Confidence On Tap

How would you like to manufacture "a success?" How would you like to have a "success reservoir" into which you could dip whenever you feel low in spirit or have the "blues?" Just follow the instructions, and you'll manufacture "a success," and build your own "success reservoir."

When most of us think of success, it is in terms of a desirable but nebulous something to be achieved in the indefinite future. "Someday, when I have the time and the money," runs such thinking, "I'm going to have—" and on continues the dream, each to each man's taste.

The distant goal, the long-range objective, is essential to successful career planning, but the elapse of time alone is not going to get you there. Decision and action are the allies of progress; procrastination is the enemy of progress. So time can become an ally of procrastination; for the more time you give yourself to reach a goal, the more time you have to invent excuses for not getting there—and there is nothing procrastination serves more obediently than a good excuse.

How often you have told yourself of the many little things you could accomplish if you could only get around to it. Those little things could be  accomplishments. They can be left to die on the vine with no apparent loss suffered, or they can be made to flourish to the enormous enrichment of your entire life.

Only a very little seed is needed to grow a big tree. While this takes a good many years, it is different with people: one little success can start you on the way to very much larger ones in days, weeks, or even hours.

Such seeds could be a difficult apology to the boss or a fellow-worker, with a resulting restoration of good-feeling on the job. The start of a long-postponed reading program to enlarge one's job perspective. The clearing of the top of one's desk to see what the wood looks like. The deposit of the first dollar to pay for next winters excursion to the Virgin Islands, dreamed of but never remotely approached in 20 years. Every day a new accomplishment, or something to be achieved within a future so immediate that its day-to-day progress is encouragingly visible.

This is a good place to put in a word for selfishness. I am very much in favor of what I call "intelligent selfishness." This is a Golden Rule type of selfishness. It recognizes that the world around me is not very good unless I get along in it; also, that it's just about the same to other people in regard to their feeling good about the world. By this measure, I am intelligently selfish when I help others to get ahead at the same time as I help myself to get ahead. (Another chapter shows how you can use intelligent selfishness to help you get a salary increase or promotion.) Intelligent self-love is necessary if you are to 'love thy neighbor as thyself." Actually, the only place where you really have freedom to start is within yourself. So, to put it selfishly, you must start with you.
 
It's Better If You Like It

With yourself in mind, then, be sure to plant among your seed successes a few that cater to your intelligently directed but wholly selfish ambitions.

Knowledge of your best self, of how you use your best capabilities to achieve your ambitions, gives you control of self-motivating forces having great power. You can apply this motivating power to help you overcome weakness, and enable you to outwit that enemy of progress, procrastination. I know an over-weight man who simply could not force himself to stay on the meager diet ordered by his doctor until he made a self-motivating success project out of it. He dearly loved his home machine shop. He promised himself a $15 machine tool if he stayed on his diet a week. Then, self-motivated or powered, he proceeded to save almost two dollars a day on his breakfasts, luncheons and dinners. In six months he found himself with a vastly improved workshop and waistline, and he had made a habit of proving he could do what he wanted done—with barely a dent in the budget.

What would you like to get done within the next 24 hours? Don't think of some unpleasant chore, like cleaning the basement, when you can just as effectively start out on something pleasant. Think of something that can use the best of your abilities, or improve your mind, like reading the book that you meant to read months ago. Write it down, and then in more detail describe four steps needed for its accomplishment. You now have a method to use in reaching a pre-arranged objective. Take that Step One, and because yours is a short-term, 24-hour project, you give Time no opportunity to stop you with procrastination. The remaining three steps will follow through on the momentum of Step One.

Let me warn you about that first step. It may look easy, and even pleasant, but the inertia of years of "getting along" is hard to budge in the direction of "getting ahead." Time used those years to get its forces of procrastination deeply entrenched. Before you can move you must overcome both inertia and procrastination, but once you are rolling, the rest is easy.

The result can be a revelation. In one 24-hour period you have proved to yourself that what you have done in a small way you can do on a larger scale with practice. Destroyed forever is the theory that success is a matter of "getting the breaks," or that it comes to some people because they are luckier than others. You have made many mistakes, accidentally. This 24-hour experience proves you can manufacture "a success," purposefully.

Now that you are rolling, continue setting day-to-day seed projects, not forgetting to reward yourself from time to time. Remember my definition of an achievement—something you did well, enjoyed doing, and are proud of? That "enjoyed doing" is as important to over-all success as it is to the achievements that make success possible. Don't let yourself become a slave to success.

It will help you to do this too: At the end of each day, make a note for yourself in answer to the following question, "What’s the best thing that happened to me today?" Even on the worst days, some things are just a little better than others. Make a habit of looking for something that is "best" in each of your days.

