I remember approaching the final year of my university degree thinking about what I was going to do next.
I was working a casual job at the local university, the “dot com bubble” of crazy internet company valuations had just burst, and I was about to graduate with average grades from a business management degree with absolutely no intention of getting a full time job.
I had played around with the internet for several years by then (I went online in 1998, and graduated university in 2002). I spent time in newsgroups and forums, reading up about tennis and card games, and getting excited by some of the crazy money that was flying around for internet companies during the peak of the bubble.
Coming from Brisbane in Australia, which back then was certainly not a hot bed for internet companies, I wasn’t exactly surrounded by people like me.
I didn’t know any other entrepreneurs besides a handful of people who had businesses in the real world. These were small business owners who had little corner store cafes, boutique craft shops or a small accountancy practice. Not the kind of businesses I was interested in starting.
I briefly flirted with the idea of starting up an internet cafe like a friend had done, but quickly gave up on the idea when I heard how many hours he was working (some days he stayed at work for 24 hours straight!).
What Happened Next
As fate would have it, I ended up heading to Tasmania after I graduated university, embarking on a six week roller-coaster-ride backpacking adventure. I picked apples and grapes during 10-hour shifts, earning $50 a day (I wasn’t a great fruit picker), lived in hostels with scorpions and drunk young people (as a non-drinker, it’s always an interesting experience being around my less-than-sober peers).
It was an intense six weeks, and by the end of it I was ready to get back into business.
As you will know if you have heard my story before, it was at this stage in my life that I took on my proofreading business as a full time project.
I previously made a little money online with my card game website, but after I lost all my profits to credit card fraud (purchases made from Thailand with stolen cards), I decided to shut down my e-commerce store.
I was ready for something new. I wasn’t sure exactly what I would do, but I know what I wanted and what I didn’t want.
Belief In A Result
One of the most difficult concepts I have ever tried to grasp is the idea of having belief when there is no physical demonstration to back up your belief.
I’m not talking about god or religion here.
What I am referring to is something as simple as believing if you do certain things a result will occur.
Belief comes into it when the outcome is something you have never done before but want to, and it’s not something you consider “easy”.
You don’t need belief to know that if you cook a meal and eat it you can solve your hunger problem. You have performed this action for years, you know it works, and you do it every day without issue.
Where I find the concept of belief becomes important is when you are talking major changes in your life.
For example –
- You need belief that you can start a business that will succeed so you do not need a job.
- You need belief that if you keep putting yourself out there you will meet someone and fall in love.
- You need belief if you keep exercising for long enough you will significantly transform the shape of your body.
- You need belief that if you keep writing eventually you will publish a best selling book.
- You need belief that if you keep practicing your sport, eventually you will start winning tournaments.
These are all major milestones in life, which contain many variables that are out of your control.
It is because of the complexity, the element of chance, and the satisfaction and happiness that comes from achievement, that makes these goals some of the most important in our lives.
It has to be something difficult to achieve in order to feel a genuine sense of accomplishment.
Belief In What Has Never Happened Before
I remember when I first heard about the law of attraction, or more simply put, the idea that “like attracts like”.
The concept teaches that you need to resonate with what you want to attract into your life. If you think about and feel loss or unworthiness or failure all the time then that is what you are going to get.
That makes enough sense to me. Even on a practical level it’s pretty logical that thinking positive about what you are doing is much more likely to be helpful.
However I found the concept more tricky when you hit upon major goals that up to this point you have never achieved before, especially if you have tried and failed.
Imagine you have attempted to lose weight many times, using diets and exercise plans, but it has never worked.
When you start a new regime to lose weight, you are supposed to think and feel like it is working. You need to align all your thoughts and feelings to be congruent with the outcome.
That’s not an easy thing to do when you have never achieved the outcome before and all you have tasted is failure.
Your natural default state, whether positive or negative, will impact how you view what you are working towards. For all but the most irrationally optimistic people, consistent failure is going to wear you down.
It’s a very unique skill to be able to clean the slate each time you attempt to do something you have tried to do before and look at past failures as merely lessons towards success.
