The Power of Self-Confidence

Become Unstoppable, Irresistible, and Unafraid in Every Area of Your Life

Brian Tracy

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118435915
• eBook ISBN: 9781118464014
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Why are some people more successful than others? Self-confidence!

What one great goal would you set if you knew you could not fail? What wonderful things would you want to do with your life if you were guaranteed success in anything you attempted?

Your level of self-confidence determines the size of the goals you set, the energy and determination that you focus on achieving them, and the amount of persistence you apply to overcoming every obstacle. In this powerful, practical book based on work with more than 5 million executives, entrepreneurs, sales professionals, and ambitious people in more than sixty countries, you learn how to develop unshakable self-confidence in every area of your life.

The Power of Self-Confidence explains how to increase your "mental fitness" by thinking like top performers in every field. Little by little, you build up and maintain ever-higher levels of self-confidence in everything you do. Self-confidence allows you to move out of your comfort zone and take risks without any guarantees. With step-by-step guidance, author Brian Tracy will help you build the foundations of lifelong self-confidence. You discover how to determine what you really want, and unleash your personal powers to accomplish it.

You'll learn how to:

• Clarify and live consistently with your values to become the very best person you could possibly be
• Set clear goals and make written plans to accomplish them
• Commit yourself to mastery in your chosen field and to lifelong personal improvement
• Program your subconscious mind to respond in a positive and constructive way to every problem or difficulty
• Minimize your weaknesses and maximize your strengths for higher achievement
• Develop high levels of courage and incredible persistence

Become unstoppable, irresistible, and unafraid in every area of your life through the power of unshakable self-confidence. Become a person of action, overcome any obstacle, and scale any height. With your newfound unshakable self-confidence, you will accomplish every goal you can set for yourself.

CHAPTER 1

The Foundation of Self-Confidence

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

—William Shakespeare

Your thoughts and feelings about yourself, and what you can or cannot do, are the sum total result of a lifetime of experience and conditioning, and usually have little relationship to what is truly possible for you.

In personal development, there is a principle, or a law of becoming, that simply says that each person is in a continual process of becoming, or evolving and growing, in the direction of his or her dominant thoughts.

Your body is also in a state of becoming. At a normal rate of cell death and replenishment, you have a brand-new body every seven years. Whereas your physical evolution in becoming is effected by the food that you put into your body, your mental evolution and becoming is largely determined by the thoughts that you put into your mind.

You Become What You Think About

The law of concentration says that “anything you dwell upon grows in your reality.” Anything that you think about long enough and hard enough eventually becomes a part of your mental processes, exerting its influence and power on your attitude and your behavior.

If you constantly think thoughts of boldness and courage and self-assertion, you become progressively bolder and more courageous and more self-assertive. The more you dwell on the person you would like to be, with the qualities you would like to have, the more you implant those deep into your subconscious mind where they become part of your ongoing evolution. What you habitually think about eventually becomes a part of your character and your personality.

In this sense, you are a self-made man or woman. You are where you are and what you are because of the thoughts that you have allowed to preoccupy your mind. Whatever you have dwelled on over the past months and years, you have become, and you are, right now, today, the result of all those thoughts.

Not only have you made yourself into the person you are today, but you are continuing with the job of construction with every thought you think. Because this is an unavoidable fact of life, the smartest thing that you can do is to persistently think the thoughts that are consistent with the kind of person you would like to be.

Personal Growth Is Not Easy

However, for most people this is too big a leap. Most people continue to think about and talk about exactly what they don’t want to happen, and then they are constantly amazed that exactly what they were hoping to avoid happens to them again and again.

One of the most profound discoveries in all of human history is that “thought is creative.” Thoughts held in mind, produce after their kind. Like begets like. Your thoughts become your realities. You do become what you think about most of the time. You cannot harbor one kind of thought and experience a different kind of existence. This law of cause and effect works perfectly, everywhere and always, for everyone.

The development of unshakable self-confidence, therefore, begins with you taking full, complete, systematic and purposeful control of the contents of your conscious mind, disciplining yourself to think consistently about only the things that you desire and to resolutely keep your mind off the things that you fear.

All of life is from the inside out. It is from the inner to the outer. The law of correspondence, perhaps one of the most important of all the mental laws, says that “your outer world will be a reflection of your inner world.” What you see on the outside is largely a reflection of what is going on inside you. This is not only true for you; it is true for everyone around you.

Your Inner Life Predicts Your Outer Life

Many times we see people who seem to be very nice and pleasant on the outside, but who seem to have continuous problems in their personal and business lives. We wonder, “How could these unhappy things happen to such nice people?”

The unavoidable fact is that, with few exceptions, most of what a person experiences in his or her outer life corresponds exactly to something that is going on in their inner life, something that you seldom know, and it cannot be otherwise.

True happiness and success comes from living your life in harmony with the laws that govern your being. Even though these laws are invisible, they are like the law of gravity, which is also invisible but is to be violated only at your own peril. Happy people are those who obey and follow the laws of nature and live their lives consistent with those laws.

Start with Your Inner Life

If you want to enjoy self-confidence on the outside, you must practice complete integrity on the inside. The foundation of self-confidence is for you to live your life consistent with your innermost values and principles, while thinking and acting in harmony with your highest aspirations.

Men and women with the most rock-solid self-confidence are those who are absolutely clear about what it is they believe to be right and good and worthwhile, and who live their lives consistent with these values. Everything they do or say is an expression of their innermost convictions. Your whole world can fall down around you, but as long as you know that you are doing the right thing, you will have a deep inner sense of calm that will manifest itself in an attitude of confidence and self-assurance in any situation.

