Let’s say you don’t believe in your business at all. Intellectually you know that there may be a 10% chance of success, but emotionally you may be running scared, and think that there is a 100% chance of succeeding.

So if we calculate an average between the emotional (chance of succeeding = 0%) and the intellectual (chance of succeeding = 10%) then you believe that your chance of succeeding is 5%.

Then you force yourself to start the business.

This simple fact is like a message to your brain which tells it that you believe that the business will succeed. Just working every day on your business may bring the confidence factor from 5% to 20-30%, even if there is no success in sight.

So.. if you want to believe in something, take action as often as you can. Take action as if you really believed the thing you want to believe. This sends a powerful message to your mind that you are really believing that idea.

I have defeated my fear of public speaking by joining a MLM company when I was a student. I was shy and introverted, and I discussed this with someone I trusted. She told me that one of the best ways to fix that was to join a specific MLM business.

I joined that MLM business. They taught us how to present their products in front of other people. Each of us got some practice presenting the products in front of the group.

I don’t believe in MLM, as I have seen two of my friends waste years of their life trying to build a “downline”. However, some of the sales training they offer can be valuable. It has certainly helped me.

In other words if there’s something about my life right now that I’m unhappy with, it’s not going to change unless *I* do something about it. If I’m the only person who has complete control over my life, and if I’m the only one who can change my state of being, then I’m the one who is 100% responsible for what I do and don’t do in my lifetime. This is a very powerful belief to have. If you know that you are 100% responsible for your life, you will be compelled to take action to change it for the better. You won’t hope for some divine miracle to occur; you will actively decide to take action and make things happen.

If you vow to take responsibility for your life, your fear will diminish significantly. The deal with fear is that it’s our brain’s way of avoiding pain. In his “Personal Power” audio program, Tony Robbins says that our brain has two primary driving forces: pain and pleasure. This is what humans do — as much as we can we try to avoid pain and gain pleasure. No matter what we do, it boils down to doing one of those two things. The problem with our brain is that it will favor the avoidance of pain over getting pleasure. In other words the brain will always prefer to avoid pain than gain pleasure if it has to choose between the two. However, if it has to choose between two painful experiences, it will choose the less painful one.

This is where fear can be attacked in the most effective way. Here’s an example. Let’s say you want to start your own business, but fear quitting your job because of the risk of the business failing. Your brain has to choose between two things — the pleasure of quitting your job, becoming your own boss, running your own business, etc., and the pain of the possibility of the business failing. Guess which your brain will choose if you present it in this way (and most people do)? It’ll obviously choose to avoid the pain of potential failure. Getting around this problem is not difficult in concept. All you have to do is condition yourself to associate more pain with staying at your job than with the potential pain of business failure, and amplify your association of pleasure with starting your own business (this is actually what I did). If this is done thoroughly enough and long enough, your brain will eventually beg you to quit the job.

It’s the same idea with taking responsibility for your life, except on a much greater scale. When you take responsibility for your life, you know that when you choose to not do something because of fear of failure or rejection or humiliation or something silly like that, you have suffered the ultimate failure. Why? Because you KNOW that you can do it, because deep inside you know that the reasons you have made up for yourself to justify not doing it are just poor excuses. The key is to condition yourself to associate this situation with ultimate pain. A pain worse than any you can experience in your lifetime. This will force your brain to always choose the lesser pain of potential rejection, humiliation, and so on.

Whew that was a long post. I hope what I said makes sense, and is helpful. Maybe I should start my own blog.

When I was starting as an entrepreneur I was very afraid of failing. I found out that in business, doing business is not dangerous. Being incompetent and not being business savvy is dangerous. So I decided to become competent and so I squished my fear.