You Gotta Believe

Hate To Break It To You is a recurring feature wherein we dispense succinct home truths that everyone could benefit from facing up to, unpleasant as they may be. Read the first installment here.

Photo by spike55151

You’ll never get what you claim to want if you don’t truly believe that you deserve to have it. Fact. Be it the white picket fence and 2.5 kids, your dream job or the opportunity to live abroad, desiring it and working for it aren’t enough if deep down you consider yourself unlovable, untalented or lacking courage. You will find a way to unwittingly sabotage yourself and prove your nagging, unspoken, middle-of-the-night doubts true. Every barrier and roadblock (real or imagined) will seem insurmountable and a cause for throwing in the towel. And any efforts you do make will be undermined or undone by the secret fear that you could never really live up to the end result anyway, that you’d inevitably fail or be revealed as presumptuous fraud.  Better then to hide your desires away, keep them pristine and untainted by their confounding unattainability.

Dreams and goals aren’t worth having until and unless you believe that you’re worth the effort to achieve and embody them.

But it’s a long old life if you allow yourself to spend all of it waiting for the other shoe to drop. And you (yes, even you) really do deserve better than that, whether you believe it or not.