Article 5: Self Belief

Every one of us have our own unique set of skills and talents. It is vital that we are able to recognise our strength and at the same time we should also be able to identify our areas of improvement. The more we are able to use our talents in our work lives, the better is our productivity and our quality. This in turn increases our self confidence and enables us to take on higher challenges and face them squarely.

However, many times, we end up imposing self-defined limitations on ourselves. Our self-doubt gets created from niggling failures and past experiences which stop us from trying again in the fear of repeated failure.

In this situation, what is important for each one of us is to introspect and find out the root-cause of the doubts or self-imposed limits. Once we are able to define the problem, it is easier to eliminate it and to overcome our doubts. In other words, we need to improve on our self-belief and be confident in our abilities.


Self belief is the ability of an individual to focus on performing at or higher than his percieved capabilities with a complete awareness of the challenge on hand and his own talents/skills. It is important that self-belief is formed on a solid foundation of self understanding and is not just a facade of overconfidence or blind optimism. The latter lead to underperformance and cannot overcome the real lack of skills in the individual.

On the other hand, self-belief helps affirm the positive attitude in an individual and produces vigour, energy and healthy optimism. It allows optimum attention span to the task at hand and an alertness which is not normally observed in normal individuals. It succeeds in raising the productivity and also the alignment of all faculties towards a common goal.

As individuals, we tend to get bogged down with our failures and one sure way of avoiding that is to use these failures to learn the maximum and to improve our knowledge and awareness. This way, we can improve on our confidence and self belief.

One of the greatest basketball players of all times - Michael Jordan has this to say about how he used his failures and converted them into positive self-belief:

"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."