Your Pocket Guide

Too often there can be days and even months when doubts rise to over-powering proportions that anything is being stacked up at all. These periods of self-doubt and depression are so widely distributed and common as to earn such descriptions as "down in the dumps," or "good for nothing," or "the blues." At such times your level of self-confidence is low, and your enthusiasm lower.
 
You cannot feel blue when you have solid self-confidence. But when you have made a mistake, your self-confidence is shaken. When you are asked to do something, and doubt your ability to produce, your self-confidence is shaken. When you don't seem to be able to do what you want to do, you let go some of your self-confidence. When you fear results or conditions, you lack confidence in yourself. Seed successes point the way to strengthened self-confidence. A Success Reservoir, as you will discover, is the means you can use to replenish self-confidence quickly, and overcome the blues.

The first step in re-establishing self-confidence is to recognize that you've had troubles before, and somehow or other you have managed to survive them. The problems do seem to become tougher as you get older, but the survival quality put into you by the good Lord also seems to more than match the problems. Even in circumstances where you might have said to yourself "the worst is yet to come," you know that you have found in yourself the ability to meet those conditions and live on.

The big trouble with the previous paragraph is its tangible aspect. You probably agree with its ideas; but when you have the blues, when you lack self-confidence, those ideas just do not come to mind.

As a realist in career planning, I must meet here a challenge frequently raised by clients still not convinced we are living in an entirely modern world. As one said, deliberately fingering a "good luck" coin extracted from his pocket, "It's all right for you to say that success is not a matter of getting the breaks, Mr. Haldane, but I happen to know better. I got the breaks one time—a broken leg—and three men in the office were promoted over my head while I was out on sick leave. I got the break, and they got the promotions. What do you say to that?"

He had me. Being the right man on the right spot at the right time does have its values, but let's not get the values confused. Compared to all the generations of mankind, in terms of opportunity just being in the world during the nineteen-sixties means that, as no others have been, we are in the right spot at the right time. Being the right men to take advantage of it is something else again. I didn't see that his good luck piece, rubbed shiny though it was, could be of much help there. He insisted that it was.

"Every time I get called into the boss's office, I polish it on my pants leg, and I've had three raises in three years," he assured me. I happened to know that in his company you either got a raise every year or you had reached the end of the line. Nevertheless, I could not discount the fact that the charm bolstered his morale, and that was good.

But if some concrete evidence was needed to bolster morale —something to be touched, rubbed, or looked at—why not something based on practicality? Why a rabbit's foot—which certainly had brought no luck to the rabbit—when a list of one's greatest achievements on a small card could provide positive and non-superstitious assurance that the obstacles one had overcome once could be overcome again? It could boost morale in an incontrovertible way. What had been done once could be done again, and no one could appreciate that more than the person who had done it. It should serve him as a constant reminder that he had triumphed over difficulties in the past, could do so now, and would do so again.

I suggested as much to my client, but he was not in an ac-ceptant mood. I changed the subject. We talked about various things concerned with his work, none of them arousing much enthusiasm. In order to start that spark, I asked him what was the most beautiful, tranquil, soul-satisfying scene he had ever viewed.

He paused for a moment, thinking, and when he began talking, some of the querulousness had gone out of his voice. "One evening up on the east shore of Lake Nipigon, in Ontario—" he began. There followed a description of the lake against a backdrop of primeval forest and red sunset that was almost poetry.
 
By the time he had finished, you could hear the bass leaping in the lake and smell the birchwood campfìre. And he was a changed man, looking as restored in vigor as if he had visited his favorite scene in person.

"All right," he agreed then. "It is better to believe in my achievements than in a good luck coin. And it is better to create my own opportunities than let a broken leg cheat me out of them. I'll go to work on it tomorrow." Then he grinned. "Okay, so I'm working on it right now."

I was still marveling at the transformation that had taken place in my client during the course of his description of the lake. "While you're at it," I suggested, "when you write down your achievements on your pocket card, write down your description of Lake Nipigon on the back. Then if you get really worried or flustered, read the description first to calm yourself, and then read your list of achievements for the confidence you need to go ahead."

The description of a beautiful scene through which you can relive a memorable, spirit-refreshing experience can work wonders in producing the calm you need in facing moments of decision. The achievements provide the confidence. And when you are calm and assured, you are at your best.

Such a card, your portable Success Reservoir, is quite as tangible as any rabbit's foot. It will help to sharpen your mind and talents, and stimulate your most constructive emotions. It deals with things you know about, things completely within your experience, things without any kind of mystery. When you lose enthusiasm or self-confidence, a touch or a glance will help to restore it. "Think on these things," it says in the Bible, "things which are beautiful and of good report." This card will help you to remember always that you have the capacity to rise above your difficulties and be successful again.

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