Staying on Top When Your World's Upside Down

“You have to find the beliefs that support your outcome – the beliefs that get you where you want to go. If your beliefs don’t do that, you have to throw them out and try something new.”
Anthony Robbins: The Way to Peak Personal Achievement

The Pyramid of Self-Belief

Belief is a force of nature, like gravity or magnetism. Unlike gravity, belief is subject to mental control. By using techniques of affirmation and visualization you can boost your energy, enhance your belief, and wire yourself for success. Self-belief is developed at four levels. Imagine a pyramid, with self-concept at the foundation, self-image and self-esteem in between, and self-confidence at the top. Each element rests upon, but also interacts with, those below. In other words, working on changing any element of the pyramid will cascade through the whole.

Level One, Self-Concept: An underlying awareness, either implicit or explicit, of your role as a human being in this universe. What do you see when you look around you: a world of scarcity and risk, or a world of abundance and opportunity? What is your concept of a higher power, and of your relationship to that higher power? Questions like these cannot be answered in an absolute sense, but rather depend largely on what you choose to see as you look around you and within you.

Level Two, Self-Image: What do you see when you look in the mirror? A winner? A victim? You will never on a sustained basis exceed your self-image.If your self-image is that of being a victim, no matter what happens, you will always be a victim. On the other hand, the self-perceived winner who loses everything will eventually find a way to get it all back, and probably sooner rather than later.

Level Three, Self-Esteem:Do you like what you see when you look in the mirror? People with high self-esteem get a lot done and make substantial contributions; people with low self-esteem tend not to. Self-esteem is not arrogance – quite to the contrary, arrogant people are often hiding low self-esteem: the only way they can feel good about themselves is by making other people feel bad about themselves.

Level Four, Self-Confidence:Do you believe that you have skills and resources to meet the challenges of your life and to effectively pursue your dreams and goals, or you are reasonably certain that you can obtain whatever you need but are now lacking. Genuine self-confidence is usually quiet, as opposed to the loud boastfulness of arrogance. You are not born with self-confidence, it is earned through experience.

One of my favorite definitions of selling is that it is the transference of belief from one person to another. The most important sale you will ever make in your life is selling you on yourself; once you’ve made that sale, all the others will be much easier. Building upon the four levels of The Pyramid of Self-Belief will help you make that sale.

In his book Live Your Dreams Les Brown wrote: “I believe the most important thing you can sell people is a belief in themselves.” That is also, I believe, one of the most important opportunities of leadership – to help people look in the metaphorical mirror and not just see who’s there now looking back at them, but to see who could be there if they could walk through the fears that are holding them back, stop listening to the nagging voice of negative self-talk, and really live their values.