When tested in real life, you aren’t given a multiple-choice test where it’s possible to guess your way to a high score. When I was in pilot training, I studied the theory of flight and aircraft construction and instrumentation. I learned FAA control tower and radio procedures. I was taught the proper way to pre-flight an aircraft and to start it up. But it wasn’t until my first solo flight, when everything I’d learned had to be put to work in order to bring myself back to earth in one piece, did I know I could really fly an airplane. The same concept is what builds confidence as a speculator or investor in the real estate business. How? Through the process of combining education, skill, and experience to achieve personal and financial goals you’ve set yourself. Setting and meeting your own tough standards creates a positive attitude that helps you to continue to overcome challenges.
Learning, then applying what you’ve learned is the key to confidence! As someone in the seminar and newsletter business, I’m certainly not going to encourage you to stop acquiring education, but, hearing about some dynamite concept will be little more than an entertaining fable unless it is applied to a real-life situation to create more profit. Until you “solo” by buying, renting, fixing, managing, exchanging, an/or selling that first property on your own, you aren’t going to become very confident of your own ability. On the other hand, with each successful “flight”, your experience and skill will improve, and your confidence will grow along with them.
So why is a high degree of self-confidence so important? In general, financial success seems to be allocated among people in direct proportion to the degree of personal confidence they have. Those who are the more successful exude more confidence, and those who are least successful are more diffident, lacking in self-assurance. Does that mean that all one has to do to become healthy, wealthy, and wise is to work on their self-confidence? Certainly, there is more to success than merely being confident, but it’s fair to say that the things a person does to increase confidence increases the likelihood of being financially successful.
Building confidence is a lot like getting into good physical condition. People spend thousands of dollars on expensive exercise equipment, only to sell it once they understand how much work is required to get into shape. To revamp your physical appearance, you’d have to concentrate on diet and exercise. Only if you persisted in these activities over a period of time would any results be achieved. Those who are able to wind up with sculpted bodies, like the models that demonstrate the equipment, spend hundreds of hours working out. Nobody devotes the effort required to get in shape, unless there is a real desire to make a change, and the expectation that the change will indeed take place within a reasonable time. Once achieved, not only would you be in better physical shape, but more importantly, you’d have also taken a giant step in building up your self-esteem and self-confidence.
The same principle applies to those who would build up their confidence to the point necessary to be a successful real estate entrepreneur. It’s critical that a person be dissatisfied enough with their current situation to be willing to make a firm commitment to take positive action to do something about it. For everyone, whether building a new body or new confidence, this involves changing lifestyle habits and engaging in activities that they ordinarily wouldn’t do.
Building confidence is truly a chicken-and-egg situation. Self-confidence comes from achieving goals, and superior achievement comes from increasing your self-confidence? One can’t exist without the other? To explain this, I’ve formulated my expectation, optimism, persistence, feedback, re-motivation, and repetition required to make real changes in physical appearance, to precisely the same steps in building confidence, and any kind of success. In so many words, it posits that self-confidence and success are all part and parcel of the same thing. To prove this theorem, let’s dissect success to see the effect of confidence on it.
