Overcoming Self Doubt and Achieving Financial Success

Financial success is probably one of the most sought-after things in today’s world. Everyone wants to be financially successful, financially independent, and free from money-related worries. 

But very few are actually able to achieve it. So, is it a matter of luck? Some special skills? Upbringing? Education? Or something else, that some people achieve financial freedom while others struggle with money.

If you study a group of financially successful people, you would rarely find a common pattern in them. They don’t possess the same degree, same upbringing, or same skill set. 

But there’s one thing that separates them from the rest and probably the reason behind their riches. That thing is their belief. Their belief in themselves and their ability to achieve financial success and becoming rich. 

The guest and expert with us in this discussion is Brian Tracy, the chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International, a company specializing in the training and development of individuals and organizations. 

he has studied, researched, written and spoken for 30 years in the fields of economics, history, business, philosophy and psychology, and is the author of numerous best-selling books. 

If you ask him the biggest reason why most people don’t become wealthy, he’ll give you a very straightforward answer that they don’t believe they can become wealthy.

Now, there’ll be many skeptics among you who might think that it is just wishful thinking that we’re talking about here. So, let’s begin the discussion with Brian asking why believing works and why most people are poor. 

Why Most People Are Financially Unsuccessful 

Many years ago, Brian put together a seminar on personal success and called it the phoenix seminar because the phoenix was the bird that rose out of the flames in ancient Egypt and lived for another thousand years, and the whole seminar was about how you could arise out of your past and create a future life.

One of the things that he taught in that seminar was the law of belief. The law of belief states that whatever you believe with intensity and conviction becomes your reality, meaning if you believe it, you do achieve it, either now or in the long run. 

That means even if you think all you’re doing is some wishful thinking, you’re actually still making the law of belief work for you.

So, what you have to do, first of all, is let go of all your self-limiting beliefs. Beliefs that you don’t know where they come from, have no reality to them, but still hold you back and limit your potential.

The Psychology of Poverty

The reason why a majority of people have these beliefs, especially about finances, is because of the families they’ve been brought up in. 

If you are brought up in a poor home, and your family used to talk about poverty, the two things they must talk about are how they were born into this situation they can’t change, and the other thing, which is a killer, is telling how bad successful people are. 

They’re constantly downgrading successful people talking about how their boss is a rich bastard, and how wealthy people all stole the money from somewhere, and so on.

So you grow up as a child, very susceptible to the influence of your parents, believing at an unconscious level that financial success is really bad, and financially successful people are evil. 

And obviously, you don’t wanna be an evil person. You don’t want to be disapproved of by others. So you develop this sort of programming in your subconscious mind that I’m not going to be financially successful, and as a result, I’m superior to financially successful people. 

When you criticize the kind of people you yourself would like to become, you basically ruin all your chances of ever becoming like them. 

Almost everyone has heard of the law of attraction, which states that whatever you believe with intensity, you attract in your life. Each human being is a living magnet, and with your thoughts, you attract into your life the people, circumstances, and ideas in harmony with your dominant thoughts. 

If you read, listen, learn, and associate with positive and successful people, you start to think like them. But when you criticize them, you ripple them away from you. 

Brian says to everyone that you have more potential than you could use in a hundred lifetimes. It might be hard to comprehend for you because you’re yet to unlock that potential. 

You might have heard that your income is the average of the five people you associate with the most, and that is absolutely true because these are the people you share thoughts, ideas, and opportunities with.

Parent’s Role in Financial Success

At this point, you know how parents play a crucial role in programming a child’s subconscious mind and how the thoughts and ideas they feed into it take their child towards either poverty or financial success. 

So, it’s very important now to discuss how can parents do their parenting job right so that they don’t take their kids towards poverty. 

Brian, from the very beginning, has always told his children how smart, creative, attractive and great they are and fed them an unbroken chain of appreciation. As a parent, he never criticized them for anything. It is important for parents to validate their children this way. 

Yes, constructive criticism is good but destructive criticism, which most parents do, is the emotional cancer that ends up destroying people. 

Children have no barriers to protect themselves from the criticism of their parents. Because if their mom and dad, the two of most important people in their lives, are telling them something negative about themselves, then it must be true. If you constantly say to your 2-year-old that they are dumb, they’ll most probably believe it for the rest of their life. 

Thus, it is crucial to shape your children’s mind the right way by not feeding them things you’d not like them to believe, and feeding more of what you want them to be. 

If you want them to be financially smart, successful, and free, tell them they are, and they can. Don’t criticize them for not being responsible with money all the time. 

Would You Spoil Your Child This Way?

A lot of parents think they’ll spoil their children by constantly praising them and never criticizing them. 

Well, Brian says that the idea of “spoiling” a child is nonsense because it doesn’t make sense to not be nice to a child just because you wanna “keep them on the ground.”

Now, it is true that constant praises might give them a sense of superiority over others. So while validating and affirming your child, it’s important to be specific about what you’re proud of. What aspects of their character that you appreciate.

It also helps them keep up with their good habits if you tell them that you appreciate them for those things, whether it’s their kindness to their friends, the affection they show, the determination they have, or anything.

Basically, it’s not about telling them, “Oh, you’re the greatest,” but you’re incredible because you have these qualities. It brings the attention to the thing or the qualities, not them. So it doesn’t give them the sense that they’re better than others whatever they do. 

Believe It to Achieve It

“Believe it to achieve it” is the latest book co-authored by Brian, and his eldest daughter, Dr. Chirstina Stein, Ph.D., author, and psychotherapist. 

The book is an awesome reminder of how to lead through your life, defeating the mind blocks that come into the way.

It is called Believe it and Achieve it because it teaches you that if you want to achieve anything on the outside, then you’ll have to change your beliefs on the inside. If you wanna know how to change your beliefs, then go grab a copy of the book because it’s a must-read for anyone.