chapter 1 Believe in Yourself!

• Believe in yourself! 
  
• Have faith in your abilities! 
• Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own power you can't be successful or happy. But with self-confidence you can succeed. A sense of inadequacy interferes with the attaintment of your hopes, but self-confidence leads to self-realization and achievement. For example, you have friend who gets A's in school and you make only C's. You never heard the last of it. So you believe that you could never succeed in life as he could. Apparently you never realized that some of those who failed to get high grades in school have been the greates successes outside the school. Just because somebody gets an A in school doesn't make him the greates man, cause maybe his A's will stop when he gets his diploma, and the fellow who get C's in school will go on later to get the real A's in life. To build up feelings of self-confidence, practice suggesting confidence concept in your mind. It is possible, even in the midst of your daily work, to drive confident thoughts into consciousness. Always people beset by the vague and sinister fear that something isn't going to be quite right. They don't believe that they have it in them to be what they want to be, and so they try to make themselves content with something less than that of which they are capable. So if you feel that you are defeated and have lost confidence in your ability to win, sit down, take a piece of paper and make a list, not of the factors that are against you, but of those that are for you. Go about your business on the assumption that what you have affirmed and visualized is true. Affirm it, visualize it, believe it, and it will actualize itself.
  Source: The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale