resources are there? Imagine what it would feel like to lean into what you really want, to let go of the fear holding you back, or that nudge that you have, like that little devil on your shoulder that’s telling you that you shouldn’t, that this isn’t necessary, that you don’t need this, that things could go wrong. But what if it were simple and everything you ever wanted was available to you? If you just learned to manage your brain, to believe in yourself and to not let that critic, that little devil on your shoulder stop, you think about the amount of action you might take if you really believed in yourself, in your capabilities, and what is possible for you and what is available to you as quickly as you decide to take the action, to go after it.

The things that you wouldn’t talk yourself out of because hear me out. Being ready is a decision. It’s not a feeling. I’ve said this before. I know it feels like a feeling, but it really isn’t.

Our thoughts decide if we’re ready, and that creates our feelings of being ready or not. So it’s really starting with the way that you’re thinking about yourself and about this decision, about what is possible for you, which is all tied to your belief. So we often want to wait until we feel ready, but it doesn’t come. And here is why. And this is going to open your eyes.

So listen carefully. The way you make decisions right now has created the results that you have right now. When you make decisions waiting for something to feel right, that is how you got where you are right now. And that includes the things that you love and the things that you don’t. But we’re going to focus on the things that you want to change.

So your brain’s motivation is to keep things the same for you, to keep you in the same pattern and cycle that you have always been in. This feels safe. Anything outside of your current situation and way of making decisions feels unsafe, scary. You feel hesitant. You can fill in the blank, but nothing has gone wrong.

Because you feel this way does not mean something has gone wrong. It is just your brain. This is how people become addicts. For example, their brain wants that dopamine hit from the pattern of what they’ve done over and over. So even though they know it’s harmful, even though it’s not something good for them, it’s not getting them where they want to, whether it’s quitting or whatever it is that they want, their brain tells them that they need to keep being an addict because they’re getting that dopamine hit because they’re in a pattern.

Of course, there is some chemical piece to addiction as well, but that is how it works for your brain. So if you are someone who always needs to think about things, who waits to feel ready, who is cautious about making decisions, who convinces themselves to settle, who tries something and gives up, who tries to settle for the good enough alternative, then this is just your pattern and it’s a learned pattern that you’ve created in your life. Your brain is comfortable in this pattern. Even though you are feeling some discomfort and want some change. This is where you’re comfortable.

Even though you may want something different, your brain is steering you away and keeping you in the same cycle. So how do you stop this? You have to take action quickly and believe in yourself along the way, but you might be thinking, well, how do I do this? Melissa, my brain is fighting against me. You just told me my brain is fighting against me.

This is what you do. You practice. You take action when you’re not comfortable. You prove to yourself that you can handle anything and that you believe in yourself and your decisions. And then guess what happens?

Your brain is going to start listening and you’re not going to feel as hesitant. You’re not going to need to take so much time to make decisions. This is simple, but it’s not easy. And a good way to explain this is if you’re a parent, for example, or even with yourself. But I’m going to use a parent as an example.

So my daughter, when she was very little, she loved playing in the water, but she was afraid to swim, right? She didn’t know that she could keep herself afloat, so she was comfortable. When I held her in the water, she was comfortable if she could have her feet on the ground. But when it came to swimming, to launching off, to jumping off, to going into water where she couldn’t touch the bottom and she had to kind of wait and keep herself up, she was scared because she didn’t know that she could learn to swim. She didn’t know that she could keep herself afloat, even though she saw all the people around her swimming, even though I was her mother and I was telling her, you’re going to be able to do this.

And I was encouraging her. She had everything lined up for her to tell her that she would be okay and that she could learn to do this. But her brain didn’t know. Her brain was telling her, oh my gosh, you’re in danger. You can’t do this.

But what happened is we just had to take small little steps, small little movements in the water so that she could build up confidence. She to keep practicing little by little until eventually I didn’t have to stand right next to her and she could swim. And that is what this is like as well, right? So just like my daughter or like us when we had to learn to swim or your children or anyone, whenever you’re doing something new like that, even when you have something you want to do, even when you have evidence of people around you doing it, even when you have a support system telling you that you can have something different, that you can do it, your brain stops you. And how you get over it is by taking that first step to do it anyway.

So, see, it’s simple, but it’s not easy. So you can practice this with raising your hand for a new project, speaking up in a meeting when you don’t think you have anything valuable to say, investing in yourself when you haven’t seen the results yet and you don’t know the outcome. Just like with swimming. This is the work that we do in coaching. Yes, we have career strategies and development tools, but this is how I coach.

I coach you to figure out what your patterns or cycles are and how to disrupt them. Then I teach you and show you what your brain is doing, and we come up with a plan to get you where you want to be. Because there is a compound effect. And you learn to rewire your brain week after week until the way that you think right now that is holding you back and keeping you in this pattern doesn’t hold you back anymore. That doubt goes away.

This is why I believe coaching is the most powerful development resource in the world. Because there’s nothing else like it. When you find the right coach for you, where you do this work for just a few months and you not only achieve the tangible career growth and promotions and clarity in your career path, but you’ve changed the way that you think forever.

