Believe in Yourself One Small Promise at a Time

You know your strengths; no one has to tell you what you’re good at. You may have a sticky note on the bathroom mirror that says You’ve got this!

You have a list of affirmations you read sometimes.

And you still don’t feel like you believe in yourself.

Well, let me burst the motivational bubble a bit.

You can’t feel your way to belief.

You can’t just feel your way to belief with affirmations, lots of insight about yourself and pep talks in the mirror.

Don’t get me wrong. Those aren’t bad.

But they don’t create belief because they don’t have any way to stick in your mind.

Here’s how I think about it.

Belief is a commitment to see what you can’t see yet.

Because it’s a commitment, it means it needs something from you.

The feeling of belief doesn’t happen until you actually do something to see it take shape.

That’s good news. It means belief is something you can build on purpose, starting today, with whatever you’ve got.

I wrote about this from another angle in why waiting to feel ready keeps you stuck.

Belief works the same way.

Action is the catalyst to belief.

Every step you take toward something you want gives you proof. It creates a receipt. And your brain trusts receipts.

Research shows belief grows out of what you’ve already done.

Psychologists use the term self-efficacy for your confidence that you can handle a specific task, like writing a chapter of a book or making a sales call.

Traci Sitzmann and Gillian Yeo wanted to know which comes first: the confidence or the results.

They pulled together 38 studies that tracked the same people over time, measuring their confidence and their performance again and again. Then they looked at which one predicted the other (Sitzmann & Yeo, 2013).

Here’s what they found:

• How well people had already performed was a strong predictor of how confident they felt later.
• Confidence predicted later performance more weakly.
• When the researchers accounted for people simply improving over time, the link from past performance to later confidence held up. The link from confidence to later performance shrank to almost nothing.

The authors concluded that self-efficacy is primarily a product of past performance.

Belief in yourself grows mostly out of what you’ve already done.

The feeling of belief on the front end still matters. You need enough of it to show up and try something. This research focuses on the kind you can create yourself.

Wouldn’t it be cool to create your own very real belief?

Each promise you keep to yourself makes your belief feel a little more real. So in a way, you absolutely can make your own.

The more promises you keep, the bigger your belief grows.

And the harder it gets for anyone to talk you out of it.

Including you.

That voice in your head that says Who do you think you are? has a much harder time when you can point to a stack of kept promises.

• You wrote all those pages.
• You made those calls.
• You put your butt in the seat on the days you didn’t feel like it.

Your belief becomes living proof that you’ll commit to what you can’t yet see.

You’re never starting from zero. Every promise you’ve already kept is already working for you.

Here’s how to build belief one kept promise at a time.

The short version: a) start with one promise, b) keep it, then c) make the next one.

1. Make today’s promise small enough to keep.

Pick something you can finish today, even on a tired day. Don’t go for the lifelong quest, just do something you can agree to commit to.

Small promises get kept, and kept promises are what build belief.

2. Write down every promise you keep.

Keep a running list in a notebook or the notes app on your phone. This is very powerful because it’s easy to forget a lot of what you’ve done.

A review of 138 experiments with about 20,000 people found that monitoring your progress toward a goal helped people reach it, and the effect was stronger when progress was physically recorded or shared with someone else (Harkin et al., 2016).

3. Tell one person about that promise you kept.

Text a friend: “Hey, I wrote my page today, applause please! 💃🏻”

Sharing your progress makes it more real to you, and it gives someone else the chance to cheer you on.

4. If you miss a day, keep the next promise.

One missed day doesn’t erase your track record. But don’t miss two days in a row.

Just be sure to pick it back up tomorrow and start from there.

Your belief is built from proof you make yourself.

Whatever you’re building right now, whether it’s a book, a business, or a new career, you get to stack up the evidence one promise at a time.

A month from now, you’ll have a good sized list.

A year from now, you’ll have a track record absolutely no one — including you — can argue with.

Imagine what you could do with that kind of belief.

If you want more on building what’s next, subscribe to my YouTube channel @LoriMiller.

References

Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y., & Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198–229. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000025

Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674

Sitzmann, T., & Yeo, G. (2013). A meta-analytic investigation of the within-person self-efficacy domain: Is self-efficacy a product of past performance or a driver of future performance? Personnel Psychology, 66(3), 531–568. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12035