Emotions are emotions. If you keep getting rejected, your website never gets traffic, the number on the weight scale never goes down, or someone else always beats you, it is difficult to really believe things will be different next time round.
The older you get and the more often you experience the same results, the harder it is to align your belief that things will improve.
You Can’t Fool Yourself To Believe
Wikipedia starts its definition of Belief like this…
Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a conjecture or premise to be true. – Wikipedia
Dictionary.com includes this in its definition…
Confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof.
– Dictionary.com
Belief, by definition, means you believe in something that hasn’t happened or you can’t prove using our physical criteria for existence.
You know when you believe something and when you don’t. Conviction is a clear feeling, no matter how misguided it might be.
As a person who has experienced a lot of self doubt over the years, problems with self esteem, lack of confidence – all the usual growing up challenges – I decided to spend some time deliberately looking at my beliefs.
I wanted to figure out how to create real conviction and genuine belief that I could achieve my goals.
I needed to have a congruent process when I was working towards big changes to my life. I had to think right, feel right and believe it was possible.
I’ve never found concepts like positive affirmations effective if you are just repeating them like a robot, hoping something will change because of the words alone.
When I work on my own inner dialogue I want to believe what I am saying.
Manufacturing True Belief
Creating real belief is not a simple process (religious leaders might disagree when it comes to spiritual belief, but let’s not go down that rabbit hole right now…).
I’ve used techniques and concepts like Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, Positivity Training, Reframing and The Success Ladder to help generate real belief.
Teaching yourself the age old art of patience also helps significantly, yet is probably the hardest part.
There is one other technique I have found particularly effective because it forces your rational brain to take over your emotional one.
This technique is called “Inevitability Thinking“.
Inevitability thinking is simple enough in concept. It relies on two things –
- Following a proven system
- Setting up the conditions to guarantee you can execute the system
Why I find it such an amazing technique is that it forces you to focus not on the intangibles or the emotions and baggage you have built up around what you are working towards, and instead focus on the process.
The key with this technique – and where belief comes into it – is that you place your belief in a system that exists independently of all your previous results.
All of this of course comes down to mindset. How you solve problems, where you place blame, whether you see conditions as permanent or transient, and can you follow and execute a system no matter what roadblocks you come across, are all critical.
One of the great benefits of working on all these areas of mindset and executing techniques like inevitability thinking, is that you start to believe in what you are doing. You experience genuine belief because you start to see signs of tangible change.
Results are the single best way to solidify belief. The more improvement you experience, the stronger your belief, and thus the bigger your achievements become.
It’s a self-reinforcing process. All you need to do is start the flywheel turning and momentum will carry everything forward.
Master Your Mindset
Productivity And Mindset Training For Professional Bloggers
All of the concepts I have mentioned in this article, including an entire section on Inevitability Thinking, are covered in the guide.
It is especially important for you to buy this guide if you have yet to experience any result online and you are new to blogging and information marketing.
When you don’t have tangible results to tap into to boost your confidence, you rely 100% on your ability to use your mind to create belief. Belief and confidence then lead to tangible results. This becomes a positive cycle that takes you to amazing places.
You can get better through mindset training.
Yaro Starak
Still Believing
hi Yaro
I like eating the big Elephant piece by piece, I mean once piece at a time… the same goes for reaching your big objectives or goals, as you stated…
In my experience online and offline, struggling with all the inherent challenges, while having to run a niche site empire and feed my 2 toddlers, I’ve learned that your mindset is like a muscle, you have to adjust and grow it on a regular basis, otherwise it’ll die or won’t help further…
Like for example, if you want to launch a product, a blog or whatever, and look of your lack of experience, instead of looking at how others have done it, and do anything in your power to imitate their approach and results, you’re doomed to fail… as fear of failure is the #1 objective you have to overcome when it comes to empowering your mindset…
Hope it helps?
Ahh John, another elephant eater. I really do feel sorry for all these elephants 🙂
I agree with everything you write and I suspect with two toddlers you have to be ever better at is as you have less room for wasting time.
