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Rule Number 2: Practise Self-belief
You have to have self-belief to get anywhere in life. Where you end up is where your self-belief takes you to. You are the product of all that you believe to be possible for you. It really is that simple and it really is all in the mind.
I used to believe there was a formula for self-belief. I still do, but I’ve changed my mind about what that is. I used to think it was so simple, a combination of right parents, right early influences and you were set up for life. You had a strong core of self-belief implanted, growing away within you, imbedded from the outset, advantaged from the start.
It’s five years since my first book, Be Your Own Life Coach, was published and in that time I have worked with thousands of people in talks, presentations and personal sessions and I’ve been prompted to reconsider that perspective. I no longer think it’s that straightforward because I’ve seen too much evidence which challenges my old belief.
In a nutshell, I’ve met too many individuals who have had these right influences yet lacked the strong core of self-belief you’d expect to find. And I’ve encountered so many others who have, on paper, had a disastrous start to life, but who are invincible. So, the formula works for some but not for all. I can’t guarantee it. The inescapable conclusion I’ve come to is this: self-belief is self-created. The meaning of life and its direction is more down to you than even I thought.
My experience as a life coach convinces me that your life is in your hands, or rather in your mind. It’s determined by free will and this was what was missing from my earlier perspective. Free will gives us the capacity to choose how we create our lives, our ability to be self-determined. Free will is the will not to conform to the past and it’s the measure of a person’s capacity to act as an individual.
The world is full of people whose experiences illustrate the primary importance and power of free will. Consider Bill Clinton and George Bush, the former and current Presidents of the US, two of the most powerful men in the world, who originated from two extremely different environments.
Bush came from an oil-rich, Texan family, the son of a former US President, so no surprises when he ended up in the White House himself. Bill Clinton’s father died when his mother was six months pregnant with him, grew up in terrible poverty, with an abusive, alcoholic stepfather, in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Yet he rose to become leader of the most powerful nation on earth. Forget his politics. The man is a model in self-determination, allowing neither his past nor his circumstances to dictate his future or his character. A measure of his strength and poise is in the fact that, as he turned 14, he stood up to his stepfather, telling him that he would never lift his hand to beat his mother again. Nor did he.
But the world is full of individuals with similar starts in life who have been crushed and defeated by their environment and become resigned to a dismal fate in life. The difference lies in the extent to which people are prepared to resist their circumstances and exert their will to make change.
On the other hand, I’ve coached numerous individuals from the ‘right’ side of the tracks, who have had all those right influences, yet had the most abysmally low stock of self-belief. I remember Elizabeth, a smart young woman complaining that she felt her loving, secure upbringing and well-connected, urbane parents had made her life ‘too comfortable’ and the fact that she would never starve if she didn’t earn her own money deprived her of real incentive.
She figured that if she lived in a run down council flat relying on state benefits, then perhaps she’d have serious motivation to write that novel, get that deal, really make things happen. She felt she just wasn’t hungry enough. She was ambitious, had dreams, but used her circumstances to explain why she was not likely to succeed.
I called a halt to the coaching on our third session, suggesting she return when she was ready to give up her ‘story’ and get on with creating her life. As I write, nothing has changed in her situation.
This perspective is no better and no worse than the resigned individual’s from the ‘wrong’ side of the tracks. Both are self-defeated, both victims of their circumstances, of their own making. Both deny the option of free will, shying away from the freedom and opportunity of self-determination.
Free Will vs. Fate
There are only two attitudes available to any of us when we are squaring up to life. One is embracing free will. The other is a belief in fate. More accurately, your interpretation of fate. My position is that free will operates at every level of our lives, that we even choose where and when to incarnate, in order to develop our selves, our souls more fully. I believe this decision is taken in cooperation with God, the Gods, a Higher Power, call it what you will, so that the life we opt for is the one we’ll ultimately learn and benefit most from.
