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To be young is to be impressionable. Take time to reflect on the impact of things you were told and happenings that occurred during the naive and innocent days of childhood. My past thoughts stir memories from church, where I learned the earth was going to soon burn and if you sinned you would go to hell. Through baseball, I learned that even perfection was not good enough. I was told by one high school teacher that I would be least likely to go to college. In college, told that I would never amount to much by my academic advisor every time we met. Later, I was told I had a bad attitude for challenging the religious leader I worked for who had been lying about the number of people who attended his church. One mistaken belief carried to another from childhood into adult life. What did you come up with?
Early life experience plays a significant role in the development of how you learn to believe or not believe in yourself. It’s not what happened to you but how you internalized messages about yourself in what you were told or what happened to you. Think about where you are, what you do, and how you respond to adversity and failure. What have these experiences taught you about self-belief? Much of your current life is shaped or at least influenced by what you learned to believe about yourself and the world around you when you were young, gullible, and immature.
It is common to associate self-belief with accomplishment and doing something great. If you do exceptional things then confidence must be oozing through your veins. If you want to succeed athletically, then do what the greats have always done. When the results don’t match the greats or your confidence waivers, then it is easy to conclude that the reason they succeeded and you did not is because they believe deeper in themselves and you don’t.
Yet, there is a distinct difference from self-belief in what you do and who you are. A scoreboard champion measures his self-worth and establishes identity from the results of the scorecard h/she keeps, whatever that is!
A heart champion is more concerned about being true to one’s heart and not just winning or losing. Becoming true to your heart takes a willingness to go deeper and find meaningfulness in all of life’s endeavors, including failure. They know that losing is a part of the ebb and flow of life. The definition is determined by the vision of destiny from within which supersedes any result.
This is where belief in who you are comes into play. It is only an illusion to think that you can control the results no matter how great you are in what you do! There is a difference between influencing results and controlling them!
However, unconditional confidence comes from who you are, not from the results of what you do! When results are unfavorable, it is knowing and experiencing the depths of disappointment, fear, anxiety, failure, emptiness, shame, and heartache that your integrity in believing and accepting who you are becomes your source of unconditional confidence.
When you separate from successful or failed results you will discover what you believe about who you are, which is different from what you believe you can do.
Embracing empowered beliefs about who you are will require that you visit what you learned and internalized about yourself during young and vulnerable days of youth. This is where you will find mistaken beliefs that focus more on doing and less on being.
This is how you got set up to evaluate your sense of self by what you do! Nothing wrong with being a scoreboard champion. Positive results are fine and desired, but fundamentally, a heart champion already has determined that they are “an unrepeatable miracle of the universe.” Heart champions understand that no victory will add to this reality and no defeat will take away from it. It is already etched into the stone of destiny that exists in their heart.
Once you establish a practice of believing in who you are, those beliefs become indelible. No matter what you face, achieve, or fail at, you will return to the unshakable belief that you are an unrepeatable miracle of the universe. This is enough and is unchangeable. Once you recognize and practice living from this space, it will transform what you understand about self-belief.
