What if, the old saying is upside down, so instead of “Seeing Is Believing” it would be “You need to Believe before you See It”
There’s an energy that goes with “Seeing Is Believing”, it suggests that it’s not possible, that I need convincing before I’ll go with what is being offered up.
And of course, there’s an energy that goes with “You need to Believe before you See It” , suggesting that if you first believe that it’s possible, there’s a high chance you’ll put more effort and energy into achieving the goal or doing everything you can until you get there!
Perhaps at the first time of reading this through, you might say that there’s not a lot of difference, let me give you an example, probably one of the best ones is the one that is commonly used around Roger Bannister who was the first person to break the 4 minute mile back in 1954.
Lots of competitive runners back then where aware of what the current thinking from the medical experts was, they suggested that it was physically impossible to break the 4 minute mile, they believed that the heart would burst and the lungs would collapse! A very dramatic view at the time and no wonder that runners might not want to test whether their theory was right or not.
Roger Bannister had a different belief, he was a medical student and didn’t buy into the current medical view and as such this wasn’t a barrier in his mind, Bannister also did actually believe he could break the 4 minute mile if the weather was favourable on the day. His closest rival at the time was the Australian John Landy who had been in pursuit of the sub 4 minute mile record but he did start to wonder following a number of attempts whether the medical experts were right, and wondered whether it was humanly possible!
As we know, on the morning of the 6th May 1954 Roger Bannister stepped up to the start line with a solid belief that he could break the 4 minute mile and as they say, the rest is history!
The point here is, that it took someone with a solid belief to achieve something that no-one else had ever achieved, once it was done, John Landy 46 days later smashed the record down to 3.58 in Finland, he had realised that it was indeed possible and was able to run without the fear of dying because someone else had done it!
Ralph Waldo Emerson attempted to help us see just how big a role our beliefs play in his famous quote “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
Henry Ford’s quote also points us in the same direction:- “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right”
In context to the business world, there are so many examples, the sales person who believes that the sales target is too high and that it’s not achievable will more often than not miss the target because their belief has led them in that way of thinking.
The senior leader who doesn’t believe in their own ability to present to a large audience as an expert in their field will likely miss out on fully realising their full potential because they have a limiting belief about what is possible for them. Just because it hasn’t been achieved in your past, doesn’t mean that it can’t be done in the future! Your past does not equal your future, there would be little or no progress if this were true.
Ultimately, this is about whether you believe in whatever you are looking to achieve in your personal or professional life, if you believe with certainty that the new product launch is going to be a massive success, you’ll be in a stronger position to authentically put that message across to the rest of your colleagues which in turn, will have a big impact on how that is sold by the sales team and ultimately received by your customers.
If you believe something is not possible, you’ll continue to see all the evidence to back up your belief that it’s not achievable, it’s the way our brain works.
We have to get better at understanding the relationship between our Conscious & Sub-Conscious mind, if you have had a life time of being conditioned as a young child growing up and being told that you won’t amount to much in your life, there’s a high chance that the old record / memory is going to support that thought.
The Conscious mind is where we create from and our Conscious mind then instructs the Sub-Conscious mind to go and achieve it. So, if the Conscious mind has the thought that you won’t amount to much, the Sub-Conscious mind will go about and trip up you up, thus reinforcing the old thought.
A new way of thinking is what’s required, I’m going to finish on a couple of Albert Einstein’s quotes:-
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”
