We need to stop listening to people who doubt us.

It’s hard enough dealing with the voices of self-doubt inside our heads; we don’t need to be around people who reinforce those thoughts.

Just because someone else hasn’t dealt with their own self-doubt doesn’t mean they get to drag us down with them.

If they’re stuck in a defeatist mentality, we need to try to avoid conversations that will lead to negative rants about their potential or ours.

In some cases, we’ll need to simply avoid these people as much as we can, just as we do the drama vampires. Every conversation turns into a negative monologue or tears us down. We can’t give them the opportunity.

Instead, we need to hang out with people who build us up, who are unabashedly self-confident, and who set an example of growth that inspires us to keep moving forward. Spending more time with people who believe in themselves is contagious. We need to give ourselves a vote of confidence.  We can’t wait for someone else to pick up the pieces and tell us that we’re enough, and “we can do this.” We have a responsibility to ourselves, as well as to others.

We need to take responsibility and tell ourselves that we’ve learned and mastered things before, and there’s no reason we can’t continue learning and mastering new things.

Think of what we’ve already accomplished, and keep telling ourselves, “There’s positive energy on the other side of fear (and I choose positive energy).”

We can do more and become more than we can probably imagine right now; we’re not limited to “the way things have always been” or to “what we’ve always known.”

We need to remind ourselves, we were made to live fully and intentionally until the moment we die. We owe that to ourselves — and to the people, we care about.  This I learned in The Art of Healing at the Center for Spirituality & Healing at the University of MN.