Ahh the jobs of being only responsible to yourself!
Hi Yaro.
Great blog post as always.
Mindset has always been an issue for me. Some days I’m productive and feeling great, especially when a heaps of sales come through. Some days it’s not the same and I begin doubting myself and whether I can achieve my goals.
I would love to have that mindset of absolute certainty that no matter, I will achieve my monthly income goals I have set for myself.
I think your mindset guide will really help out so I’m going to grab it today.
Cheers
Paul
I hear you Paul, and totally agree.
I try and get off the rollercoaster as much as I can, but I still feel a whole lot more excited when the sale notification emails come through compared to those days with nothing.
I do think it is something I have become a lot better at though over time. I allow myself to feel a certain level of excitement, but with experience I know that nothing lasts forever.
If anything I appreciate it more now. For example with my new eguide that you just bought, I’m feeling a little extra grateful because it’s my first new written product in a long time. I know sales will drop off, so I’m finding myself more excited by even just one sale.
I may have become a little too used to selling lots of product in the past. Nothing like a few years with nothing on the market to remind yourself how lucky you are that you can get paid to be a writer.
Yaro
Hi Yaro,
Well written article. I think there’s a fine line difference between “belief” and “conviction” (feels more certain and perhaps absolute). However, what I find interesting is that most people who do “positive affirmations” have ongoing self-doubts regardless of how small it may be and I guess there’s still a lack of conviction there and they are not 100% certain that they could achieve what they have set out to achieve. Of which in that case, having a proven system to follow would be very useful in giving them that additional confidence that they need to believe that it would work. (Assuming if they do actually follow the system and execute it). Hope I’m making sense here.
Yes that makes sense Raymond, that was the point I was making.
The hard part is knowing when something doesn’t work was it because of what you did, or your timing, or was the system wrong, or did you not work on it long enough, or any number of potential sources of self doubt.
When things get complex everything becomes more variable. That’s when controlling as many of the variables as you can becomes powerful. You can trust a system when you are confident in your ability to execute, and as with anything, once you do succeed, you become even more confident, hence the success ladder principle is very important too.
Yaro
Step by and step and continuous learning and challenging yourself is definitely the way to achieve your goals.
Many people read too much and never take the next step. It really does work!
One tip I like to share is keep a diary. You can really see how far you come when you look back. I have finance diary, personal diary, health diary and business diary.
Good tip with the diary Norm. EJ is kinda my diary, but not quite so private 🙂
Yaro
Belief is one of the most neglected components of success.
Belief is a lens through which all our experiences pass before we make decisions and take action. If we are saddled with beliefs about passivity, self-doubt and pessimism, we will continually create the obstacles to confirm those beliefs. It is only through changing our fundamental belief structures that we can become the people we need to be to accomplish our dreams and goals.
Thanks for writing about this in a world that tends to focus on tricks and tactics.
Right on Kirk, can’t argue with anything you said. I agree, talking about techniques is only part of the solution.
Yaro
Hi Yaro,
Just purchased your Master Your Mindset program yesterday and I’m loving it! You sparked some ideas in me for my new website that I KNOW will INEVITABLY get my site to where it needs to go. Thank you so much for all the work and thought you put into this excellent product! The 80/20 rule and inevitability thinking will be my daily mantras to see me through–invaluable!
Barb 🙂
Hi Barb,
As you know I used your comment in my newsletter. Thank you so much for putting in the effort to leave me feedback like this, I really appreciate it.
We had some chats on email too and I know you are going to recommend my guide as an affiliate, so thanks for your support there too. I’m sure because you have read the guide it will be easier to talk about when you promote it.
Hopefully you can make a couple of sales to earn back the cost of the guide and we can help more people with their mindset and productivity.
Thanks again!
Yaro
Hi Yaro,
thats great thinking… my teacher had told me at the school that ‘ success start from our mind, if we thought we success. it would be”..
i still believe on it..
Arif
Sounds like you had a good teacher Arif!
