Una's Blog

by Una Hearne.

ABSOLUTELY NOT.

Every time I heard someone say ‘You have to believe in yourself if you want to make it’, I felt a knot in my stomach.

‘What’   I thought   ‘If I just don’t?’

Should I just give up now?

When I first dreamed of being a coach, trainer and writer, I couldn’t see how it was possible. I didn’t have the qualifications, any relevant experience, didn’t know any of the right people, had no money to study, little energy at the end of every working day and I had to keep my crappy job to pay my mortgage. It seemed I was trapped. And I was 34, surely far too old to be starting a new career? My dreams seemed very unlikely to me.

One smart thing I did was confide in my close friends, the ones who support me no matter what. If I had described my dreams to other people, family included, they would have joyfully confirmed that I could not possibly reach those goals and they would have been able to explain in great detail why not.

In the end I didn’t want to be 90 years old wondering what might have been if only … So, with no actual belief that I could make it happen or any idea of how to start, I set out. Years later, here I am, an experienced coach and trainer, publishing my blog. The last 13 years have been the best in my life, each one better than the last. I’m not kidding.

Yet even now, as I write this, I am thinking ‘Sure, who would want to read what I write?’ I want people to read these blogs and find them useful, thought provoking and occasionally amusing. I can’t quite believe this will happen. So I find it easiest to treat the actual outcome as, more or less, none of my business. My job is simply to write blogs and put them out there. I measure my success by the number of blogs I write as well as I can. And I acknowledge the greater part of my success is overcoming my internal resistance and actually putting in the hours doing it.

What I’ve learned is, it’s nice if you believe in yourself but it’s not essential. There are only two things you need to start working towards your dreams:

1) You need to figure out what you want

2) You need to take action to make it happen

You build belief in yourself as you go.