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Overview

Everyone has goals throughout their lives. These range from small tasks, like cleaning out the garage before the weekend, to life-changing achievements, like saving $20,000 in ten years. When you are ready to start working toward your goal(s), you might wonder how to begin or what approach will work best for you. The best way is to believe in yourself and have a mindset of 100% confidence that you can do anything if only you set your mind to it. This works because when we truly believe we can accomplish something, our minds release creative power – mental focus necessary for finding ways to accomplish our goals. As long as your level of belief matches the task’s difficulty (for example becoming VP at a company), then it becomes feasible as well!

Believing in yourself helps you get people to believe in you. A study by the McKinsey Foundation for Management Research found that leaders prefer working with others who have a strong belief in themselves. They also want to work with confident candidates.

People who are more successful have a stronger desire to succeed. This is contingent on how much they believe in themselves.

Many people believe that success is determined by the desire to keep going. This is a quality leaders look for in candidates because it means they won’t give up.

Believing in yourself can be very powerful. Your mental power will shift to help you succeed, and as a byproduct, inspire others to believe in you.

Big Idea #1: Instead of memorizing facts, do what successful people do and sharpen your creative-thinking skills.

The saying, “knowledge is power,” implies that the more we know, the more capable we are of doing things. But this doesn’t distinguish between fact memorization and creative thinking. Fact memorization involves learning pieces of information and storing them in our brains for later recall. However, many facts end up like old boxes in a garage: you only access what’s inside when you need it.

Creative thinking is focused on finding solutions to problems. It allows us to come up with new ways of dealing with those problems and challenges, while memorization of facts has the opposite effect. Creative thinking makes our brains flexible, while memorizing facts makes them rigid.

Successful people focus on improving their creative thinking rather than just memorizing facts.

There are three ways to boost creativity: be receptive to new ideas, take every opportunity you can to try something new, and spend ten minutes each morning thinking about how you can do a better job.

To promote these three actions, diversify your lifestyle. For example, join a community group outside of your occupation that challenges you and supports you at the same time. This will broaden your skills and open up opportunities to use those skills in other areas.

Big Idea #2: Eradicate all negative thoughts by thinking and acting positively, every day.

In today’s world, negativity is everywhere. People hear about murders on the news and advertisements make them feel fat or ugly. Even when people are close to us, they might try to discourage us from pursuing our dreams.

Negative thoughts are normal, but they’re not healthy. They can be compared to mental monsters that grow stronger the more you feed them. Unsuccessful people tend to think negatively and say things like “it can’t be done”, whereas successful people focus on positive thinking and say things like “let’s do it”.

Thus, to achieve your dreams, it is necessary to eliminate negativity. The best way to do this is by thinking and acting positively every day. You can do this by writing yourself a pep talk that reads like an advertisement: a “sell-yourself-to-yourself” commercial in which you remind yourself of the qualities that make you unique.