how to believe in yourself if you don’t know .
If you've ever planned to achieve something big in your life, and then watched yourself do absolutely nothing about it for weeks or months or years, I want you to hear me when I say this: it has nothing to do with laziness.
There's a neurological cycle running in the background of your subconscious that was given to you long before you had any say in the matter, and its entire job is to keep you from believing that wealth, success, and the life you see for yourself are already yours to have.
The reason so many people never actually accomplish the goals they set for themselves is simpler than the self-help industry has made it out to be. Believing in yourself has less to do with manufacturing some new confident personality from thin air and more to do with letting go of the beliefs that have been stored in your nervous system since you were a kid. The confidence is already in you, but it's buried underneath a pile of inherited thinking, and as you clear all of that out of the way, the positive belief rises on its own without you having to force it to.
The doubts came from somewhere though. These beliefs were planted in your subconscious mind while you were growing up, during the years when your brain was soaking up information without filtering any of it. For the first 7 years of your life, your brain is in a perpetual theta state, which is basically a prolonged state of hypnosis. That means whatever got repeated around you got recorded as a belief, without your permission.
Maybe nobody in your household ever sat you down and taught you how to trust your own thoughts, that you should listen to your intuition, or how to see yourself as someone already capable of breaking down any wall that stands between you and your goals. Did you grow up watching the adults around you settle for average paychecks, average relationships, and put off their dreams because of their own fears? Well, you absorbed that as behavior yourself. It was stored deep within your mind as the normal way to live, and so here you are as an adult, trying to build a self concept from scratch in a certain area of your life. Piecing it together through trial and error when it should have been handed to you as you were growing up.
“ Procrastination is the fine art of
avoiding your feelings.”
And if you've failed at something before, whether it was a business that flopped, money you lost, or a major goal you quit on, the mind does something sneaky with that memory. It grabs that old experience and throws it forward onto your future, treating what happened one time as something that's guaranteed to happen again and again if you're brave enough to try. That projection feels very real when you're dealing with it, doesn't it?
Because that's the start of the neurological cycle all over again. It can make you think that you're being smart or that you're just playing it safe. But it's just fear masquerading as common sense, and as long as you treat it like the truth, it will continue to be your truth.
The beliefs you have about yourself today were written into your subconscious mind during the years you were too young to question anything. In that theta state, your brain was operating like a sponge that absorbed whatever was in the environment around you. The tone your parents used when they talked about money. The way the adults in your house responded to the good things in life versus the way they responded to the negative ones. And even better — whether the people raising you believed life was something that happens to you or something that happens through you. All of that got recorded without your awareness, and it became the operating system you're running on right now. But the good thing about operating systems is that you can always update them, to run new and better programs.
Once you see this cycle for what it is, you can start asking better questions about your own behavior and the identity behind it. Dr. David R. Hawkins laid out a framework that cracks this whole thing wide open, and it's one of the most useful ways I've ever come across to understand why someone may struggle to believe in themselves. He taught that the way into self-belief is to be honest with yourself about what you're getting out of your own apathy — whether it shows up as what you may have labeled as laziness, avoidance, or productive procrastination.
Every time you catch yourself slowing down on a goal, pushing it to next month, or setting some new rule that says you can't follow through just yet, there's something you're getting in return for indulging in that behavior. It's an excuse that lets you save face and covers up what is really running your operating system — and that's fear. You get to keep your pride and you get to avoid the risk of looking like a beginner, and the price you pay is the bitter taste of mediocrity.
You are already a very capable creator, who has all of the tools to manifest the type of success you desire to experience, even if you haven't admitted it to yourself yet. Your mind is already using the natural laws to create results in your life, the only question is what direction is it pointed in. When you take a second look at the things that you swear you can't do, you start to notice something that may sting a little. Your "I can'ts" are really "I won'ts." When you say something is impossible or you're not ready to take it to the next level, you're actually just saying you're refusing to do it, and behind every "I won't" sits the neurological frequency of fear, doing what it does best. Keeping you from believing in you.
The average person typically doesn't fear whatever work they have to put in, what they dread is the feeling that comes with getting started. Feeling exposed as a beginner at whatever it is they want to master or trying something for the first time and not getting instant gratification from the results, so it's safer to not get started at all. Procrastination is the fine art of avoiding your feelings, and it's been talked about like a time management problem when it's really an emotional one. The dread of starting is what's holding you back from believing in yourself and from using these natural laws to create the outcome you say you want.
For as long as anyone has been tracking these types of things, public speaking has sat at the top of the list of things people fear most. And in this day and age, making content is the new form of public speaking. Sitting in front of a camera, putting your face, voice and ideas out there for strangers to see and judge, this is where most people hit the brick wall of self doubt. The goal is in plain sight, they know what they want and they know how to get to it, they know the audience is waiting for them, and they still can't get themselves to press record consistently enough to make it happen.
What happens instead is the excuses start rolling in. Someone who actually wants to get started begins coming up with even more elaborate reasons to put it off, and the reasons sound really logical on the surface but think about what these affirmations are really doing on a neurological level.
I've heard many of these when coaching others. Someone will tell me they don't believe that they really have anything different to say yet, that their voice sounds weird on camera, that they should probably read one more book before they start. These are little rules that were made up on the spot to protect the ego, and every one of them is built to sound smart so you never have to admit that there's a belief issue.