So, fate and destiny exist with our full support and agreement. Nothing is forced upon us, against our will. We’re not at the mercy of any outside force, however celestial. The extent to which we feel we’re living out our destiny is the extent to which we’ve picked up the gauntlet of free will and run with it to meet life head on, valuing every experience, great or gruesome. Then, it starts to feel ‘right’, we’re living the life we ‘should’ be living, on the right track, right path.
Astrology is wonderful for gaining greater insight into your inner workings, impulses and desires. And, if you accept my premise of a freely chosen incarnation, then the time and place of your birth is not random or accidental.
I learnt this for myself when I had my astrological chart interpreted by a well-known astrologer many years ago. She said my chart could only belong to someone born into a place such as Northern Ireland or the Lebanon, somewhere plagued by tremendous conflict and violence, a war zone, which was what Northern Ireland was to become as I turned 10.
My older brother Brian was a student at Queen’s University in Belfast as the Civil Right’s Movement erupted and I joined him on all the early marches and demonstrations, finding the charged atmosphere compulsive. ‘The Troubles’, as they became known would be a feature of my life from then on. We were driven out of our home on a predominantly Protestant housing estate because we were Catholics but we were lucky not to have been ‘burnt out’ as some of our neighbours had been.
Tolerance has never been my strongest point, nor is it to this day. But what more ideal place and time could I have been born into so I could witness the repercussions of rampant intolerance?
Growing up in a place where people killed and tortured each other because they refused to tolerate their differences and accommodate them gave me a unique vantage point to study intolerance. I believe I was born In Northern Ireland and lived through the Troubles for a reason.
The mistake that some make is in waiting for destiny to show up and deliver the goods or in feeling that fate or an unlucky planetary alignment has condemned them to conditions or a life they’d rather not have. This is a convenient but distorted reading of these forces.
The magnificent Oprah has the right idea saying, ‘I don’t think of myself as a poor deprived ghetto girl who made good. I think of myself as somebody who, from an early age, knew I was responsible for myself and I had to make good’.
Another magnificent woman who thinks like this is Barbara Corcoran. Barbara grew up in New Jersey, sharing one floor in a three-family house with her parents and nine brothers and sisters. She had few luxuries, but she was blessed with a mother who taught her to see that she had as much going for her as anyone, rather than viewing herself as a poor girl stuck in Edgewater.
After failing at twenty-two other jobs, Barbara, 56, is now known as the ‘Queen of New York Real Estate’. Celebrity clients have included Madonna, Harrison Ford and Robin Williams and with sales volume at over 7 billion dollars, The Corcoran Group is New York’s leading real estate company. Exactly how did the waitress from New Jersey become one of the most powerful figures in New York City real estate?
Barbara Corcoran
‘My mom had a genius for putting her finger on the special gift she saw in each of her ten kids and making each and every one of us believe that that gift was uniquely ours. The trick was then to apply that gift to your advantage. That’s what I can put my success down to, knowing what I had going for me and using it.
Let me tell you about the first time I really applied that lesson. I was 21, living at home in Edgewater, New Jersey and working as a waitress at the Fort Lee Diner. On my first day at the diner, my heart sank when I saw Gloria, the other waitress.
Gloria had assets that I’d never have, at least without surgical support. That night I went home to fret to my mother: “And when we weren’t busy, Mom, my counter was plain empty. Even when Gloria’s station was completely filled, men were still asking to sit with Gloria and not me.” Mom replied, “Barbara Ann, you’ve got a great personality. You’re going to have to learn to use what you’ve got. Since you don’t have big breasts, why don’t you tie some ribbons on your pigtails and just be as sweet as you are.”
And that’s how it was. I wore ribbons on my pigtails and offered a cheerful alternative to the big-breasted, blonde-bombshell Fort Lee sensation. Customers walked in and asked to sit with “pigtails” and my sweet-talking kept them coming back. Two years down the line, one of those customers, Ramone Simone, was to be my ticket out of Fort Lee and across the river into New York. Ray said a smart girl like me should be living in the Big City and offered to pay for a week at the Barbizon Hotel for Women.
