You wouldn't instinctively put faith and business together, but in fact it's fundamental to success. Without it, no entrepreneur would even start. So what exactly is it? For most people, faith is associated with religion, and belief in doctrines and dogma. Some have an even more negative view of faith seeing it as the wilful denial of reality!
In fact, faith is not the exclusive preserve of religion, but is in fact a fundamental essential quality of daily living. Faith is necessary because premonition, if it exists at all, is not a universal skill. Most of us simply don't know what the future holds, even in the next few minutes.
Logic tries to deal with this problem by the concept of probabilities. It is possible to mathematically calculate the likelihood of an event and the bigger it is, the more confident we feel taking a risk. Alternatively, if the "stake" is very low, we feel comfortable betting on very low probability events, such as a pound on the National Lottery, because we can comfortably afford to lose it.
In ordinary life, with no way of knowing what the day holds, most people adopt this high stakes for high probability or low stakes for low probability principle. The odds favour us getting to work safely and back and getting paid for it, so we do it.
However, when the emotions become involved, we tend to break this rule. Marriage is a classic example, a very expensive financial and emotional commitment with only a 50 percent chance of success. Most folks will go through the whole of their lives playing the odds except in cases of emotional override.
But there is a third way of playing the odds that is employed by athletes and entrepreneurs. They employ the principle of self-belief. It is fairly easy to measure the performance and state of mind of an individual at any given moment. It is virtually impossible to measure potential - what the individual will be able to do in the future. There are two reasons for this: firstly there are too many uncontrolable external variables. Secondly there is no way of evaluating how an individual will respond to new circumstances. A person with no self-belief can suddenly develop it by a chance encounter or experience, and lose it in the same way.
A person employing self belief follows neither the odds nor the emotions. A self-believer is convinced that success is inevitable so long as one does not stop. In the face of defeat or failure, the self-believer simply sees this as a milestone on the way to success and will start again. In the event of being utterly barred, the self-believer will just create a new goal. Self-believers thus continually take risks that others would shy away from, even when a string of risky ventures did not pay off.
There is little denying that successful entrepreneurs tend to be self-believing risk-takers. This quality is essential to business success. The intriguing question is whether self-belief is inherent or can be acquired. My experience and personal belief is though some people have this quality inherent from birth or childhood, it can also be acquired by anyone who wants it, so long as they obtain the right training. That is where professionals like myself come in!
Anyone who has lost or wants to acquire self-belief is taking a long gamble hoping it will suddenly appear! It may or may not. My personal experience was that I had to obtain the right trainer, and now I train others myself. The great thing about self-belief, and the reason that it's worth acquiring is that there's always a reason to go on. Those without it and playing the odds often fall into despair seeing no way out, but the self-believer never sees a reason to stop!
