(This is an excerpt from my blog post on this topic. For the full post, click here)
https://beyondhomosapien.com/how-to-believe-in-yourself/
Here’s something society doesn’t teach: how to believe in yourself.
Learning how to believe in yourself is one of the most important parts of life. Unfortunately, we don’t even get a definition of what it means to believe in yourself.
There is no course in high school or college that teaches us how to believe in ourselves. In fact, quite the opposite…
School and society is setup in a way that it becomes difficult to learn how to believe in yourself. At school, we are taught to listen to the teachers, stand in line, color in the lines, and abandon our childlike sense of creativity. Meanwhile, fundamentalist religions are teaching us that we are full of “original sin” and inherently wrong.
That’s the message of both school and church: you come into this world “wrong”.
You need guidance. You don’t have the answers. You need to listen to the adults. You have to listen to the pastor or you’ll go to hell. You have to listen to the teacher or you’ll fail your class and get in trouble.
That’s why these messages need to begin changing…
We need to teach people how to believe in themselves. We have to teach self esteem and help individuals experience personal growth and personal development without feeling like they are failures. Instead of teaching kids to ignore that little voice in their heads, we need to teach them how to believe in themselves.
Believing in yourself means listening to that little voice in the back of your head… That little voice with all the crazy ideas.
Listening to that intuition… Listening to your “gut instincts”.
THAT is what it means to “believe in yourself”.
Believe in that little voice.
Believe in your feelings.
Believe in what feels right for you.
That is your birthright.
The world NEEDS that voice. Your voice is what is missing from the collective conversation.
Instead of teaching kids how to listen to authority, we need to teach them how to listen to that voice… How to act from a place of courage, creativity, and inspiration instead of a place of fear and waiting for guidance.
When we teach our kids to ignore their own little voice, we teach them how to fail at contributing to society. We breed a society that is not able to come up with creative solutions to complex problems. Instead of wondering why the world seems to be “falling apart” in 2019, let’s focus on teaching more folks how to believe in themselves.
Believe in that little voice with all the crazy ideas.
Follow that voice to the ends of the earth. That is how you will fully know yourself. That is when you will have the fullest experience of this world that your soul is craving to have.
We come to this world to express and experience something deep within our soul.
When we fail to listen to that little voice, we fail to experience what our souls are begging to do.
Until we learn how to believe in ourselves and follow that voice without fear, we will repeat patterns that will help us get it right.
So listen to that little voice!
Write that book.
Start that podcast.