Episode 46: Success is About Convincing Yourself You Can

[00:00:00] What in life deserves our time and attention, and what things don't? I hope that as we consider that question, along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - "Success is About Convincing Yourself You Can."

My kids like to tell me what they can't do a lot. And [00:00:30] sometimes it's trying a new food or doing some little thing that they're afraid of. As a parent, it can get frustrating when you know how easy it would be for them if they'd just do it. Usually when my kids are with me, I'll let them have a small dessert, like a little popsicle or something, if I can tell that they've made an effort to eat their food.

I don't usually require them to finish it, but I do need to be convinced that they got some amount of nutrition out of it. And occasionally I [00:01:00] cycle into food that they haven't tried, or something that they haven't tried in a while, and predictably, I'm usually faced with some resistance. My son, in particular, likes to put up a fight about how he's just physically incapable of consuming whatever it is that I put in front of him.

I always answer with more or less the same thing, though. I say, "Son, it's OK." I'll never make you eat anything. You don't have to eat it. To which he always [00:01:30] responds, "but I won't get my popsicle." Then I'll say, yeah, that's true. After which he'll continue to tell me how he's entirely incapable of eating it.

And I'll respond with some amount of sympathy for his predicament. And then usually after about 30 minutes or so, he changes his mind and decides that the popsicle is worth the effort and eats whatever I put on the table. And of course, sometimes he decides to skip dessert. So [00:02:00] obviously my son is capable of eating whatever I put in front of him, but until he believes that as well, it can never happen.

If you want to turn your life around, but you don't believe you are capable. You never will. And if you don't think you're capable of starting a business, you never will. If you believe you're ugly, you'll never feel beautiful. And if you think you're worthless, you will continue to behave as though you are until you believe that you are not.

[00:02:30] Believing that you're capable of success is by no means a magic bullet to becoming successful in whatever goal you have, but it's an absolute prerequisite. So, for a little while now, I felt that reciting positive affirmations to ourselves seemed a little silly. But I suppose they're better than nothing.

That being said, maybe the right way to encourage ourselves is to stop telling ourselves how amazing we are and to start telling ourselves We [00:03:00] can be amazing. That's probably a lot closer to the truth anyway. And besides, if you ever actually are able to convince yourself that you are, in fact, amazing, you will likely become blind to when you are not, and then you rob yourself of opportunities to become better.

And likewise, if you convince yourself you're bad, you will likely give up trying to be good. Really, all you need is a belief that what you want to be in life is [00:03:30] possible. Who we are today will probably never be sufficient for anything more than our current level of success. And if you want to be more successful, or to achieve something greater than what you already have, you are likely going to need to become different from who you are today.

Nobody is inherently special this way. Being just the way you are will never push you above where you currently are. You may be naturally athletic and six foot seven, but you are still going [00:04:00] to need to practice to get good enough to play basketball in the NBA. Let's imagine for a second that you're a six-foot seven athletic guy.

Your first advantage as far as getting into the NBA is probably your height. But the second biggest advantage, outside of that, is the fact that you probably believe that if you wanted it badly enough, you could have a pretty good chance of making it into the NBA and when it comes down to it. Maybe [00:04:30] that belief is actually an even greater advantage then the height.

The best part about believing in your own capacity to do a thing is that it becomes contagious and other people will start to believe you are capable of it too. If it is all just an act, eventually you'll stop being consistent with that act. But people that are sincere never break their character. And people begin to see that.

When a salesperson actually buys into the superiority of their own [00:05:00] products. Their effectiveness as a salesperson skyrockets because we all can feel sincerity and we all recognize confidence. There are hundreds of sales courses out there to teach you how to be effective at selling a thing. They will tell you how to say a thing and what tone of voice.

They will give you ideas to pump yourself up, but all the good acting in the world does not compare to the true believer because the true believer is really what the acting is trying to imitate in the [00:05:30] first place. The guy that gets on the phone to sell a person something that he actually believes they need will be a monster of a salesperson.

And when that same person's belief in their product flags, so will their effectiveness. When a person believes the world is at their fingertips, they walk a little taller, they hold their shoulders back and they keep their chin up. The world round immediately recognizes a person that walks this way as a winner.[00:06:00] 

They see that person in a different light. You'll find that some people are drawn to them while others are uncomfortable with them. It seems like people react two ways when they see another person that seems to be going somewhere in life. They either like what they see, or they feel inferior to what they see and resent it.

But what's important is that you stop limiting yourself with untrue beliefs. It may be true that you are a terrible person, [00:06:30] but it's also true that you probably don't have to stay that way. It may also be true that you are an amazing person, yet you are as capable as anyone else of becoming a Terrible One.

Once you know you can achieve incredible things, all that is left is to decide which of those incredible things matter the most to you. And to decide where to start. This podcast is a deeply meaningful project for me, and I'm deeply invested in trying to promote it, because these [00:07:00] ideas have helped me put my life together.

It started with an attempt of mine to understand what would convince a soldier to willingly walk into a battle That he knew he would lose. And as of right now, this podcast probably has about nine people a week that tune into it, which in its own right is a success, but I know I can grow up further. So, all I have to do is figure out the next step in the process.

And if you can't bring yourself to sincerely believe that you can be better than you are now, [00:07:30] I think that's okay. But it might be worth challenging that belief just a little. Or maybe pretend that you believe for just a day to see how long you can stay outside of your comfort zone. Whoever you are, there's something that you can do better tomorrow than you're doing today.

But you have to believe that before it happens. We really don't have a lot of time to live. In the grand scheme of things, even a long life of a hundred years really is not that much time. As short [00:08:00] as that life is, I feel, in a way, we cut it down even further and leave so much of it on the table when we decide at some point in our life, whether at 20 or at 80 years old, that we are just going to coast through the rest of our time.

Is life not for living? And is living not about growing? Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. [00:08:30] And that's a poem by Dylan Thomas. This is Skipping Stones. You can find this podcast, "Success is About Convincing Yourself You Can", anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts.

For more information about me, feel free to visit skippingstonessr.com. And if you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. If there is a topic you would like me to speak on, please feel free to email me at info@skippingstonessr.com. New episodes will be released weekly, every [00:09:00] Monday.