A Real Estate Coaching Client recently expressed this (above) affirmation to me *(note the langage, he didn't say he failed or was failing, he said he was a failure).
He had come to this realization after reflecting back over the past 6-months of no deals, and realized he had over 120 leads and had only made 3 offers. He was scared or something. I'm not sure. Of those 120 leads, he should have made at least 100 offers.
Here's the lesson: Learning to see yourself as a winner and to feel like a winner happens primarily as a result of having small successful experiences and thinking self-affirming thoughts. When we believe our efforts will be successful, we become venturesome and are most likely to undertake an activity or task. Because we expect to succeed, we persist until we do. This successful experience causes self-affirming thoughts, which boost our self-esteem, enhances our self-efficacy, make us feel good, and leads us to believe we will do well in the future. Thus, we attempt more and the upward spiral continues. This internal system helps us grow and develop -- a natural continuous quality improvement program.
There is, however, an equally powerful downward spiral that can interrupt the natural growth process. If we believe we are likely to fail, we undertake activities tentatively, expecting a negative outcome. We feel anxious about our performance, we avoid or remove ourselves from anxiety-producing situations. When we fail, we say "I told you so" to ourselves and make a mental note to avoid similar situations in the future. When we expect failure and succeed anyway, we toss it off to luck or say it's a "fluke" or "only temporary," and hold on to our negative beliefs
Henry Ford said if you think you can or think you can't your right.
Here's the bottom line. On a fundamental level, your thoughts create your reality. If you think you have the capacity to assume total control of your life, take on new challenges, learn from your mistakes, and persevere to get the results you want, you will! But if you believe that no matter how hard you try, you’ll never succeed, guess what? Your fears will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The key word I want you to pull out of the paragraph above is "believe", it's the most powerful of
all the inner game concepts. We act not in accordance with the truth, but the truth as we believe it to be. This belief may be right or wrong, it may support us or not support us, but we still act that way. We act this way because we are this way, because we believe that this is the way we should act, and that belief could be 100% wrong.
If you know personally that you don't have the skill or the ability to become a leader, then why should I invest in the time and skills that go along with it?