This was my chance to run my own show and find a place of my own and I grabbed it. Within a week I had a job and an apartment. I landed a receptionist’s job at Giffuni Brothers, two wealthy landlords who owned a dozen apartment buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn. This gave me my introduction to Manhattan real estate and after a few months I convinced Ray to loan me 1000 dollars to start a real estate company. He agreed on condition that he had the controlling interest in the business. My old boss, Joseph Giffuni, said if I could find a tenant for one of his apartments, he’d pay me a whole month’s rent for a commission.
Mr Giffuni’s apartment was no different from the 1,246 other one-bedroom apartments advertised in that Sunday’s New York Times. How, I asked myself, could I put ribbons on a typical one- bedroom in four lines or less and make it stand out from the other 1,246 apartments? I persuaded Mr Giffuni to put up a wall separating the living room from the dining alcove.
That way he’d have something different and be able to rent it for twenty dollars more each month. He had the wall installed that week and a few days later my ad went into the paper, offering a 1 bedroom with a den. It wasn’t a big ad, but it offered something more. Why would anyone settle for a one-bedroom, when for the same price you could get a one-bedroom with a den? That Sunday, the calls began.
And on Monday I rented my first apartment.
I saw that good salesmanship was nothing more than maximising the positive and minimizing the negative. Although your competition might offer something you can’t match, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you identify and play up what you’ve got.
I didn’t have a big chest, but I did have a nice personality, a great smile, and the gift of the gab.’
I first came across Barbara on a trip to New York. There was no missing her, as she was plastered on billboards from Madison Avenue to Times Square. It was April 2003 and her book, ‘Use What You’ve Got & Other Business Lessons I Learned from My Mom’, was on the New York Times bestseller list, (now available in paperback as ‘If you don’t have big breasts, put ribbons on your pigtails’, Portfolio) and Barnes & Noble had copies stacked high on tables as you walked in.
That evening as I hit the treadmill in the hotel gym, there she was, up on the television screen doing a slot on the 60 Minutes show! I bought her book the next day, loved it, and called ‘her people’ to arrange a meeting. She seemed such a formidable figure, the ‘Doyenne of Manhattan Real Estate’, as one paper called her that I figured she’d be terrifying to interview and felt apprehensive before we spoke.
What a pleasant surprise awaited me. From the moment we spoke I saw exactly what her mother had been getting at: she had the sweetest personality you could ever have and was incredibly, well, nice. I felt her warmth and good nature travel down the phone line from New York to London. I liked her immensely and could see how she would have won over Donald Trump or any other New York mogul, easily, just by using what she had, her ‘gift of the gab’ as her Irish American mother put it.
Use What You’ve Got
Barbara believed herself to be equal to anyone. It never occurred to her that she was defined or diminished by her background. If she personifies the American Dream, it’s because of this attitude. Her success was built on using her assets to the full in her approach to every stage and every challenge of her life. She used her way with people to make her way in life, beginning with initial change of attitude in her waitressing job, ensuring that she established a friendly rapport with all her customers. And, four years later it would be one of those customers who would provide the stepping-stone for her move out of Edgewater and the Fort Lee Diner into a bigger world. Her gustiness meant that she didn’t hesitate and before her borrowed money ran out, she had a job and a room for herself in mid-town Manhattan.
Observe how simple yet brilliant her approach was in continually searching out the unique selling point of everything she needed to sell, from that very first apartment that was to launch her real estate career. As soon as she could afford to, she was also unique in including her friendly face in the box ads she placed, which made her stand out on a page crammed with small ads, personalising the business to a prospective customer. Nowadays she does exactly the same, except her short blonde hair and all-American smile beams at you from 30-foot high posters right across the city and the company she started with a $1000 loan was sold in 2001 for a reputed $70m.
Resist the temptation to see only what you feel is missing. Focus on seeing and using what you’ve got. Don’t waste time or energy wishing you were someone else, had someone else’s lot, otherwise your own lot will go to waste. You’ve got enough going for you as you are. See it and see it that way.
This is an extract from Chapter 2 of Fiona harrold's new book, "The 7 Rules Of Success" published by Hodder and avaialble in bookstores now or from us online here.
