Good morning, and happy Hump Day! I hope your day is off to a great start.
I read a quote yesterday that struck a nerve and made me think a little. Actually, I think it was the title of a motivational CD. I have a few of those. Like a couple hundred. I just like the sound of somebody telling me I can achieve greater things in life. There are certainly enough people out there trying to convince me otherwise. The title of this CD was “You will see it when you believe it.”
That’s a bit of a reversal on something most of us have said over the years – “I’ll believe it when I see it!” And all it means is don’t give me empty promises, give me results. The advertising world is full of empty promises. Only Fifth Avenue could come up with the concept of a better sex life by using a certain brand of dandruff shampoo. Well, I tried it for several years. Let’s just leave it at that.
So, with anything that’s even slightly beyond what we already know to be true, it’s natural to approach new things with a certain amount of skepticism. We want proof, or at least a decent level of confidence in the outcome, before we invest our time and effort into achieving the desired result. We want to see the result first. Only then will we believe it can actually happen.
Of course, it doesn’t quite work that way. You can get a glimpse of success by looking at the success of others, but that doesn’t really do trick. You can go to the RV dealership and take a test drive, but there’s still that nagging issue of having the money to drive it home. You can kick back in the boss’s chair after he goes home for the day, but tomorrow morning you’ll be back in your own cubicle.
Make no mistake, there’s something to be said for dream-building. If you never drove through a neighborhood of waterfront homes, it might be hard to feed the dream of owning one. And sitting in the driver’s seat of a new car can definitely fuel the urge to buy one. There’s a reason dealers are so eager to let you take a test drive. They understand the value of dream-building as well.
But unless you believe you can someday reach your goal, you’ll never put forth the effort to make it happen. If you knew you could never advance in your present job, how late would you work each day? But if you saw other people around you being promoted on the basis of competence and hard work, you’d probably be a lot more willing to put in those extra hours.
Armed with the belief that success could be within reach, you’ll work that much harder. And the harder you work, the greater your odds of success. But without that confidence, your efforts will be half-hearted and you’ll probably give up at the first sign of resistance. When we believe failure is the likely result, it’s not hard to find reasons to support that notion.
But when we believe we can succeed, we begin to find reasons to support that belief as well. We put in the extra effort and work through any obstacles that may come along. Before long, those obstacles don’t seem as prevalent. Things start going your way. You find yourself moving closer to your goal every day, and with each step closer your belief becomes that much stronger.
Success and defeat are not verbs. There’s no action involved other than the efforts we take to make them happen. They’re not even really destinations or outcomes. They’re nothing more than a frame of mind. And when we approach any new goal, the outcome depends almost completely on our frame of mind. Whatever outcome you believe is almost always the outcome you’ll achieve.
And we can believe just about anything if it’s what we want to believe. Religion teaches us to believe in something we can’t see. We go to work each day believing there will be a paycheck at the end. We raise our kids believing they will achieve even greater success than we have.
We could just as easily believe the opposite to be true. We could disavow any notion of spiritual guidance. We could work as if the company would cheat us out of our pay. And we could raise our kids with the expectation that they’d fail miserably in life. And the outcome would almost always be less than optimal.
Believe in success and you will see success. Maybe not at the level you’d imagined, and maybe not as quickly as you’d hoped. But you’ll always achieve a higher level of success than you would have by accepting defeat. Success and defeat are just a frame of mind that sets you on a path toward an inevitable outcome. You’ll see it when you believe it. So, believe in something you really want to see.
That’s all for now. Have an awesome day!
© 2019 Dave Glardon – All rights reserved
Dave Glardon 