You don’t need self belief to be successful…

“The one thing that the most productive, consistent, resilient and loving humans do NOT possess, is an intense belief in themselves…” 

Garret Kramer

Talking to a friend today, telling her the story of how I came to be presenting with a speaker as awesome as Garret Kramer, I realised that this story confirms what people like Garret and I teach… That believing in yourself is really NOT important.  So I thought I would share that story with you.  It goes a little something like this:

How important IS self belief…?

Little old me is working as a coach and believes that bringing the Inside Out understanding into being a significant part of the way that I work would be hugely beneficial to my clients.  Little old me hears of Garret Kramer from another coach who is in the business, thinks he sounds interesting and starts following his work.

Meanwhile I have 2 very good friends who are in this understanding and I found myself sharing things with them that Garret says in his posts on social media and how it really resonated with me.  At this time I did not exist to Garret.  I also found myself sharing with these 2 friends that I would like to be on a year long programme to really propel myself to the next level.  A little while later one of these friends hears that Garret is running a programme and that it starts in two months’ time. She excitedly tells me! Well of course I wanted to be on it, so I speculatively enquired.

This enquiry led to a Skype interview with Garret in which he told little old me that he thinks I am a very good coach and he’d be delighted to have me on his programme.  I got off the call and thought how hilarious it was that I’d managed to pull the wool over his eyes!

Prior to the course beginning I started to feel a bit anxious…

Entertaining thoughts about how I actually wasn’t good enough to be on this course and I’d show myself up.  Or even worse, the exposure to this course would propel me into great success.  How was little old me going to deal with that!?

Fortunately, because I have this understanding that Garret and I both teach, I know that neither of those things are true. They are just thought. There is also no way that this course could affect me positively or negatively as I am already whole.  So I buckled up and got on with it!  Regardless of what my self belief was saying.

Less than a month into the course I’m chatting to Garret about the work I am doing locally and next thing I know he’s offering to do a talk with me to people in my area.  Once again I come off the Skype call and laugh to myself about how I’ve still got the wool over his eyes.  Garret Kramer, top coach to professional athletes and well known business people, doing a talk in Leigh on Sea with little old me?!  Hilarious!

And then I panic about how I’m going to show myself up during the talk!

I am writing this now, laughing.  Those feelings and those thoughts felt so real, but I am doing this talk anyway.  Sometimes those feelings are there, a lot of the time they are not.  But I know that I’m fundamentally okay. There is nothing crushing about those thoughts, because I know they aren’t telling me anything real or true.  They are simply my ego looking to protect itself. Nothing more.

So having a deep belief in myself is neither here nor there.  How the event goes is neither here nor there.  Of course I care about how it goes, and I want it to be a success and for me to be perceived as knowing what I’m talking about, but I know that whether it is successful is nothing to do with my self belief – and it will not affect whether I am okay or not.  What a relief!  I can just get on with it and maybe even enjoy it…

Coming back to the original statement – getting a talk with Garret in your home town actually counts as a MASSIVE success (in my book, to me, which is all that success ever can be anyway) and I have achieved this despite not having the belief in myself that top motivational speakers will tell you you need.  Believing that you need self belief is just another pressure, another weight to bear…  If you drop the idea that you need to believe in yourself too, how much freer will you be?