In this blog, I want to share with you today the secret ingredient every confident and successful person has planted deep within them.

I want to tell you that, you will not overcome your fear, anxiety, or self-doubt. You will not overcome the thought that everyone else is better than you. Until you face the fear that is responsible for negative thoughts in your mind. Until you face the fear that scares you the most, you'll not be able to overcome it.

I am sure that somewhere in your journey, you came across a big challenge that you may have given up on. You might have thought that “it’s not a big deal” But as you are progressing in your life when you avoid a few more challenges, your brain will begin to categorize every challenge as either doable or not doable!

Your brain will start to think that “Uh, this is pretty challenging, it might not be doable for me”. And the problem-solver part of your brain begins to remind you “Even though you've quit before, which wasn't a big deal then, it’s okay sometimes you just quit and know when to quit”.

But in that process of coming up with these excuses and justifications about quitting inside your brain, you will start to chip away, bits and pieces of your self-confidence and your self-worth! You begin to form a subconscious pattern of thinking it’s okay to give up sometimes or choose the easier way out.

Eventually, you will start to leave that place of challenge or struggle earlier than you should, thinking that “you weren't good enough”. So, naturally, your brain's defense mechanism will kick in to try to validate your self-image with some helpful suggestions such as:

• “You're not a math person it's okay you've filled many math tests” or
• “You've tried this before, you failed, so it's not even worth giving it your best this time around” or
• “You’re not that talented” or
• “You're just not cut out for the job” or
• “Pick a different field” or
• “Try something else”

Hundreds of more excuses will be brought to your mind, including things like:

• “you may have depression or anxiety disorder”.

Your brain will try to convince you with many types of excuses and justifications about you quitting early. Because your brain has a secondary defense mechanism that tries to bail you out and make you feel better about things. But in the long run, that's no good, even if these are false excuses your brain comes up with.

Effects on quitting

Over time you begin to believe these excuses are true because your brain keeps reminding you of your track record- “you failed at this”, “you quit in this”, “quit that”, “quit that” and that starts to become your default way of thinking. For all the times you left that challenge earlier without a real fight, this process has a compounding effect. With every challenge you avoid, you will start to think that it's okay to quit and your self-esteem drops lower.

Do you remember the unlimited belief you had as a child? What do you think has happened to that unlimited belief? When you quit more and more often, that unlimited belief in yourself when you were just a kid had become narrower and narrower over time. Believe it or not.

And there's going to be a night where you will quit something, go home that night, and look in the mirror. What are you gonna see? Whom do you see? Do you see someone that put up a fight? Or do you see someone that took the first punch and decided the fight was over even though they still had plenty left in the tank?

Did you give it your best? I mean, did you put in that hundred hours per week for over six to twelve months towards that job or career or business goal? I bet your chances are! If you are feeling hopeless and defeated, I bet that you didn't put up that hundred hours per week for a year. Hopelessness comes from inaction, not action.

Boxing match mindset

If you go into a boxing match deciding that no matter what happens that night, either you go home on a stretcher or you go home with a trophy. It doesn't matter! You're willing to do whatever it takes, to try and win that night. When you go home that night either on a stretcher mangled up or the winner carrying the trophy.

Now, when you are going to look in that mirror, what you will see is a champion. Because the person who is staring in the mirror, whether he won the match or lost it. That person will feel like they did the best. So, he or she will know in their heart that they didn't quit, instead, they faced their fears and did everything in their power. The result doesn't even matter at that point. Giving up is the most psychologically harmful thing you can do to yourself. Because it's not the circumstances that defeat you, it's you that defeat you.

The good thing is that you can work harder! But when you chose not to, it is your choice. The actual reason you are most likely to give up, believe it or not, is because you didn't decide that this is the end-all-be-all for me. You didn't commit. You didn't burn your bridges behind you. You always have a Plan B!

Since Plan B is the path of least resistance, you tend to naturally gravitate towards it. Because that's just how nature works. Nature gravitates towards the path of least resistance and that's exactly how our brain works. If you do that enough times, subconsciously you will begin to wire your brain to always follow the path of least resistance or Plan B.

If you're fearful anxious or depressed, you weren't born like this, something got you to this place and it's still in your control to get yourself out because guess what you're the one who got you to that place, to begin with. Don't bail yourself out by blaming a circumstance or a person or an event! That is your brain's defense mechanism getting in the way that's allowing you to blame someone else for your circumstance.

You have to become practical. Rather than being a result of your environment, take control of your circumstances and become the variable that influences and changes that environment. You have to take responsibility for it, you have to accept it!

All you need to do the next time you face a challenge is decide! That's it! You just decide. Decide that no matter what happens the option to give up does not exist for you. I'm telling you. You do this and face your fears and you put your best efforts into your next job or your goal.

Challenge Yourself

Don't sell yourself cheap. Make sure it's a challenge, a real challenge for yourself. You will learn things about yourself during that process that you can't even begin to imagine right now. You'll realize how powerful this No-Plan B mindset is. After you cross the finish line whether you win or lose, you'll know that for once you didn't quit.

Your next goal should be a personal battle, in which you will have to decide that quitting is not an option for you. That is your goal for facing the challenge. So pick something that's challenging and face the fears. If you need a hundred hours per week, you put in those hundred hours per week of hard work, because you promised yourself that you won't give up. So you have to try and do your best.

The scariest time is the time of uncertainty. When you don't know what's coming up next. And that's when you're most fearful. In that time of uncertainty, you need to latch on to something certain! Something certain and it better be coming from within. What is that certainty thought you can latch on to comfortably and say that “At least this thing doesn't change, the entire world can change around me, but this thing in me is not going to change!”

What is that thing? Your promise to yourself that you will not quit!

Because, you don't go into a fight thinking that you might lose, you go into that fight knowing that you've made a promise to yourself that no matter what happens quitting is not an option for me. You need to prove to yourself that the word “quit” is not in your dictionary. As long as you have that mindset, whether you go home on a stretcher or whether you go home as the victorious champion carrying that trophy. It doesn't matter.

You went home with the right mindset and you will be happy with your results, regardless of what happens. Because you've latched on to that one idea, that one thing that kept you going. And that was that you cannot quit! It's not even in your dictionary.

Once you do that, I'm telling you the world's yours!

YouTube Video

Resources

• Job Ready Programmer Courses: https://www.jobreadyprogrammer.com/p/all-access-pass?coupon_code=GET_HIRED_ALREADY
• Job Ready Curriculum, our free Programming Guide (PDF): https://pages.jobreadyprogrammer.com/curriculum

About the Author

Imtiaz Ahmad is an award-winning Udemy Instructor who is highly experienced in big data technologies and enterprise software architectures. Imtiaz has spent a considerable amount of time building financial software on Wall St. and worked with companies like S&P, Goldman Sachs, AOL and JP Morgan along with helping various startups solve mission-critical software problems. In his 13+ years of experience, Imtiaz has also taught software development in programming languages like Java, C++, Python, PL/SQL, Ruby and JavaScript. He’s the founder of Job Ready Programmer — an online programming school that prepares students of all backgrounds to become professional job-ready software developers through real-world programming courses.