You do have something to offer (stop thinking you don’t)

‘Can I really do that though? I mean who wants to hear from me?’

When you examine social interactions between people it is really easy to pick up who is communicating what people want to hear as opposed to who they are.

‘What would you like to know?’ you ask, when really it has nothing to do about what the other person wants to know but what you feel is important to convey to them at that time.

‘I’d love to run a business, but don’t I need to have everything sorted, have a big bank account and a lot of confidence before someone will buy? Won’t they just look at me and go nope?’

These phrases indicate some of the beliefs we have about what success looks like and what our value is measured on. You can have these expectations on yourself but not on anyone else.

A classic example of this was when I was talking to a very successful business owner lately, we were talking about success and I asked her, ‘what are the success, failures and flaws of a business owner you want be? Successes were easy, so were failures but when it came to flaws, she was stuck- what do you mean they have flaws? I guess they’d have none. This is when it struck her, she knows that she doesn’t expect people to be perfect but yet in her everyday admiration of others she sees them as perfect.

I share this because this is not uncommon. Everyone has a belief that isn’t connected to a reality. This idea that we have to be superhuman to achieve our goals starts us procrastinating and stops us from living the life that we want. Its unsurprising that we have this thought process. From the time we went to school we believed being popular was more important than being ourselves and we wanted to have the social acceptance before we accepted ourselves. Life doesn’t work like that though, we must accept ourselves first, who we are and what we want, get realistic about our goals and what we have to offer and then simply act. It is when we do this and consistently turn up for ourselves that people say, ‘Wow I’ve been watching what you are doing, and I love it. So proud of you for doing what makes you happy and helping people like you do.’ The trick is to own that reality and to start practicing communicating who you are and what you have to offer, your beliefs will catch up.