Affirmations Help You Create the Successful Life and Career You Want and Deserve

Self confidence is one of the keys to personal and professional success that is part of my Common Sense Success System.  I discuss it in several of my books: Straight Talk for Success, Star Power, I Want YOU…To Succeed, Your Success GPS and 42 Rules to Jumpstart your Professional Success. 

You can become self confident by doing three things.  First, choose optimism.  Believe in your heart of hearts that today will be better than yesterday, and that tomorrow will be better than today.  Second, face your fears and act.  Procrastination and inaction feed fear and rob you of self confidence.  Action cures fear.  Third, surround yourself with positive people.  Don’t let the naysayers into your life.  Hang around with people who are positive about themselves, their careers and life in general.

I have learned that self confidence is an upward spiral.  Self confidence leads to professional success, which in turn leads to increased self confidence, which leads to higher levels of success, and so on.

You might be saying, “That’s great, but how do I become self confident if I’m new in my job or career and haven’t had a lot of success to bolster my self confidence?”  There’s an old saying that applies here: “Fake it till you make it.” In other words, act as if you’re successful. This will help you succeed. Your success will help you build your self confidence.

How, do you “fake it, will you make it?”  Begin with affirmations. If you’re in a new job, tell yourself something like, “I have the skills and desire to succeed in this job,” several times a day. If you repeat this to yourself often enough, you will begin to believe it. This will help you perform at the level necessary in order to actually succeed in your job.

Affirmations are positive self talk. The idea behind affirmations is that when you think of the things to which you aspire, like becoming a success, and then tell yourself that you are a professional success, you will believe that you can become successful. More importantly, you will be more likely to do the work it takes to make that aspiration come true.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a book called Star Power, Common Sense ideas for Career and Life Success. I used a star to depict this model. I urged readers to think of themselves as a star and to aspire to becoming a career and life star. I like the star metaphor. Daily, I repeat the following affirmation to myself: “Bud Bilanich is a star.”

I’ve done a lot of working in making this affirmation a reality – redoing my website, developing better promotional materials, speaking, writing books, blogging.

I’ve also done something a little unusual. A few years ago, right after Star Power was published, I went to the “Name a Star” website and named a star after myself. Now I can say “Bud Bilanich is a star” and really believe it, because Bud Bilanich really is a star.

Bud Bilanich the star, is Catalog Number TYC  868-1011-1 in the constellation Leo. Bud Bilanich has a Visual Magnitude indicator of 11.2. Right Ascension is 11h 58m 21s. Declination is 11degrees, 43,’18.”

I don’t have a clue what all of these things mean, except the constellation Leo, which I chose because my birthday is August 14. But I do know one thing. Bud Bilanich is a star!

How’s that for an affirmation?

Affirmations work. I have become a minor star in the career and life success world.  You don’t need to go to the lengths I did to make them work either. Just decide what you want, visualize yourself as having it, and tell yourself you have it. Then do whatever it takes to make your affirmation come true.

Affirmations alone, however, are not enough to guarantee your professional success. You have to do the work. Spend the time necessary to accomplish your goals. Volunteer for projects that will get you noticed. Become an expert on your company, its competitors, and your industry. In other words, bust your butt, and you will succeed.

The common sense point here is simple.  Successful people are self confident.  If you want to become self confident, you need to become an optimist, face your fears and act and hang around with self confident people.  Your self confidence will improve as you build a successful life and career. The self confidence => success =>self confidence cycle is an upward spiral. You have to enter the cycle somewhere. Most of us don’t have a strong track record as we begin our careers, move into a new job, or start a business. Therefore, you have to “fake it till you make it” by “acting as if” you are a success.  Find ways to bolster your self confidence until you have some real successes on which you can build.  Affirmations are a great tool for helping you “fake it till you make it.”

That’s my take on self confidence and faking it till you make it.  What’s yours?  Please take a few minutes to leave a comment sharing your thoughts with us.  As always, thanks for reading.

Bud