Achieving success in life, career or in business it is not primarily about having experience or technical knowledge but having mental toughness to win is even more important. In this two part blog series (and YouTube video) you will learn 10 important strategies to develop this mental toughness to believe in yourself so that you can win professionally as well as in any other area of your life that you choose.

In a previous blog I wrote in detail about just how important personal development is to our professional advancement, because success is just as much about who we are being as it is about what we are doing. What do you think the seemingly elusive trait executive presence is? It isn’t about what you are saying or doing but who you are being when you show up and whether or not that “being” bring the influential impact to get the outcomes necessary.

1. Trust In Yourself

In order to believe in yourself so that you can become unstoppable you must know that you have all that you are a resilient and strong person. This resilience and strength has allowed you to be creative and resourceful to get through many challenging situations. These situations will be different for each of us due to the specificity of our life experience but nonetheless if you are alive to read this blog and have a primary goal of improving your profession or business it means you have overcome a lot to get to this point to be able to focus on something beyond basic survival. The challenge that you have overcome may have been struggling to get through school, dealing with bullying, figuring out how to get into a sports team, learning a new language in a country you now call home, moving to a new neighborhood where you have no connections, being the first in your family to graduate college or have a professional career, or even entering into a field where very few look like or sound like you. When you set out to do these things you didn’t quite know how you would accomplish it but you were creative enough and resourceful enough to figure it out and if you did that before that same resourcefulness is there to do it again. Even if in a completely different circumstance.

2. Know Thyself And Know Who You Are Becoming

Many of us aspire to understand the people that we work with, our customers, stakeholders and clients so that we can influence them for a specific outcome but we haven’t taken the important step to understand our own self. Knowing ourselves, our strengths and weaknesses, what triggers us and what inspires us is very important. Most of us just haven’t slowed down long enough to take the time to do this. I encourage you to take sometime to assess yourself via this MBTI test. You will learn about strengths as well as your development needs. The purpose of doing a self assessment isn’t to label yourself and then use it as a crutch or an excuse to remain stuck or not take action (this is a downside of personality tests that I causes me personally not to like these type of tests), but it is meant to be a starting point for you to diagnose where you are now, decide where you want to be and then develop a plan of action to get there. I believe that we all should be our authentic selves, and we decide who that authentic self is. Just know that you are not static, you are ever evolving, you can learn, change and improve. Leverage your natural strengths and then take action to either minimize your risks or eradicate them. Design the life you want and then get on with the work of making it happen.

3. Bet On Yourself

Many women tend to be nurturing, caring and supportive and we use these natural abilities in helping everyone else get ahead from family to friends and even co-workers. What about you? It is time to take a bet on the jockey. You are worth taking a bet on. Take that same determination to invest in every one else’s success and invest in you. It is time to stop downplaying everything that you bring to the table and to stop taking it for granted and recognize the great potential that lies within you waiting to be cultivated. Come out of hiding and stop playing supporting actress. It is time for you to take center stage and become the start of your own life!

4. Work Hard To Achieve Mastery And To Be The Best

The first three points were meant to inspire you to want to take action, but this fourth point is where the rubber meets the road. Taking action. You can believe in yourself all you want but honing your skill so that you can separate yourself from everyone else is still key to advancing in your field. You can achieve this high level of mastery by doing the following things.

a. Study on your own - educate yourself through books, courses, learning from experts, attending conferences, and the myriad of resources that are available.

b. Role model the experts - find the experts in your field that are the most successful and study what they are doing, then do the thing. There is no need to completely reinvent the wheel. Success leaves clues. So study the successful and do what they do. Once you build enough knowledge and experience in the area you will be in a prime position to build upon the field, pave your own way and put your own unique rubber stamp on it to make it your own.

c. Get your 10,000 hours of practice in

Nothing builds expertise and sets you up to dominate like practice. Think of Michael Jordan, Koby Bryant or Tom Brady. They are the best because they put the training in, they put in hours and hours and hours of work. Author, researcher, and journalist, Malcom Gladwell has famously stated that anyone who achieves success in a field has done the work to put in 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery. There is a debate now on exactly how many hours one has to put in, in order to dominate their craft but the important point we ought to take away from this is not what the exact number of hours are but the fact that we do have to put in time to be really good at what we do. A lot of time. So practice, practice practice or work, work, work, work, work!

5. Be Willing To Fail Until You Succeed

Many people do not step up to pursue their goals because they are afraid of making a fool of themselves and failing, but let me help you shift your mindset if you are one of the people that think like this. Would you rather remain in a false safe existence and live way below your potential and a life full of regret because you never tried? Would you like to get to the end of your life with wondering about the what ifs? This is what you should be afraid of, living in regret! Be less afraid of failure and more afraid of living with regrets because you never even tried. Go after that thing, so that you can live in peace knowing that you did everything in your power to get where you need to be. Success comes after persistence, pushing through many failures until you find the right strategy. The only ways to fail are to never try or to stop trying. Never ever ever quit.

Youtube Videos!

I have recently started a youtube channel in March 2019! To catch up on the videos that I have released just check out my channel & subscribe here.
The videos will be based on the same professional women empowerment themes that have been the basis of this blog. Some people find video more convenient and effective to follow, so subscribe to the channel and you will be notified of my weekly Wednesday video releases, normally at 7pm EST.

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How To Believe In Yourself And Become Unstoppable Part 1