Self Belief

Stress management is much talked about subject in corporate world now a days. They hire specialists to give them tips on how to manage stress under work pressure in workplace. Stress is not caused by work pressure as is generally believed but by the anxiety of failure to meet deadlines. Only those who have low self belief, self image will develop anxiety and hence stress. If stress level rises beyond a certain point, it can lead to depression and in the extreme case suicide. Stress management is required to reduce stress level.. Since stress is related to mind, yoga and meditation helps a great deal in reducing stress level. Stress management is post mortem. It does not prevent you from developing stress. This is where self belief comes in. If you increase self belief, you would not develop stress even under work pressure. Therefore, focus on developing self belief and not stress management. Prevention is better than cure. It is better to develop immune system of the body to fight infection rather than take medicines to fight it after it has infected the body. Self belief is believing in your own strengths to cope up with challenges, deadlines etc. People whose self belief is very strong are too excited to work under pressure. Their performance is at peak when made to work under pressure. They take this as an opportunity to showcase their talent. Hard work does not cause stress. Stress has nothing to do with physical effort. It has to do with fear, anxiety, inability to perform. Those who are emotionally weak are likely to develop stress under pressure. People with low self belief tend to think negative. They lack confidence in their own strengths,capabilities. They think of failure rather than success in whatever they do. They avoid taking any challenge for fear of failure. You can develop self belief by acknowledging the fact that you are not alone in this world to possess weaknesses. Every human being has got certain strengths and weaknesses. Write down all your weakness and strengths on a piece of paper. Tell yourself, I am going to leverage on my strengths and I will work towards improving my weaknesses. Next, you write down your worst fear.” It could be for example “If I fail to perform, I will lose my job”. Then write down, if that happens, how do I convert this threat into opportunity. You may write for instance “ If I lose the Job, I am going to join a course to develop my inter personal skill which I am not good at at present”. This is your action plan in the worst scenario. Having done that, you will find that you are now ready to take up the challenge and face the consequences if you fail.. If you perform with positive frame of mind, you will achieve success. You will discover, all your fears are unfounded, imaginary, baseless. In fact, you will soon realize 95% of all your fears are imaginary. They are in your mind. They are not real. They are your own creation. What is required is believing in your own abilities, your own potential. If you have seen cricket match, you might have noticed that sometimes, the team which is technically superior to the other team loses the match. It loses the match because it has lost it in mind even before the match started or before the match finished. If you are mentally prepared for defeat, you lose the match.. You stop making effort. Psychologists estimate that we use less than one third of our actual potential. By increasing our potential even marginally through self belief and positive thinking, we can make significant improvement in our performance. If you have negative attitude, temporary setbacks, failures will reinforce your negative thoughts which will lead to more and more failures. Contrary to this, if you have positive attitude, you will learn few lessons from the failures and will make yourself even stronger to face new challenges in life and achieve success. The best way to increase self belief is to gain practical experience by doing things rather than imagining failures and not making any attempt.