You will have many ups and downs in life, but what is most important is that you remain “true to yourself.” Then, as Shakespeare said, “thou can’st not then be false to any man.”

Determine Your Values

The starting point of developing high levels of self-confidence and in becoming a superior human being is for you to think through and to decide on your values. Superior men and women are those who have taken the time to decide clearly what it is they believe in, and in what order, and they have then organized their lives so that everything they do reflects those values.

Recently, I addressed about 150 members of the national sales force of a very successful company. This company had started from an idea and had grown very rapidly in an extremely competitive market, and the company was very profitable.

All the people at the meeting were remarkably positive and upbeat and had a special quality of goodness about them. When I commented on this, the president of the company showed me the value statement that the executives of the company had worked out before they had begun operations.

There were two pages of values and principles that were given to everyone in the company when they began. These two pages had been subsequently reduced onto plasticized cards that each person could carry in their wallet or purse.

The president told me an interesting story. He said that whenever two or more people in the company were wrestling with a decision of any kind, even over the telephone, they would pull out their plasticized cards describing the corporate values. They would then review the values together, one by one, and compare the various options available to them with each value. Whatever decision they finally made would always stand the values test, without question.

Values in Business

In a recent study covering 25 years of business history, the researchers found that the companies that had very clear written values to which everyone in the company ascribed had earned an average of 700 percent greater profit over the 25 years than other companies in the same industries that did not have a written codes of values. “As within, so without.”

Whenever I conduct a strategic planning exercise for a corporation, the executives of the corporation always select integrity as their highest value and most important organizing principle for the entire corporation.

In my experience, almost every corporation will select the value of integrity as one of their foremost organizing principles. The word integrity, according to the dictionary, means “perfect, undivided, complete, unified, a single whole, without blemish or fault.” It’s a fine value to choose.

This is a good choice, but, in reality, integrity is more than a value. It is the one quality of mind that assures or guarantees all the other values that you select.

The economic and personal results of individuals and corporations with clear values always tend to be far superior to those of companies and individuals whose values are vague or unclear.

Clarify Your Personal Values

Your starting point toward higher self-confidence and personal greatness is to, first of all, clarify your values for yourself. It is for you to decide for yourself the values that you believe in. What do you stand for and, even more, what will you not stand for? What values do you espouse that you are willing to sacrifice for? What values would you pay for or sweat for—or maybe even die for?

Do you value your family? Your God? Your health? Your work or career? Do you value principles such as freedom, liberty, compassion for the less fortunate, or “reverence for life?” Do you believe in honesty and truth and sincerity and hard work and success? Whatever your values are, think them through and write them down.

Who Do You Most Admire?

A useful exercise is for you to think of the men and women, living and dead, whom you most admire. What qualities or attributes of these people do you consider the most important? If you could be like any one of these people, which of their qualities would you most want to emulate?

When you look around you at the people you admire, what qualities of these people do you consider the most important? What qualities do you look for in your friends and associates when you are trying to decide whether to become deeply involved with them? What do you think are the fundamental qualities or values that underlie business and personal relationships? What are your values?

Values Are Nonnegotiable

When you select a value, if it’s to be one of your values at all, it becomes inviolable. Either it is a fixed value and you live every part of your life consistent with it, or it is not one of your values. You cannot have a value when it is convenient and put it aside when it’s not convenient. You cannot have a little bit of integrity: It must be all or nothing.

The act of selecting your values is also the act of clearly stating to yourself, and sometimes to others, exactly how you will live your life from this moment forward. Once you have selected a value, and you have declared it to be one of your unifying principles, you are, in effect, saying that this is something on which you will never compromise. And your level of adherence to the values you have personally selected is the real measure of your character, your true quality as a human being.

Unshakable self-confidence comes from unshakable commitment to your values. When, deep down inside yourself you know that you will never violate your highest principles, you experience a deep sense of personal power that enables you to deal openly and honestly and with complete self-confidence in almost every human situation.

Values Clarification

If you’re having any difficulty in clarifying your values, a very helpful exercise is to take some time to write out your own obituary or eulogy. Imagine that everyone you know and care about is gathered at your funeral to pay their last respects. The minister reads your eulogy to this assembly of people, and in it he describes the person you became over the course of your lifetime. He describes not only what you accomplished and what you contributed to the lives of others, but he reads out the virtues, values, and qualities that you were known for by the people around you.

This obituary can become your vision of the kind of person you wish to be and the kind of values that you wish to live by. No one is perfect, and we all have a long way to go in living our lives consistent with our highest values, but the very exercise of writing out your obituary will exert a powerful influence on everything you do thereafter. Both consciously and unconsciously, you will be drawn toward living and acting more and more like the person you described in that final testament.

Organize Your Values

Once you’ve decided on your values, your work is not over. Now you have to organize your values by priority. You have to decide which value is more important and which value is less important. If you wrote out each of your values on small squares of paper and then you had to throw away all the squares but one, which one would you keep? This then becomes your foremost value, the one that takes precedence over all others.

Which would be your second most important value? Your third? Your fourth? And so on. Your order of priority is extremely important in determining the kind of person you are and the kind ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Foundation of Self-Confidence
• Chapter 2: Purpose and Personal Power
• Chapter 3: Achieving Competence and Personal Mastery
• Chapter 4: The Inner Game of Self-Confidence
• Chapter 5: Capitalizing on Your Strengths
• Chapter 6: Triumphing over Adversity
• Chapter 7: Self-Confidence In Action
• About the Author
• Brian Tracy: Speaker-Author-Consultant
• Index