“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right,” Henry Ford once said. Doubt really is often the only dream killer. The only difference between those who do, and those who don’t, is the presence of self-doubt. There’s no inherent super-ability or extraordinary intelligence behind everyone’s success, but rather, self-responsibility and confidence in their own abilities that leads them to to pursue the work others fear starting out of self-doubt. People can do hard things. Most of them are ordinary people that simply had the unordinary tendency to believe in their abilities and simply start and persevere. When we let emotions like doubt control and anxiety control our reality, we stop ourselves from doing everything we could have succeeded at in life. Put your goals, not negative emotions in the driver’s seat.
What do you value in life? To break out of the human tendency to let actions be led by our ephemeral emotions (that leave us with a reality that doesn’t match our dreams) we must be led by our goals, not our fears. Each time we think we’re undeserving or not equipped for the life or goals we want, we should remember, “ordinary people do extraordinary things through hard-work and discipline.” Learning curves exist in every goal that’s worth it and every successful person has had to go through them. Failure is truly a guiding, instructive, part of the unpaved road to success. Progress means taking the wrong turn to find out the right one afterall.
People can do hard things. They do them all the time. They don’t stop themselves because of the belief they’re not good enough as others who have already achieved those things. They don’t believe inherent super-abilities are required to achieve them. They believe in discipline and hard work. You either work and endure your way to a life that you are passionate about, or succumb to a stressful life you dread waking up to every morning.
Failure isn’t actually trying and not succeeding, it’s trying and giving up, or never starting at all because of self-doubt. When we redefine the parameters of how we view failure and success, we are free to pursue our goals without this fear of not being an expert in the beginning of the learning curve.
Henry Ford’s quote perfectly captures the power of how thoughts control our reality. When we change thought patterns — by simply observing negative thoughts and giving them no credibility — we change our reality. Thoughts create a feedback loop that can either be positive, or negative. When we think negative, we feel negative, we take negative actions (avoidance, self-sabotage, vices, etc.), and which result in negative consequences that become our entire reality. Those consequences just reinforced our negative thoughts in one big negative feedback loop. Soon enough we’ve become imprisoned by these false negative thoughts or stagnated in life by thoughts of self-doubt. We can’t break free of them, because we’ve been living through the negative haze the unreliable narrators depression and anxiety have created.
While circumstances in life can often influence our thoughts, we can recognize that while we’re not to blame, we are responsible for changing the controllable. Challenging ourselves to not complain about anything that we won’t try to change is freeing and life-changing. Accept what you can’t control, and change what you can’t accept. Sometimes things may seem uncontrollable because they’re challenging, so we silently resign to them. We go miserably through the motions each day, submitting to situations that we’ve been in so long, that it seems impossible to imagine anything else being our reality. However, anything worth it is challenging. Anything worth it takes time. And time will pass anyway. Recognize your limited human autonomy and do good with it to the full extent that you can.
We must put our values, not our emotions in the driver’s seat. We must believe that we are as equipped as any successful person is to achieve our goals because all they require is discipline, hard-work, and resilience. We must break free of the negative-thoughts feedback loop to take better actions that create better consequences. If not, what are we left with? You can’t hate or doubt yourself into the person you want to be. You can’t stress or breakdown your way out of a problem.
“Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”
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