Believe In Yourself

To be totally honest, I must credit my wonderful son-in-law, Craig, for giving me the inspiration to write this blog. I never know what I will be writing about until something smacks me right between the eyes. When writing something on Face Book, I saw this post on his timeline. PERFECT! The light bulb clicked on.

As I was going through my 'Blog' folder, where I store ideas for future blogs when I think of them, I found a collection of believing in yourself articles and quotes. If I did not believe that I could write and publish novels, then why am I wasting my time? That is my point. Today, I am going to write about some people who accomplished extraordinary things based on the fact that they believed in themselves and followed through carrying on with their work, regardless of what others may have told them.  

J.K. Rowling, one of my favorite authors stated that it was not until she hit rock bottom that she had anything solid to stand on which allowed her to then rebuild her life. She turned her life around by believing in herself. Having the confidence that success will come your way by believing in yourself is so important and yes...sometimes that may mean to fake it till you make it.  A case in point would be Muhammad Ali when he said, "I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was." He believed in himself. 

We have to be bold enough to believe that we can change the world by believing in ourselves because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do based on the philosophy of Steve Jobs. Stay unique because this is what makes us truly human and different from one another. Oscar Wilde followed this in his life, "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."  There is no reason to try to replicate what others have done. There is no one way to accomplish goals. Do it your way.

Even though I have been in the field of education, I strongly believe that we can't allow schooling to get in the way of our education. We can't allow failure to stand in the way and should constantly be putting ourselves in situations where we could possibly fail; then learn from it.  Michael Jordan and many other professional athletes that were All Star quality will say that they have failed over and over and over again in their lives and this is why they succeeded. The top rated baseball players had the highest number of strike outs. Surprising? Not really. They believed in themselves and did not let anything get in their way, even failure to hit the ball.

The bottom line of believing in yourself is if you really want to do something, you will do it. If not, you will find excuses. My plan is to challenge myself enough to do it by looking in the mirror and seeing an accomplished, published author staring back at me, checking my hair before I go out for another book signing tour. See you there.