Why Believing in Yourself Is Just the Beginning



I'm not an artist.  But one day during the final months of high school, I tried to be.

          More on that later.

          We commonly tell people to "believe in themselves."  But "believe in yourself" is a phrase that doesn't mean anything without context.  Believe that your can do what?  Succeed in life?  Accomplish your dreams?  Certainly.  But to me that kind of belief is a kind of first stage, a stepping stone to something higher. 

          The limitation of the aforementioned goals is that they are centered on the person undertaking them and thus are, in one stretch of the definition, self-centered.  They aren't selfish, necessarily, but they focus entirely on the individual and so lose the soul-expanding opportunity to reach outward to others.

          No, to me belief in myself is tied to my ability to help other people in meaningful ways.  We don't see much of the full impact of our actions on other people, so it takes a certain amount of belief in the potential results of our actions for us to be motivated enough to give it a shot.  It requires us to predict what we have no way of knowing for sure.

          Belief inherently refers to confidence in something unseen.  It sounds a little silly, but without belief of some kind we couldn't operate from day to day.  We don't know that we won't get hit by a car, struck by lightning, or carried off by a tornado when we leave the house each morning.  But we choose to believe it won't happen, and that belief makes it possible to conduct our affairs without being paralyzed with fear.  The idea that the sun with rise tomorrow is a belief that we hold because of scientific evidence and our past experiences, a belief that actively affects our daily actions and plans.  It's the same thing when it comes to being an agent for good in other people's lives.  Without the belief that we can do something worthwhile for them, we will be paralyzed and unwilling to act.  We have to believe that we can influence people in meaningful ways.

          Our goal is not to change other people.  Our goal is to believe in them so deeply that they begin to believe in themselves and thus begin a self-transformation of their own volition.

          I believe in that.  The very existence of this blog is proof of it.  I am certain that if I can just help you see that you (and not just the person next to you) can be a miracle to the people in your life that something inside you will actually change in response so that the world (and more importantly, your personal life) will be influenced in a positive way.  You, the individual reader, have the opportunity to prove me right if you choose to.  All you have to do is believe what I'm telling you about your personal capacity to make a meaningful difference at critical turning points in the lives of the people around you.  Believe it enough to act.

          How does a person act differently when they really believe that they can be an earth-shattering influence for good?  That is a blog post in and of itself, but let me brush over the surface by turning back to the experience from high school that I referred to at the beginning.  It all started when I decided that I wanted to ask girl I knew on a date.  Due to a brief burst of insanity, and despite any real artistic talent of my part I decided that I would draw a picture of her along with a brief note asking her out.  Up to this point I couldn't do much better than a boxy outline of a human figure that looked like the sketch of a small child.  But here's the thing:  I believed that I could do it.  And so instead of throwing up my hands and giving up I got to work.  I looked up online tutorials on how to draw hair and eyes and made numerous practice attempts for every square inch before I actually attempted it on the final project.  I drew lightly at first until things looked right and then colored in more darkly.  When I made a mistake I erased it and tried again.   I went to work to succeed because I really believed that I could do it.  I didn't end up with an artistic masterpiece, but I didn't embarrass myself either.  I did what I'd set out to do.

          When you know that you can change a person's life forever and have a taste of what that means, you don't throw in the towel because you don't feel competent.  You get up and try anyway.  You make as many practice attempts as you need to in order to figure things out.  You take light, tentative strokes at first until things look right lest you accidently make things worse rather than better, but you keep drawing nonetheless.  If you make a mistake, you do your best to fix it and try again.  Above all, you keep learning.  You don't let fear of failure stop you from being there when people need you.  You can't always control when opportunities to help people will come, but you can choose to act on them when they do.  In my experience, they always come to those who are willing to take action.

          Like you, I'm still learning about the process by which people have their needs met in modestly miraculous ways.  But the more I learn, the more avidly I believe how important it is for each of you to see your own potential to change people's lives.  You can do it!  You can be the change you want to see in the world!  As you do so, and as I've done so, our lives can and will be transformed more powerfully than in any other way.  It will change you to the point that you begin to see believing in yourself as a medium by which you can transmit hope and light to those around you, not as a tool for self-advancement.

          That, in my opinion, is the greatest miracle of all.



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Picture attributions:  Pacheco, "North Lake, Ca - Red Dawn and the great migration.", https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/legalcode Neville Wootton, "Sundown at Pakokku Bridge on Ayeyarwady River" https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode OiMax, "Nightscape," https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode Fred Mancosu, Turkish Delight VI https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/legalcode Jason Jacobs, "Saturday Night Lights," httpscreativecommons.orglicensesby2.0legalcode 

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