Yaro
Hi Yaro,
I’ve experienced a lot of the problems you’ve discussed in this article, and still to this day I let the emotional and doubting side of things get the better of my analytical, systematic approach that I try hard to maintain.
It isn’t always easy but after the first couple of successes everything gets easier.
I think we all struggling with the emotional side of things Jamie, some more than others of course.
That being said, it’s the emotional side that makes the process fun too, so you really do need to find that balance.
Yaro
When you believe, you keep working on your business even though it looks like it’s taking forever to succeed.
One thing I’ve learnt about belief, is that you cannot share your feelings with others. People will discourage you and tell you that you won’t succeed. This can put doubt in you. So, I keep the belief to myself and keep working at what I’m doing.
Hi Joyce,
Yes sometimes people can try and bring you down especially if they fear the path you are walking.
Some can also support you though, so make sure you don’t completely shut off what you are doing from everyone. You may find some important allies if you talk about what you are doing.
Yaro
Just a couple of points I’d like to make .. I should probably point out that I am not a fan of positive thinking. I believe it to be destructive and harmful to society and to some extent has replaced religion and/or God as an excuse for success or failure. It’s the American Dream on steroids for the internet age. That said, my principal problem with your philosophy is that it doesn’t work. In fact it’s not even a philosophy it’s unproven physco babble designed to sell to those struggling with real world problems. It’s similar to a rousing speech given by a southern Baptist minister rousing his flock on a Sunday morning.
To suggest that positive thinking delivers success is to ignore millennia of economic,scientific and philosophical thought and return us to the dark ages.
‘I think therefore I am’ and ‘I believe therefore it will happen’ are not the same thing. Just ask the millions of victims of religious war mongering who firmly and unquestionably believed their God would save them.
The pseudo science of Positive Thinking has become a stick to beat an already downtrodden populace (just ask the thousands of unemployed people told by their HR departments that they should see their being layed off as an opportunity) . In truth it has more in common with a cult than a philosophy.
You say above you ” wanted to figure out how to create real conviction and genuine belief that I could achieve my goals”
Did you try hypnosis ? Seems to me that if hypnosis worked you could have saved yourself a lot of effort – assuming that real conviction and genuine belief were actually of any use in achieving your goals.
.. and finally what on earth does the following sentence mean ? I don’t think this is an unreasonable question as you say yourself it’s “the key with this technique”
“The key with this technique — and where belief comes into it — is that you place your belief in a system that exists independently of all your previous results.”
Hi Michael,
I’m surprised you have inferred that my article suggests positive thinking as a solution. I stated quite specifically in the article that I don’t believe positive affirmation work, I think genuine belief is what works, and that is a lot more than just positive thinking. I’m not proposing anything along the lines of just thinking about something and you will get it.
I do however give credence to positive psychology, which if you look into it, has plenty of peer researched proof that it works.
I’ve not tried hypnosis before, but I wouldn’t look to that as a means to create belief in this situation either. The whole point of my article that belief comes from a place of practical reality. If you follow a system that works, just like following a recipe to cook, you know eventually you will bake a cake. The belief is in the recipe – or the system.
And that end question you had about this statement –
“The key with this technique — and where belief comes into it — is that you place your belief in a system that exists independently of all your previous results.”
Is about exactly that, believing your recipe will work because other people have used it. The challenge that I talk about with previous results, to continue the cake analogy, is that you may have tried to make a cake several times before, so even if you have a recipe that is supposed to work you will have self doubt because you are anchoring previous results to what you are doing now.
The key is not to do that, to unlink previous results to what you are currently doing and gain belief in the new recipe you are following so you have confidence in your current process.
Yaro
Good article Yaro. Micahel is a nob.
Achieving goals and getting better at anything – like you said, is about finding a system to follow, getting results (good or bad), testing and tweaking. Use the small wins (sales, comments, opt-ins, small weight loss) as inspiration along with stories of other peoples successes to keep plugging away. Stay focused on the goal.
Although, I think we all differ when it comes to “delayed gratification” and the will to keep going.
