by Alan Weiss, author of “The Courage of Your Talent“
We don’t always treat ourselves fairly or with kindness. We can be effective in our pursuits but feel unworthy.
Ironically, we’re creators of our own restraints and self-limiting beliefs. Although the sources are often external — parents, siblings, teachers, friends, bosses, et alia — the damage occurs when we docilely accept the limitations.
We have to free ourselves from self-imposed restraints in order to form an abundance mindset.
I coined the term “courage of your talent” several years ago and have now made it the topic of an entire book. It represents the foundation of an abundance mindset and I define it as:
Courage is not fearlessness, but rather the ability to accept fear and/or pressure while still performing at the top of your game.
Talent involves innate traits, abilities, and behaviors that help you to master challenges and to lead. Some are highly relevant (for a consultant: communication skills), and some are irrelevant (for a consultant: perfect pitch). Psychologists call this “efficacy.”
The courage of your talents already exists. You simply need to acknowledge and ardently apply it!
Confidence is an offshoot of the courage of your talents. It’s the honest belief that you can meet someone’s objectives irrespective of whether you’ve done what’s needed prior. That means that you can’t allow self-doubts to enter your analysis (and emotions). Confidence is a generalized feeling of being able to achieve things (I can learn to drive a manual shift car). But efficacy is about what’s critically needed (I must understand and apply legal precedent if I’m going to win court cases).
The constant, unconsciously competent ability to live our lives in command of our positive self-esteem and the confidence it generates to handle threats, opportunities, and ambiguity is enormous. Otherwise, we’re stuck in the cycle of self-doubt.
Here’s how self-doubt perpetuates itself (I call this the cycle of self-doubt):
- Thinking doubting thoughts (e.g., “I’m not sure I can…”)
- Overlooking strengths, attributes, and achievements
- Comparing yourself unfavorably to others
- Seeing barriers and obstacles as insurmountable
- Talking yourself out of decisions rather than into them
- Returning to thinking doubting thoughts, ad infinitum
If you begin with self-doubts and don’t try to understand and be proud of your natural and developed confidence and efficacy, you’ll see yourself as inferior to others and obstacles will be insurmountable. You won’t trust your judgment and the self-doubt worsens.
Authority often figures create doubts through their own needs to always be seen as correct. “Do as I say, not as I do,” my father used to say. That didn’t exactly convince me of the wisdom or effectiveness of his advice. I’ve experienced teachers and professors at every level — from grammar school through graduate degrees — who sometimes were in error. The outstanding ones admitted it, the inferior ones did not. I’ve lost count of the times my bosses in assorted positions were wrong, many of them more times than they were right.
There’s nothing at all wrong with being honest about our talents, joyful in pursuit of pleasure, gleeful in seeking happiness. Yet we are too often inculcated with the damage from those who would have us believe that humility is more important than achievement, that poverty is somehow noble, that denial is the express lane into heaven.
And there are those who “project” their own imperfections and failures onto us. “If I couldn’t ski the blue hills when I began the sport, you won’t be able to, either.”
Well, I have news for you, I could, because I didn’t listen to you.
To develop your abundance mindset, embody and build upon these four traits:
1. Establish physical regimens.
Walks, workouts, biking, and so forth. We receive sensations from our physical activity that establish a sense of well-being. Engage in physical activities at least four times a week for at least an hour. Be in the moment and “listen to your body” as you go through the activity. Instead of reading while on a treadmill, ask yourself what you’re feeling. Experiencing these sensations and utilizing them in a self-directed manner creates higher beliefs in our abilities and, consequently, higher esteem.
2. Exercise your persuasive powers.
Your ability to encourage and discourage within rational discourse will improve your esteem, and your attempts will improve it even when you’re not as successful as you wished to be. The more you can rationally deal with others to persuade and influence, the better you’ll feel about yourself. You don’t have to “win them over,” you simply have to have given it a great try. Join organizations such as chambers of commerce, nonprofit arts groups, Toastmasters, Rotary, and town committees to provide you with the means to constantly exercise your persuasive skills.
3. Isolate negatives and generalize positives.
Experience has a profound effect on esteem, but experience can be interpreted. Viewing a result with a positive interpretation (“I didn’t get the sale, but I learned how to open the conversation better next time”) rather than a negative on (“I’m just a lousy marketer”) makes a huge difference.
4. Use others’ examples to improve positive feelings about yourself.
Using others’ examples, understanding their strengths and contributions to their success, is a powerful (and free) education. Ask yourself, “Has anyone similar to me ever accomplished this?” When you identify them, vicariously try to emulate their behaviors and traits that resulted in their achievement. If you observe an athlete who perseveres even when performing sub-optimally, but overcomes the temporary setbacks, perhaps you can, as well. Viscerally, you want to feel what they feel empathetically so that you can identify with what others are going through to better your own positive feelings about yourself.
An abundance mindset will serve not only the courage of your talents, but enable you to attain wealth without shame, dignity without entitlement, and growth without harming others.
Alan Weiss is a global award-winning consultant, coach, speaker, and author of 57 books, and 16 additional editions in 15 languages. He’s the only non-journalist in history to have received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Press Institute. He’s a Fellow of the Institute of Management Consultants and an inductee in the National Speakers Association Hall of Fame®. His newest book is “The Courage of Your Talent” (Taylor and Francis, 2026). Learn more at alanweiss.com.
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