How much money are you losing by not believing in yourself?

Welcome to your first lesson on the psychology of self-image! 

This is going to be a crazy journey of a complete renewal of yourself, in fact, some weeks from now it will feel like you’ll have gotten out of a magic chamber where the best version of you will be churned out. 

Before we start, I would like to ask you a quick question:

Have you ever had trouble positively seeing yourself physically, mentally or spiritually? 

That’s a problem that many people have, and it’s a big one! 

Your Self Image = Your Degree of Success

You know, your self-image is going to be the determinant of how much success you’re going to reach in your life and those aren’t words of my invention but the words of most of the psychological research made in the most recent years.

Having a poor self-image is the primary cause of failure in people. From having the freedom to express themselves freely, to the ability to cope with difficult challenges of life and of becoming happy and fulfilled.

The self-image that you currently have is the real key to your personality, behavior and to how your entire life is going to unfold. Every person’s behavior can’t be understood if we don’t first understand what's the image of himself that he is holding.

Your personality is nothing but a series of ideas and mental images and concepts that you have about yourself that MUST be consistent with one another. If they are not consistent, they are rejected by your mind. 

That’s why the personality that you have is a direct consequence of the image that you hold of yourself as it can’t be constructed from something else apart from what you believe to be.

If you believe to be dynamic, you can’t also believe to be inactive as those are two completely opposite qualities and the mind can’t hold contradictory beliefs in itself. 

That’s why if you want to change how you are you have to change how you see yourself and that’s entirely possible.

Now I have your attention, right?

How “Believing in Yourself” is Created

The reason why we hold our current self-image is that we have created it from the interpretation of external events, from the experiences we had during our life and also through external factors that have influenced us like our caretakers, environment and other people that had an impact on us during our childhood.

It’s easy to see that the self-image that you hold is a consequence of both internal and external factors. This is the cause why all your actions, feelings, behaviors and even abilities that you have, need to be consistent with the self-image you have. 

You can’t behave in a way that is inconsistent with the way you view yourself, this means that you are always limited in your life by how much the image that you have of yourself is limited.

If you are currently holding a negative image of yourself right now, it means that you keep negative images about yourself impressed in your subconscious mind.

This occurred because when you were young, and your intellect was not yet well developed, you took as true whatever was said to you, even negative things that had no real evidence in the real world.

You have put a lot of garbage (negative thoughts) into your temple (mind). The problem is that you took the trash in, coming from outside of you and you let it in your temple unconsciously. 

The temple is yours since you were born, but the trash is not! That’s the garbage of other people and, unfortunately, it has been stuck with you for so long that you are now used to its presence and smell.

It's very typical for children to believe anything that is said to them and it’s no surprise that many of them believe in Santa Claus. They believe so much in Santa Claus that they create in their mind real emotional and hormonal responses every time they hear about him coming for Christmas.

From Fantasy Belief to Reality

How’s it possible to create real, tangible emotions based on a fantasy? Now you see how powerful a belief can be. If you’ve been exposed to negative ideas about you throughout your entire childhood, you automatically accepted those beliefs as true and they, as a consequence, shaped your reality.

Based on the beliefs and experiences you had in your life you have constructed the self-image you hold now. Be aware that you were not that kind of person before. All those experiences made you believe that you are what you think to be even if that’s not true at all.

The beliefs that you have about you also create a set of expectations about what’s possible or appropriate to you. Expectations turn everything into reality that confirms back the expectations you had about it. As you can see, then, your self-image is what determines your destiny and can create both negative and positive feedback loops.

Now that you understood the link between your self-image and the results you will get in your life, you can now start on creating the image that you would desire having.

It’s really fundamental to change how you see yourself, or you’ll always find a way to self-sabotage as you can’t produce a behavior you want if you don’t first have the image of the person you want to be implanted into your subconscious mind.

If you know you can sell 1 million euros per year, are you gonna sell less of that? Probably not, so the first thing to do is to work on the image that you want to have and then both your personality and behavior will change along with your personal and professional results!

Once you let your self-image expand into something bigger, you’ll extend the possibilities in your life as well. In fact, I believe you will agree with me if I say that a person can’t accomplish more of what he considers to be in his life, right? 

Quoting Dr. Maxwell Maltz "Our future is controlled by a mental blueprint we have inside our subconscious mind, and it dictates where we think we belong.”

Making a hypothetical example, if tomorrow the most famous boxing champion is hypnotized by somebody that makes him believe to be a loser, he will act exactly as a loser, even if he won the world title the day before. That’s the power of giving powerful suggestions to your mind.

What do you think are the implications of this? We will discover it together in the next lessons, for now, try to really grasp the impact that your self-image had on your life up to now.

Your Confidence Exercise

1: Become aware of all the thoughts that you are holding about you during your day, Who do you honestly think you are?

2: Are you thinking in negative, neutral or in favorable terms about you? 

3: Which thoughts are helping you move closer towards your goals? Which ones are moving you further from them? 

Label each one of them now.

This is an essential exercise so please take your time to complete it as awareness of a problem is the first step that everybody must take to defeat that problem. 

GOOD LUCK!