Law of attraction of course works as much as you let it…
Law of attraction at play… suddenly I need a new washing machine, and suddenly, I see ads for washing machines everywhere, as though the universe was targeting little old me!
Or could it be my focus and awareness has been cranked up because I need a washing machine?
To achieve your goal’s: Test, tweak, repeat and keep going people! Most worthy endeavors take time (building a new business or product, losing weight or skill mastery); they require consistent effort and of course – belief in the process; they are more marathon than sprinting.
I agree with you that you precisely did not provide what Michael complains about. Instead, your post is one of the very few which tries to look at positive thinking in a very genuine way.
The only complaint I have is that where it started to get interesting, you promoted a book. But of course that is the whole point of your balanced approach of giving content for free and have us pay for the rest of it. That is totally understood. In any case your free post already provides a lot of food for thought and we cannot complain at all about the amount of free advice we’ve got in the past.
Now I will reread your article and perhaps buy the book.
Since we’ve moved on to talking about cakes .. what if the ingredients are horrible and not really suited to cakes. Doesn’t much matter what recipe you use if you want a brussell sprout cake .. it’s gonna be a mess.
But let’s assume for a moment there’s a brussell Sprout appreciation conference going on and all the brussell sprout lovers from all over the world are gathered in one place. Someone suggests they make a cake .. they all love it. One entrepreneureal bright spark decides to mass produce said cake. He follows a proven cake sales and marketing plan .. no sales (obviously).
It’s obvious what happened – group think – anyone outside the conference could’ve told him he was nuts. Sometimes it’s the core ingredient that’s wrong and sometimes that core ingredient is the person (or group of people) themselves. They may want success in a given area but that doesn’t mean they’re capable of it – no matter what systems they follow.
Therein is my objection to positive physcology as espoused in so many blogs. Positivity suggests that it’s never the individuals fault – they can always change. Funnily enough that change usually depends on them buying something.
Positive physcology is about mental health and of course it has applications in the real world. But I would suggest it’s best left to the profesionals, in the hands of armchair physcologists it’s dangerous.
Most of the things you’ve said in this and other articles on you blog – and yes I’ve read a lot of them – are common sense. If you do this then this will happen, and so on.. but there’s always this underlying reference to positivity and self-belief. There isn’t a snowballs chance in hell that reading a book or following a system is going to do what physcologists the world over struggle to do on a daily basis – change someones opinion of themselves or their prospects.
Yes you can change your habits .. get up earlier, be patient, improve your writing skills but these are all practical skills and steps and are principally about good old fashioned hard work.There is no proof anywhere or serious peer reviewed study saying that visualizing success brings success.
It’s easy to understand why so many people believe, or want to believe it’s true.
In conclusion, I like your blog – the factual bits. I really don’t get why you keep throwing in the positive physcolgy and self belief mumbo jumbo.
Hey Yaro,
Great post, mindset is such a massive part of any success and I know that people are interested in it as well from some of my blog posts about it in the past!
Having a strong belief in what you are doing or trying to do really is key in getting yourself over the finishing line!
However some people take the law of attraction stuff in slightly the wrong way. Unfortunately some people have read the books and watched the films and thought “great I can just sit back and thing about $1,000,000 and it will come to me”
I wish it worked like that but as you and I both know it takes a lot of hard work as well as that strong belief to achieve your results!
Keep on blogging! I always enjoy reading your posts.
Speak soon
Simon
Hi Simon,
I do find it funny the cycle that the movie the secret created about the law of attraction. It was an underground hit, then a mainstream hit when Oprah surfaced it, then it was looked upon negatively because of what you talked about – presenting an overly simplified you get what you think about message (if you watch the movie it doesn’t actually say it that simply, but some of the case studies made it sound like that).
So now if you mention the law of attraction some people immediately call it psycho babble with no real substance behind it. If you really dig into it you see that the teachings on the law of attraction involve a lot more than just thinking and waiting. It’s very action focused, not just about wishing.
Thanks for your comment!
