Belief in yourself is the starting point.  There are going to be people who don’t believe in you.  People who don’t think you can do something.  The trap we sometimes fall into is believing those people, and stop believing in ourselves.

A close family friend reminded me growing up that my mother treated me like a Prince.  She raised me to believe I could do anything I set my mind to.  And I believed her, which developed a belief in myself.  And it worked.  Anything I set my mind to I was in fact able to accomplish.

Over the years through different ups and downs, that belief started to wane.  I actually started to get the label (or I perceived I got the label) village idiot in my family.  And I started believing it.  The Prince mentality that I had grown up was replaced with belief that I couldn’t really accomplish much of anything.  It almost got so far as to believe that I was a loser to some degree.

But when the family friend reminded me of how I was raised, something woke up inside of me.

I believe in myself again, and that’s the start.