How Do I Start Believing in Myself?
As the new year starts and our journey to accomplish new goals and lifestyles begins, we may notice ourselves coming up against the same roadblocks, so how do we start believing in ourselves?
As the days continue and you start to realize how difficult it is to wake up in the morning to make it to that gym session or you realize how hard it is to find the time to work on your side business. The heaviness that comes along with accomplishing a goal or starting a new lifestyle starts to show its ugly face hello. Worry and despair start to flood your body. Your mind races, am I going to quit this early? What will my friends think? I posted my New Year's Resolution on social media, how am I going to back out now? Why does this always happen to me? And why can't I seem to go through with my intentions?
Black and white thinking
Quitting cold turkey on our New Year's Resolutions is usually what we tend to see within a few months to the start of the new year. Why is this? As you see people all around you give up their hopes and dreams you think to yourself, how do I prevent this from happening to me? The tendency to do this is often attributed to black and white thinking or an all or nothing mindset. It's important to note that our brain has utilized this function as a means for survival for millions of years. Times have of course changed and it’s of no use to us if it leads us to quit the commitments we’ve attempted to make to ourselves. Thinking in black and white prevents us from seeing all the complexities that exist between where we currently are and where we wish to be. It holds us back from understanding that it's not all or nothing. Most of us forget that accomplishing a new goal or lifestyle is difficult for the very reason that we don’t know how to go about this new endeavor and the fact that we’ve never done it thus are not used to it. Thinking that we can wake up on the first day of the year and expect ourselves to just be experts at this new goal or lifestyle is simply not feasible but is exactly what tends to happen leading us to feel like failures when we don't size up.
How do I believe in myself again?
To prepare yourself for this black and white thinking notion that we are unfortunately predisposed to its important to have faith in yourself by remembering the following:
Our life is not a race
Our life is a journey with ups and downs, unlike a linear scale graph, our journey is not anywhere close to being linear
Understanding and getting comfortable with the fact that there will be days where we will fail is key. Having days where we fail does not mean that we are failures, this is how black and white thinking disguises itself, it simply means we are human. Think about the following questions to prepare yourself for those moments of doubt that will surely kick in and have you questioning whether you really want this or not:
How will I treat myself on the days where I don't feel good enough to work on my goal?
How long, or how many days, will I give myself to be in this funk or feeling?
Will I allow the voice inside my head to be cruel to me?
Replace these things with the following:
Taking it slow for as long as needed. This means being present and gentle with yourself
Understanding that the feelings you’re experiencing are energy thus these feelings need to be felt to be released
Keeping in mind that the voice inside our head will attempt to make us feel worse about ourselves thus engage in activities that help you feel good, surround yourself with loved ones, and most importantly move your body
Luckily for you, all this work of replacing one thing for the other won't be in vain. With time, believing in yourself and having faith in yourself will be a collection of all the moments you chose to show up as well as the moments you were kind and gentle to yourself in order to believe and trust in this newfound goal or lifestyle you’ve committed to.