It’s like my daughter learning to swim. If she had never taken that first step, she still wouldn’t know how to swim or that first stroke, I should say that first step. But now she does, right? But if she never would have done that, she still would think she couldn’t swim. So imagine what would be possible for you if for the rest of your life you fully believed in yourself, if you didn’t need the proof first, if you were able to make quick, confident decisions that were scary but created so much growth for you where you were able to go to work and speak up and lead effectively, be more effective at work, get more promotions and recognition, influence your stakeholders, know exactly what you want and go after it.

You would achieve so much more. You would have a more thrilling life of joy, and your relationships would be better. Everything would be better because I know how my brain works. I’ve done this for myself. I work with a coach regularly to get objective viewpoints and continue to grow.

I just made a decision for myself that was a huge leap, a moment where I made a decision to go after something I’ve wanted since I started my business. So there’s a coach that I’ve had my eye on for a couple of years. I worked with her a little bit in the beginning of my business, and she has another way to work with her that you have to qualify for, and it’s a $25,000 investment, and you have to be at a certain level in your business to get this level of mentorship and to be accepted into this program. And when I first started my business, it seemed so far away. In fact, I thought, I don’t think I’ll ever invest that amount of money.

I didn’t have the belief in myself and the concept at the time to believe that I would not only grow my business to that level, but that I would I didn’t have the belief in myself enough to even think I was worth that investment. A couple of years ago, my first investment in coaching was a $2,000 program, but here I am. I applied for this program that I’ve secretly wanted for the last two years, and I decided that this is what I wanted. And that process alone of making that decision and applying was a game changer for me, too. Something similar my clients experience when they decide they want to work with me, it instantly changes your belief of what is possible and puts you in the room or in the arena, as Bernie Brown would say.

So when I was selected for this program, I was elated. I popped champagne. I respect this coach, and I’m so much looking forward to her mentorship as my business continues to grow. And I’m gladly allocating the money to her because what I’ve learned is that I can trust myself and what I’ve done through action as I’ve made my own decisions for myself. As I’ve navigated having my own business is the more that I trust myself, the more I invest in myself, the more growth I have, the more I achieve in my goals, the more I feel better about myself, about my future, about what I’m doing, about the work that I do.

The more I grow as a coach, the better I am for my clients. But I’ve had to grow to be the person I am today to make this investment. So you have to change how you think about yourself and the value of your life and your goals and what will happen when you achieve them, how your experience, you have one life and how that quality of that life can change and be different even when you don’t believe it can.

So think about College. For example, many of my clients have paid $100,000 or more for their education. But the thought of paying $2,000, $10,000, $2,0000 to get promoted, to learn career strategies that will help them excel, to master life skills that change how they feel when they wake up, to how they feel when they go to bed, to have better relationships and marriages, that is hard to do. Why do you think that? Is it’s because of belief in yourself and what you deserve and what is available to you.

So College and graduate schools have been around forever. It’s a standard to have a degree in your industry. Everyone has one. Everyone pays a lot of money for tuition. It’s just the way that it is right there’s jokes and memes all over the place that you pay a ton of money for College, to get a job, to pay for your College.

So you look at what you want, what will help your career. You go to a catalog or do a University visit. They tell you exactly what degree you’ll have and the classes you have to take to get there. You know at the end that you’ll have a degree that you can put on your resume that will help you with your job. And if it’s a really great program, you’ll get a lot of practical application and experience in your subject area.

It can earn a status of promotion and knowledge that no one can take away from you. Education, I think, is very important. But what if College wasn’t something that everyone did? What if it wasn’t a standard in our society or for your industry? If you could earn a good salary without it and have a good job?

But that College was something that you did because you could learn something that you couldn’t learn at work, that would better help you know what you want and how to get it, that it would give you a competitive advantage and skills that you can’t get anywhere else, that it would enable you to have a happier and more fulfilling life. But you had to pay the same tuition. Would you go? Some of you would, but some of you wouldn’t. I think if you sat down and thought about it, if this was something no one did, if it wasn’t a standard, if you didn’t have proof that this was something that would get you where you wanted to go.

So the way I see it is College and coaching are both investments in yourself and you get some similar and some different skills and advantages. In our society, College is often necessary. But I believe in the future, coaching will be too, because coaching sets you apart. It isn’t textbooks in theory, it’s real life skills and application. With me, it’s also psychology and career strategy.

Just like College became the norm, coaching will be more the norm too. Those that already had their degrees when certain College requirements were made mandatory were already qualified for their next level. The people investing in coaching now going beyond the status quo, achieving bigger things, understanding themselves and how to get any result they want, how to apply their expertise in a strategic way, be a better leader. Those are the people that are going to excel. It’s already happening.

Senior executives and leaders have coaches from the company because they know the value. Now, coaching is more available than ever. You don’t have to wait to get to a certain level or have someone else decide for you that you need one. You can believe in yourself and decide now. You can make a decision now that is going to change your career and life trajectory and put you ahead.

