Build your self-confidence and achieve your goals through a look at your strengths and lessons from the past

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Michael Jordan

A few great words of wisdom and exercised from the book I am reading “This Year I Will…” by M.J. Ryan. Ryan says that many of us look back at many of our failures and consider them the reason that we may not succeed with a new goal, yet we can motivate and empower ourselves so much more by looking at our past.

Ryan’s recommendation: go back and look at all the things you’ve done in the past that show your strengths. “No matter who you are, no matter the circumstances of your life, you have talents and skills that have produced success. Even if you feel like you’ve messed up over and over, you have succeeded at something – finishing school, being a friend, paringin a house, learning to cook – and you used qualities of heart and mind to do so,” she writes. She advises that rather than ignoring your past, you instead inventory your successes as a list of competencies. Select 4-6 accomplishments, write each down, and then look over the list and write the strengths and skills you used repeatedly to create success.

These are the personal competencies you can use to achieve any goal. And, reminding yourselves of these, even putting your list in front of you where you work or see daily, can do tremendously for your self-confidence towards new goals. In fact, many researchers say that self-confidence is a significant (and often the single most significant) factor in achieving success.

Combine that with your ability to learn from your mistakes, and you’ll be much more capable of achieving what you are after. We tend to think that we’ve gone down a similar path before, and we need to put our failures behind us. But instead, she writes, we need to consider each failure as a learning lesson. What did we learn from that path and how can we use it now for our new attempts. “If your emotional brain thinks the task is too much like what you’ve unsuccessfully tried before, it will sabotoage your efforts. So the way to start discovering the answers is to recognize that you actually are not right back where you started. You now have a wealth of information and experience from the previous attempts, no matter how many those may be, to draw on this time. You know where you got stuck, what threw you off,” Ryan explains.

Tomorrow I will make up my own list of “competencies” and think through what I’ve learned from the past – to build my own self-confidence up and help ensure my success as I continue a path towards new career opportunities.