Where does self-confidence come from?
And this is the best advice I can give you on that,
Not neglecting, first of all, the small daily disciplines.
Self-confidence really comes
from feeling good about yourself.
And one of the best ways to feel good about yourself
is at the end of the day,
to know that you poured it on,
you did your best.
If you conducted a meeting,
you did the best you could.
If you made a phone call,
it was the best phone call you could possibly make.
If you wrote a letter, it wasn't a casual letter,
it was your best letter.
At the end of those kind of days,
when you feel good about yourself,
self-confidence starts to rise.
You know that if you can have this kind of a good day,
you can have another one the next day.
And those days become the weeks.
The weeks become the months,
and the month becomes a powerful year.
I got a key phrase for you:
Life accumulates.
We either accumulate the debt or the value.
We either accumulate the regret
or we accumulate the equity.
Now we must all suffer one of two pains.
The pain of discipline or the pain of regret,
and I'm suggesting discipline,
mental discipline to refine ideas.
Of course, it's laborious and of course it's a push,
but it's called small price to pay
so that you won't have the regret later on.
Regret weighs tons.
Discipline weighs ounces.
I'm telling you, for things to get better.
You gotta get better.
Don't ask for it to change out there.
Ask for you to change here.
Don't ask for a more favorable wind.
We call that naive.
Don't ask for better seed, better soil.
This is the only planet you got.
Just ask that you can get wiser and stronger and better,
and be able to take care of your own responsibilities
get better.
Learn how to handle the seasons better.
Let's go through 'em.
Just get better at handling the winters.
You can't change the winter,
you can't change the seasons,
but you can change yourself.
The whole key is to make yourself valuable
The key is to make yourself attractive.
The key is to make yourself skillful,
competent,
willing,
powerful,
unique,
sophisticated,
cultured,
being able to manage in control,
healthy.
The whole key really to the future
is personal development
because the greatest gift you can give to someone else
is your personal development,
self-development
self investment.
If I become 10 times wiser,
10 times stronger,
10 times brighter,
10 times more competent,
think of what that will do for my success.
Your successes fuel your ambition.
Your successes give you extra energy.
Your successes pave the way for more successes.
It's the snowball effect
with one success you're excited to meet another
and another, and another,
and pretty soon
the disciplines that were so difficult in the beginning,
the disciplines that got you going are now
part of your philosophy.
Motivational speaker, Dennis Waitley has said
that the top people were those who were more concerned
with activities that were goal achieving,
whereas average people were more concerned with activities
that were tension relieving
dinner before dessert.
The simplest rule in the practice
of self-discipline is to eat dinner before dessert
In a meal
There is a logical order of dishes
and dessert comes last.
First, you eat the main
courses and clean your plate.
Only then do you have dessert.
There's a cute but Jacques Torresthat says,
life is short
Eat dessert First,
just think about what would happen
if you came home from work and
instead of eating a healthy dinner,
you ate a large piece of apple pie with ice cream
what kind of appetite for healthy, nutritious food
would you have afterward
with all that sugar in your stomach
How would you feel?
Would you feel re-energized and eager
to do something productive,
or would you feel tired and sluggish and ready to
write off the day as largely finished?
You get the same results when you go for a drink
or two after work and then
come home and turn on the television.
These are simply different forms of dessert
that largely eliminate your ability to
do anything useful for the rest of the evening
Perhaps the worst part of all is that whatever
you do repeatedly soon becomes a habit.
And a habit once formed is hard to break
the habit of taking the easy way
of doing what is fun and enjoyable,
or eating dessert before dinner
becomes stronger and stronger,
and it leads inevitably to personal weakness,
underachievement and failure
success is its own reward
The wonderful thing about the achievement
of success is that every step in that
direction is rewarding in itself.
Each step you take toward becoming a better person
and accomplishing more than you ever have before,
makes you feel happier,
more confident, and more fulfilled.
You've heard it said that nothing succeeds like success
What this means is that the greatest reward of
success is not the money you make,
but rather the excellent person you become
in the process of striving towards success
and exerting self-discipline every time it's required.