I’ll never achieve what I want to achieve if I don’t first believe in myself.

I had this realization last night. Propped up against a pillow on my headboard and wrapped up in my blankets, I journaled. I needed to motivate a shift in the way I thought and talked about myself. I needed to take back control.

You only have control over three things in your life – the thoughts you think, the images you visualize, and the actions you take (your behaviour). How you use these three things determines everything you experience. If you don’t like what you’re experiencing and producing, you have to change your responses.

Change your habits

Change what you read

Change your friends.

Change how you talk.

Change what you daydream about.

Change what you journal about

Change the voice you journal in

Jack Canfield (although I added the last two examples), The Success Principles

The word only feels sort of out of place when you really step back and see how much you can actually control – how much power we all actually have when it comes to our experience.

In yoga class today, my teacher asked us to turn ourselves into a blank canvas. She described us as paintings – the colours were emotions and the brush strokes, textures, and build up represented the layers and intricacies of what we now perceive to be our identity. Who we are.

She asked us to paint the canvas back to white. She asked us to scrape off the paint. She asked us to treat today as a new beginning, and to forget about everything that had ever happened to us in the past. “Allow your memories to simply inform the skills you have built. Don’t let them hold you back with  visions of a time and identical situation went badly,” she said.

I’ll never achieve anything if I don’t first believe in myself.

Once your canvas is blank, she said you could start the painting again. Only this time you will paint deliberately. It’s not about perfection – what makes beautiful art is, after all, it’s imperfections – but it is about power. No one else is holding the brush. You are in control of who you are and how you choose to present yourself to the world – how you choose to paint your painting.

You choose everything that Jack Canfield mentioned above. You choose it all.

Believe in myself?

Shouldn’t that be the easiest thing in the world? Believing in myself is completely within my power.

I loved this visualization. Scrape off the paint and begin again.

I think there is an enormous amount of power in a new beginning. I’m not talking about anything drastic. I’m actually extraordinarily happy with how my life is manifesting… but I want to play with the colours that impact my day, my relationships and the lens through which I see the world. I’m curious… what might I see if I tilt my head just so.