Many people, my self included in the past, believe that life is unfair … I would have a plan about something I wanted to work on or achieve and sometimes when my first attempt was not successful, I would just give up.
My giving up often had to do with what people around me had said, or hearing about how so and so have failed in their attempt to start a business or to follow a certain path either I sports or show business.
When I realized how limiting it was to hang around negative people, I had to choose who I associate with; however, though the change in people around me was moving toward the right direction but somehow I was still ruled by this amazing fear or negative thoughts spiral. With those stories of failure at the back of my mind, understanding and embracing this principle was a matter in which I had very little choice on. It was either I held-on to those limiting beliefs and always spoke about how I nearly achieved something for the rest of my life or apply this principle to cement my process of unleashing the giant inside me.
A simple definition of this principle is: Creating an inability to give up no matter how heavily the “odds” are stacked against you.
I created a simple process of how to build this inability to give up, by using the most common tools to do this … OPE (other-people’s-experience). OPE is simply stories of other people who had in their lives experienced amazing adversity and yet went on to achieve their goals. They thus manifested their purpose, attained their vision though goals they set and just made it happen against all odds.
The reason I used this simple methodology is that, the stories told of those who had failed are the ones which paralyzed me: so then what else could uplift me rather than the stories of those who had made it. I simply replaced the belief “I can’t” with the one “if they can, so can I”. I carefully chose the stories about these people, read them, memorized them and used them as an anchor each time I was confronted with challenges in the journey of life.
“Henry Ford forgot to put a reverse gear in his first car”
Building Resilience Through A Success Source
- Change your spending habits: instead of buying CD’s buy autobiographies of people you can relate to and who inspire you
- Search for powerful stories, which illustrate the great human spirit of defying adversity, embrace them as if they were yours
- Attend seminars and workshops, which deals with issues of success in all formats, be it financial or spiritual
- Be a student of life
- Use visualisation techniques to build consciousness, which is always positive and directed
- Do not be afraid to confront people and ask questions
This article is an extract from Billy’s book “From Barefoot to Snake Skin Shoes“