The Beliefs You Need to Be Successful

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Your beliefs in who you are and what you can accomplish have everything to do with how successful you are in creating your extraordinary life. There are three main beliefs that the most successful and happy people have, which I detail below, but what if you don’t currently have those beliefs? I also have three strategies to help you create them when your “belief muscles” are weak, or if you want to change long-held thought patterns that have been holding you back. 

Your Beliefs Determine Your Direction

This is a great time of year to start thinking about your beliefs. During the holiday season you’ll be seeing more of your family and friends, and these people are the basis for most of the beliefs you have about yourself. Yet these beliefs may not serve you in creating the success you want,  because they have been passed on to you - rather than you creating them for yourself. 

This is why you need to take time to examine what your beliefs are, and whether they are true for you. The alternative is leaving everything to circumstance, which limits what you can achieve. The sooner you realize that you do have control over your thoughts and beliefs, the sooner you can move forward and beyond them, and create the life that you want. 

Three Beliefs You Need to Be Successful

Often, we associate the word “successful” with our job or career. Rather, I want you to feel holistically successful in your life - what I call living an extraordinary life! The following beliefs will help you achieve success in your relationships, mindset, purpose, work, and everywhere in your life. 

1. Believe in Yourself

If you want to be successful, you need to believe that it’s possible for you! In addition, you need to believe it’s possible without compromising the other areas of your life. You may think that successful people make huge sacrifices to get what they want, but contrary to popular belief, this isn’t true. They do sleep enough, eat well, exercise, and have great relationships… but most importantly, they believe in their ability to succeed. 

Ways to Cultivate Belief in Yourself

Live in alignment with who you know you can be. A big part of this is taking time to create a vision of who you want to be in five or ten years from now, and then taking actions to make that happen. So if you want to be healthy and fit ten years into the future, then you need to be a person that exercises now. If you struggle with creating this vision for yourself, join my upcoming live Design Your Decade workshops, or jump right in with the DIY version for clarity and a future you can get excited for. 

Believe you are capable of achieving what you want. Build your capacity to believe that you can achieve success. This could mean that you have the skills you need right now to create that future, or it could mean that you’re capable of learning what you need to be successful. 

Believe you are worthy of having extraordinary success. This seems to be harder for women, perhaps because of what was modelled for us by previous generations and the patriarchal society we live in. No matter the reason, you need to believe you are deserving of your dreams. One way to cultivate this is actually through gratitude, because when you focus on the great things in your life, you get more of the same back. 

2. Believe in Others

The most successful people have strong beliefs in the capabilities of others. The social influences that successful people bring into their lives is a big aspect of their achievements. They interact with people beyond their own needs, and engage with others for support and mentorship on both sides. 

Ways to Nurture Belief in Others

Believe that people are trustworthy. If you can’t trust others, it will obviously lead to loneliness in your personal life. It will also affect other areas of your life, because it hinders you from asking for help and puts immense pressure on you to “do it all”. Further, by not asking for help, you are preventing yourself from actually helping others with your talents!

Believe that others are value driven. If the world all thought the same as you, it would be boring, but we can still get caught up in “my way is the right way.” If you can believe that others are good people with their own values, it makes it easier to find common ground. When you can find a shared value, like that you both want to be role models for your children, it creates the chance to influence or help them. 

Know that others are struggling. If you can keep this belief in mind, you can eliminate a lot of conflict from your life. So if your partner or child does something you don’t like, for example, consider that they may be struggling with something. A bad day at work or school, maybe? Or if someone is rude at the grocery store, you can choose to believe that maybe they just got some bad news. This relates to the point above, believing that people are good. We don’t know the whole story, and taking an empathetic stance opens up more possibilities for a constructive response. 

3. Believe in the Future

It can be hard to believe in the future sometimes, like when a worldwide pandemic hits, for instance. Yet extraordinary people believe that the world is a beautiful place that deserves everyone’s best. When you shift your focus outward to the opportunities you have to make a better world for yourself and others, it skyrockets your results. 

Foster Your Belief for the Future 

Believe the future is safe. Even with the current state of the world, we still need to believe that the world and the future is safe - and that we can create a safe future for ourselves. 

Believe the future is abundant. Part of believing that you deserve more in your life is believing that there is enough for everyone. There is enough opportunity, resources, money, and love for us all. 

Believe that the future is improving. It’s easy to look at the past with rose-colored glasses, or down on what’s happening around us right now. In general, the evidence says that the world is actually improving. For example, the idea that our children could call us from a cell phone from anywhere wasn’t even on our radar thirty years ago. Yet here we are. Everything comes with drawbacks, of course, but if you believe the future is improving, you are more likely to participate in that as an extraordinary person. 

3 Ways to Support The Beliefs You Need to Be Successful

No matter how excited you are to create an extraordinary life for yourself, the fact remains that no one can live in these beliefs 24/7. You may also be struggling to create new beliefs for yourself out of old ones that no longer serve you. The following strategies will help support the beliefs you need to be successful, whatever stage you may be in.

1. Create Momentum

Did you know that the power of momentum in one area of your life can inspire momentum in other areas? For example, this past year I started out with big plans and all the goals, but I hit a dip. Rather than sit there and wait for inspiration to magically appear, I intentionally created momentum in other areas of my life. 

I started by exercising more, but then the California fires hit and I couldn’t go outside. Sitting there in my house, I decided we needed to paint, but thanks to the pandemic, I couldn’t have anyone in to do it. So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work, painting nearly every room in the house. It was a tough, physical job, but it felt amazing to do it and see my success. My success spilled over, and I was ready to jump right back into my business again.

2. Practice Integration

This means to integrate your wins, no matter how small, into your life. Take the time to stop and reflect on your achievement, and celebrate it! Without integration, you end up just moving on to the next thing. Then the next. And then the next. It becomes hard to see all that you’ve done to get where you are, and it leads to burnout or quitting. Celebrating the small things is also another way to create positive momentum in your life! 

3. Seek Feedback

It’s all well and good to get feedback from your friends and family, but sometimes they aren’t the ones you need to hear from. If you’re running a business and have big ideas, your sister may not be the best one to give you constructive criticism or bounce ideas off of. It’s vital that you surround yourself with people who can give you the feedback you need, and this could mean having several communities! I think back to how helpful mom groups were to me when I had young children; but when it comes to my business or self-improvement, communities like the Extraordinary Life Tribe or masterminds are more beneficial. 

What we give attention to grows, which is why it’s so important to examine the stories and beliefs we tell ourselves. When you create an environment filled with beliefs of success, it becomes easier to make those successes happen. You have the power to control your thoughts and to create an extraordinary life, and working on the beliefs above will help you to get there.