And yet, the doubts can come from outside of yourself, but still have the same effect. You tell yourself you need to take a course before you're ready to teach what you know. You need to hire an editing team instead of learning how to edit yourself. You need to wait for the new iPhone to drop before you can upload anything. You need to save up for the nicest camera, the best mic, the perfect lighting setup, before you can start putting any content out. Everything has to be just right before you begin, which sounds responsible, except the magic was never going to be in the gear. The magic is in the act of starting. You start with what you already have, and the rest gets built along the way.
Here's a little exercise I want you to try after you finish reading this: Go look at your favorite personality on YouTube, and if you don't have one just yet, I'll assume that position and you can do it with my channel. Go to their videos tab, or mine, and sort the oldest videos to the top. You'll see that anyone with a respectable following didn't start off perfect. The lighting was bad, the audio was mediocre, and the delivery was awkward, but there they are with nothing but value and self-belief on full display.
Authentic is one of my favorite modes to be in so here's another plot twist for you. I myself was scared of public speaking right up until the day I sat down, started talking to a camera and launched my channel. The fear didn't leave before I started, it left because I started. That's what most people don't see, because it's a behind the scenes type of thing. For weeks as I prepared to start, excitement wasn't what flooded my nervous system, it was fear. The average person is sitting around waiting for the fear to go away first so they can feel ready, and that feeling will never arrive. The action is what kills it. Not the other way around.
It helps to get really clear on how fear actually shows up, because the reason it keeps winning is that we often are looking for it in the wrong form. You expect fear to feel like fear, your heart pounding or a little bit of a cold sweat creeping in. But from a neurological standpoint, fear is much more sophisticated than that. It wears clever disguises you've been told to listen to, and what's holding you back from believing in yourself is almost always fear showing up in a costume you've been conditioned to mistake for something else. Here's a short list of the most common disguises I noticed when working with clients.
N0. 1 — Perfectionism
On the surface, perfectionism looks like having high standards, which is why people tend to brag about it and applaud themselves for it. But when you look at what it actually does in your life, you'll see it rarely leads to success. Perfectionism is the fear of not being perfect, and because the standard you're measuring yourself against can't be reached, you end up avoiding doing anything consistently.
Your mind will ruminate on the possibility that if you gave it your full effort and it still comes up short, then you'd have to face the idea that your best isn't good enough. So the ego shields you from that by keeping you from getting started or being consistent in the first place. Mission accomplished. You'll just stay right there in the planning phase, the research phase, the "I'll be ready next month" phase, and you'll label it being productive when it's really just productive procrastination.
no. 2 — VANITY
Under perfectionism sits an even deeper layer, which is vanity. And this one stings a little when you spot it in yourself for the first time. The real question behind most self doubt is this: are you willing to let go of your vanity so you can let yourself be awkward as a learner? Are you willing to look clumsy on camera, stumble through your first ten videos, write a business plan that nobody wants to immediately invest in, or start a podcast that only gets twelve views in the first month? Most people would rather stay polished and protected rather than look imperfect, even if it's just temporary. The ego mind would rather protect the illusion of being a flawless expert than risk the reality of being a beginner.
A lot of this gets cranked up by the world we're all moving through now. Modern minds have been trained to think that life should look like the highlight reels we see on Instagram, where everyone seems to be winning with no extraordinary effort put in. Most people go out of their way to avoid showing the not so glamorous middle phases of patience and persistence.
With all of that being said, there's only one thing left to do, and that's to fix it by getting started, and if you already started, keep going.
Belief is something that compounds on itself until it transforms into knowing. You plant seeds every day in your new identity, and as long as you keep planting, it grows until you become that person in full. The seeds are smaller than most people want them to be but, trust me, one action taken when you didn't feel like it or one moment where you chose to persist instead of quitting with nobody around to see it, that's where the magic happens. Those are the seeds and sowing them looks like nothing on its own, but give them enough time and consistency and the harvest will always be in your favor.
And you'll soon notice that the actions you take will expose the fear programming you inherited from the people in your past. The memories will begin to flow in and the understanding will come as a natural byproduct of it all. And once these negative beliefs have risen to the top, just taking action to keep going is enough to permanently change the pathways in your brain to support your success.
Trust is the highest form of self-belief. You're telling your subconscious mind that you trust yourself and the value you have even when the results haven't shown up yet. And your subconscious mind, which may have been watching you break promises to yourself for years, starts to reorganize around this new line of code you just installed. It believes you now, because now, you're giving it the best evidence to do so.
Hold onto this and master this powerful art of self belief, because nobody can believe in you more than you believe in you. Every step on the staircase to success was a previous failure. The entrepreneurs you look up to, the influencers whose content you love, the people whose lives you admire, every one of them climbed their own staircase with the exact same gifts you have within you now. Failed attempts, awkward beginnings, dropped projects, stretches where nothing seems to be working, these aren't roadblocks, they're the price of admission to the best timelines of your life.
The limiting beliefs you've been carrying around since childhood are false. They're not real and they're not yours, so why don't you give them up for good? The universe doesn't respond to your planning, it responds to your identity, and letting go of the inner negativity opens the door for your inner greatness, what you could call the higher self.
Let go of the negative feelings that kept you comfortable and you'll be surprised by the power of those positive thoughts radiating from your new identity. Self-belief isn't earned, it's not something you have to invent or get lucky to be born with. It's always sitting there under the disguise of fear, under the excuses, under the old beliefs you inherited from people who didn't know how to believe in themselves either.
Your job is to clear the path, take the first step, and the next one, and to keep going until reality has no choice but to acknowledge your greatness.
Thank you for reading.
