13 Essentials Of Success: #2 – Faith

Welcome to the second article in our series ’13 Essentials for Success.’ Last time we looked at desire and how it is the first essential for success.

The next essential for success is Faith.

What is faith? Is it an emotion? No, but people do experience it with a degree of intensity that could be mistaken for feelings or emotions.

Essentially, faith is the trust or confidence in an idea. It’s often described as a belief that is not necessarily based on a known truth.

When it comes to having a desire for something, the object of desire does not necessarily exist yet. Hence having a strong belief that you can be do or have what you desire will propel you towards that end.

In other words, if you have not been successful yet at what your desire, you need to have faith and belief in order to obtain it.

Having said that, faith is something that needs to be curated and nurtured.

In order to do this you need to do the following:

1. Remove any counter beliefs that may sabotage your efforts. If you believe that earning money is evil, you probably won’t earn any. If you believe that obtaining the perfect partner is impossible, you probably won’t get one. The same goes for believing that those who are rich are lucky – if you think that luck will save the day, I’ve got bad news for you!
   In short, choose only beliefs that serve you and your purpose.
2. If you have trouble believing something that may be required for success, then reinforce your chosen belief(s) daily through affirmations. A simple statement such as ‘I believe I am a successful person’ can be very powerful when repeated daily for a minimum of 30 days (but preferably never stopping.)There are plenty of resources online that you can copy and even record in your own voice – just search for ‘affirmations for self confidence.’

The brain learns in a variety of ways and repetition is one of them. You probably remember being taught your tables in the first grade – rote learning is quite effective in this way. I would bet that you could still recite the 4 times tables today, many years later. It has become indelibly imprinted in your mind.

Once you have faith and belief, the benefits are huge. It’s as if you have suddenly ‘magnetized’ your thoughts together to focus them on the outcome you desire. The seed of desire, when watered by faith becomes the plant, which in turn produces the flower.

There is a simple 5 step process to fostering your belief. This process can be adopted to get anything you want to be, do or have.

Say you would like to be more self-confident. Here are the 5 simple you could use to foster your belief that you can be a confident person.

1. Resolve it upon yourself to become self confident. Resolve to do what it takes to become a confident person. Set a date and time if you want – the mind works better when given a time frame.
2.  Spend 30 minutes each day thinking about who you will be or what you will do when you are confident person. If you prefer to ‘see’ things in your mind, visualise what it will be like. Similarly for the other senses – what will it ‘feel like ‘or ‘sound like’ to be a confident person. Visualise situations where you exhibit your confidence.
3. Spend time developing your ‘definite major purpose’ in life. Most people’s lack of self-confidence is derived from not knowing this.There are plenty of online tools that help you do this.
   One such is called the ‘Passion Test,’ and another way is to complete a values evaluation. Once you know what is important to you (i.e. your values), it is a fairly straight forward process to develop your life’s purpose.
4. Affirm to yourself: ‘I know that I am a confident person. I know my purpose in life and I take action persistently and consistently each day to reinforce this.’ Add this to your daily affirmations practice.
5. Realize that nothing comes of nothing and that if you want anything in life, some effort is required for it’s attainment.Also realize that your efforts must be ‘ecological,’ and by that I mean that you must consider the effects of your efforts on yourself, those close to you and the community at large. There is nothing to be gained if you seek your own self-confidence at the expense of your family, peers or anything else that is important to you. Indeed, you could end up with the opposite!

In summary, faith has been described as that which can move mountains. The efforts of religious figures such as Christ and Mohammad are testament to this. And even modern day figures such as Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi have been able to motivate millions with their words.

And it was their faith that actually moved the mountain – that the British left India or that governments changed their policies to remove injustices.

If you have a goal in mind, a purpose to fulfill or anything else of that nature, then faith is an essential part of it’s attainment.