Yaro
Hey Yaro,
Thanks for your reply. I’m totally with you on that one. I have some friends that think I am a bit of a hippy (maybe because I am a little) mainly because I talk about these sorts of things. I know however there is more to these things than just sitting back and thinking about it. No one got anyway by sitting on their behinds and thinking about success! Everyone had to actually get out there and do something to make it happen.
Chat soon
Simon
I set my self little goals ($500 a month, $600 a month, $700 a month, etc), that way I more likely to hit them that just setting myself a big goal of hitting something like $100,000 a year or something similar.
Small might be boring, but it certainly helps you succeed more. 🙂
Great advice, belief that you can do something goes a lot farther than just telling yourself you have to do it. You have to believe you can do it, and I agree that small goals are just as important as big goals, and sometimes your small goals work together to reach your big goal.
Hi Yaro,
I’m excited about this new guide book because mindset is my biggest challenge. So far I’ve yet to make any money online and I think it’s because I read information all the time, but I get paralyzed and don’t know where to start. I have over 8K subbies on YouTube and thriving FB community 12K strong. I know I have something I just haven’t figured out how to monetize it.
I’m not willing to give up though. I know it can be done so I’ve committed myself to keep trying until I can make things work. I stopped telling others my goals because some of my closest friends tell me it’s too late to make money online.
I appreciate all you do and I’m excited to focus on my mindset.
Trudy, it sounds like you have a pretty good base there to work with. You just need to figure out what they want and then start giving it to them – for a fee of course!
Mindset is a big part of this, as is strategy, which go hand in hand.
Keep up the momentum and I am sure you will get there.
Yaro
I think you should not just believe you’re going to achieve your goals but be sure you’ll do it. You just need to do everything the right way. All in all if someone could do that, then it’s possible.
Hi Yaro,
Lovely Post. I feel if you have believe in yourself and you aim high then you can achieve success. Set a goal and believe in yourself.
Excellent post! I always tell people that “mindset” is the most important thing to me, above all else. For a long time, I thought it was all about knowing “what to do” and just getting it done. I learnt an important lesson to visualise success – what it looks and feels like. Just like working out regularly, it’s helpful to “train your mind” as well, and I’ve invested a lot in books etc (Money Well Spent) – On that note, I look forward to grabbing your latest book!
Hi Yaro
A thought provoking post. When I was younger and first took on a sales position I had no evidence that I could be successful, however, there was a lot of evidence that others in this profitable organisation were, so I followed their system, tweaked it to suit my personality and set the goal, from day one, that I would join the wining team at year end in Acapulco. I did succeed and each year after that with ever increasing targets.
Later when I decided to go it alone I floundered, despite diligently following systems and setting goals. In my finances I had a red line amount that I had set to tell me This Is Not Working. I then changed tactics and took a different direction. Like you I thought long and hard about what had enabled me to be a success and realised how much I like to ‘represent’ a bigger ideal, a bigger picture than me on my own. Choosing something with this bigger picture helps me to “not sweat the small stuff”. I also think finding support through a mentor/s is very important – I appreciate that you take on this role.
I used to struggle with beliefs,self-doubts,…may I suggest here another approach, a radically different perspective.
A coach used to tell his clients when he feels self doubts are stopping them in the way : I don’t ask you to believe this will work, I just ask you to test it!
and here happened a shift in perspective : instead of struggling to change one’s beliefs and replace negative one’s with positive one’s , here the focus is on action, testing and experimenting.
I believe that is what my article was about Abderrafie – belief in a system that you execute (test).
Hey Yaro,
Totally agree. Actually, it starts in the mind. You should see it completed, done and dusted in your mind’s eye. What the mind can conceive and accomplish, the body will follow.
I reckon it is about 90% mindset , and 10% strategy. BTW, i just made my first affiliate commission of $20 yesterday. I’ve visualised long ago, i was earning good commission…it was small victory, a confident boost.
I’ve seen Anthony Robbins interviewed John Reese about his failure/success online. John stated that i could see my self driving my Ferrari, felt it, in my mind’s eye long before i made $1MM on the internet.
Nice blog.
Cheers, Leo