If You Don’t Believe in Yourself, Why Should Anyone Else?

Oftentimes, people ask me why I am always encouraging others to have more self-belief and why I believe it is important.

If you don’t believe in yourself, why should anyone else?

Whilst it’s not true that we will achieve everything we believe we can achieve, it’s definitely true that we will fail to achieve those things where we don’t believe we can do it.

This is why Self-Belief is so important, it inspires us to try, and it motivates us to keep going when we are not making the progress we should, because we know if we keep going, then we will be successful.

Without Self-Belief, we might not even start, and we will definitely give up the moment we encounter differences.

One area where you see the importance of Self-Belief is in sports, particularly boxing.

A great example is Mike Tyson, he had tremendous Self-Belief and you could visibly see people shaking when they had to face him, as they had no Self-Belief that they had any chance of beating him.

In 1988 Mike Tyson fought Michael Spinks for the World Title, both were undefeated, Tyson was the World Heavy Weight Champion, and Spinks had been the World Light Heavy Weight Champion.

This should have been a great fight between two great undefeated champions.

However, Tyson won the fight, knocking out Spinks in just 91 seconds.

I remember watching the fight live, and you could see that Spinks had no Self-Belief, even though he was an undefeated World Champion, and he said that before the fight “fear was knocking at my door big time.”

Whereas Tyson, just exuded confidence, prowling around the ring like a Lion.

Tyson said of the fight,  “The first punch I threw, he wobbled a bit. I knew right there I had him.” and then added “my trainer told me before the fight that he bet both our purses that I would knock him out in the first round. So I went out and knocked him out in the first round.”

Here you can clearly see the difference between having, and lacking, Self-Belief.

Maybe Tyson would have won the fight anyway, even if Spinks had had Self-Belief, but it would surely not have been over in just 91 seconds. Spinks gave up, he let the fear and lack of Self-Belief defeat him, just as much as his opponent.

We need to work on our Self-Belief, and we need to create it in our teams, in order for us to increase our probability of Success.

I cannot over-emphasise the importance of Self-Belief.

If you want to learn more about creating highly engaged teams or being a better leader click the link to make an appointment to talk about how I can help.