Because the thing that coaching gives you that College doesn’t, or one of the things that gives you that College doesn’t is it gives you insight into your blind spots. So when you’re in College and you’re learning a skill or acquiring new knowledge, your brain is interpreting that knowledge and applying it. When you work with a coach, you learn new things, you learn new skills. You have new knowledge, but you have also an unbiased expert outside of you that is watching how you’re interpreting the information is catching you. If you’re sabotaging yourself is catching you.

If your brain is putting you in that repeat pattern or cycle that is keeping you stuck, that is bringing awareness and to help your processing information and how to change it to get what you want. Because your brain can’t solve your brain’s problems and that’s what coaching does for you. It’s not just the skills and the knowledge, it’s the application and the uncovery of your blind spots and the discovery that you go through to get to exactly what you want in a very quick time. If I hadn’t hired my first coach and continued consuming everything that was available to me, like textbook style or things that were free or cheap, I would still be in my fancy corporate job convincing myself that my salary and benefits and that I liked some of what I did and that I don’t have a commute were all good enough. But instead I believed there was more for me and I made a decision to explore it.

I didn’t know the outcome. I didn’t know how it would work for me. I didn’t have all the steps ahead of time. I had a supportive partner at home, but it was uncomfortable at home, too, to have that conversation with my wife to say, okay, I want to take thousands of dollars and invest in this coach that’s going to help me that she didn’t know, she didn’t have any experience with this person. Right?

I had to advocate for that at home so we can make that decision together. But now I have this track record. I’ve built this trust. So whenever I’m talking about these investments, I don’t get pushback. You know what you want.

Everything you invest in works. You grow every time you do what you need for you.

Joe, I trusted the person that I hired to guide me. I advocated for myself at home and the coach that I worked with. In less than six weeks, I was full time in my business and had replaced my income. And now I just invested in my next level. And don’t be afraid of that, because you might hear that and think, well, oh my gosh, if I hire a coach, am I going to be coaching forever?

And no, not necessarily. That’s a choice that you make. But what you’ll find is as you grow, your goals get bigger. The things I was working towards two years ago are mastered. Now I have new goals.

When you find a path and await your goals, that’s faster than you can do on your own, you take it. At least I do. That’s what my clients do. They don’t wait around. They’re like, okay, you’ve been there, you have a process that works.

You can get me there faster. And then instead of spending six months a year, five years, ten years, your whole life wondering what else is out there for you. You already know. And you’re already way beyond that and working on new, exciting things that you can’t even see right now. And I share this, not to say that if you don’t hire a coach, you don’t believe in yourself.

That’s certainly not the takeaway, but it’s an example. I see so much. I see people, I talk to them just like you, who want more, who are in their own way and have that thought that there is something more for them. But they’re scared to make a change. They’re scared to do something different, scared to invest in themselves and hire a coach.

They’re worried it won’t work for them. Or what if they’re fooled? Or what if it isn’t worth it? But that syncing is exactly why they have the results they do and what they overcome in coaching. So being worried that their action won’t work out is why they don’t speak up at the table with senior leaders, why they aren’t able to influence or negotiate effectively, why they take the lower package when they’re negotiating a new role, why they overwork and don’t have boundaries, why they don’t know what they want and have a hard time making decisions.

They aren’t able to make the decision to do something different because they don’t feel ready, because they’re repeating the pattern. Their brain is comfortable staying the same. Their brain is in a cycle of not believing in themselves. Doubt and the what ifs because the way we do one thing is the way we do everything and that is what is causing the problem. But to get to the solution, you have to make a different choice and this happens by believing in yourself just enough to put that doubt in the passenger seat and go after what you want.

So today as you listen to this, think about what is holding you back where your belief in yourself can be stronger. There’s nothing you can do that you can’t come back from, that you can’t handle. You’ve handled everything in your life so far. You’re here right now listening to this for a reason. So if it’s speaking up in a meeting, do it.

If it’s going after the job you don’t think you’re qualified for, apply do it. If it’s applying to be a speaker at a conference to showcase your work, do it. You build your belief by taking different action. You show yourself that you are worth it and that you can do hard things. And the more you do, the more you achieve, the happier you’ll be in your life.

And if working with me is something that you’ve been wanting and you’ve been putting it off or thinking about, take the leap. There are two ways to work with me. If you don’t know what your ideal career path is and you want to know what role is going to be the best move for you, join me in career path Navigator. If you are working toward a promotion, want to lead more effectively, get to your next level or develop as a leader. Schedule a consultation to apply for one on one coaching.

I’ll put those links in the show notes. All right, now go out there this week with a tad more belief in yourself and go after what you want. Don’t leave this episode without an idea of how you can take more action to build your belief because that is going to be a game changer for you. Have an amazing week.

Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode. I truly hope you enjoyed it. If this episode resonated with you or helped you in any way, please share it on your social media and tag me. I love seeing what you’re up to. Also please make sure to subscribe and leave a review and until next time, have fun navigating your career knowing the life you want is totally possible.