“Stay focused.  Don’t listen to anything.  What’s on your mind, just do it because what’s destined for you, you’re gonna get.”  This is a good follow up to yesterday’s piece.  The challenges we face are that noise, whether it’s from other people or the voice in our heads—that’s the noise we need to ignore.  We need to focus on the goal and know that when we work toward it and we keep that focus, it will happen.  This is about faith.  This is about real belief.  This is the hardest part of the game.  I struggle with it every day because that inner voice happens to be really loud for me—and really negative, especially about things that haven’t happened yet.  The voice and the old thought patterns are so deeply engrained that they can be really difficult to turn off.  The more we level up and the more we step into unknown territory with our growth, the louder those voices become.  So that devil we talked about yesterday often comes from within. 

It can be really hard to believe that we can move forward especially if we haven’t seen that level of success before.  I now I’ve struggled with the whole you’ll see it when you believe it concept.  I’m a pretty fact based girl so not a lot of my time was spent in faith so I wanted to see hard evidence that something existed or would happen before I believed—I needed to see it to believe it.  But what I’ve learned and what I know I need to practice is that those are the moments we need to have the most faith.  Don’t let anyone talk us out of our dreams, least of all ourselves.  Too many times we take ourselves out of the game before we even try.  We never learn what we are capable of if we don’t push ourselves to follow through and keep our promises—we talked about that a lot last week.

I haven’t learned anything new since yesterday about how to eliminate that devil except to have faith.  That and we can’t keep one foot on the other side of the fence and say we think it will happen.  That’s like resting on the edge and hoping the wind blows us to one side or the other.  The secret to faith is to dive in entirely and see what comes up.  I’ve always been afraid to swim but I know I’m not going to learn by standing with my feet on the ladder to the pool.  It’s the same concept here.  We won’t learn what we are capable of if we keep one foot tied to the old ways of thinking and doing.  Commit to learning and let go of the edge.  When we have that kind of belief, we learn to carry ourselves.  We learn to follow through and we build confidence learning things one step at a time.  Just remember to keep our eyes on the goal—let the noise fall away and the rest becomes easy.  Do the work and watch it come our way.