Create The Confidence Of Ali

The Greatest Example 

Muhammad Ali earned himself the right to be known as ‘The Greatest’, but earlier on his career, when Ali was known as Cassius Clay, the nickname he earned himself at that point was ‘The Louisville Lip’. The young Cassius Clay was the embodiment of extreme confidence, cockiness if  you will. At this time, no other fighter before him had even been as loud and flamboyant as the young fighter was (the only exception maybe was the first black heavyweight champion of the world, Jack Johnson). In his early days many of his critics found his expressions of confidence quite distasteful but in a few years, with the results to match his great ego, many had come to accept his confidence and even admired it. Ali later even spoke a time when he was young, that he talked about his future greatness and aspirations, but he was laughed at by the other children. Imagine that! Ali, possibly the most recognisable name today, being laughed. Crazy, right? So what does this tell us? Every champion was once ‘just’ a boy with dreams, and if you don’t believe you’ll make it one day yourself, then no one else will. ANYONE can be great, but you will have to be the first one to acknowledge it.

Igniting Fiery Confidence With Self Belief

Mike Tyson once said ‘confidence breeds success and success breeds confidence. The more you do well, the more confident you become.’ This is essentially the cycle you want to always be in. Belief and confidence is obviously always linked together, but they are not exactly one and the same. Confidence is more a  result of a strong belief system. The more self- belief you have in your potential, the more likely that you are going to be motivated to work and practice, for example believing you can be a pretty decent boxer will motivate you go the gym and practice a certain part of your game. This results in you learning or becoming better at that particular .

A champion needs to be in a continuous cycle of improvement and growing confidence

At this point, even though you may not be getting your hands raised  or receiving any trophy, just becoming better at something is actually a success in itself, you are technically doing well because you’re doing better than you were before, and you start to be more confident in those particular abilities. This is where the cycle begins, after this little bit of success, you start to have a little more belief in yourself of what you are are capable of and what you’re doing to improve. With increased self- belief in your potential, you are then motivated to work again and the cycle continues after you get more mini-successes. So you see, self- belief and confidence is the primary catalyst that gets everything in motion.

Encouraging Self Belief 

An unassailable confidence can only come from within yourself

Imagination is an important aspect of self belief because it can be what you need to get the ball rolling. Legendary champions, such as Muhammad Ali, Floyd Mayweather, Roy Jones Jr. you name it, imagine themselves accomplishing their deepest desires and dreams. This is how you encourage self belief within yourself. Even if you have no belief, you can still just imagine yourself being successful and it may not immediately have an effect but you have to stick with it at all times. Tell yourself that the champion is in you. You just need to find it and more importantly, act on it. Then eventually, with experiences, memories and other factors such as mentors, you’ll soon start to believe more and more in your positive self talk and imagination. The inner self affirmations will then spill over into your reality. The truth is it’s going to take time and a winners mentality is grown from feeding your self- belief over and over again to build up positive reference experience. So the sooner you start, the better!

Final Note – Are They Doing It?

Take note, no champion fails to find a way to increase his self- belief. Self – belief is grown from hours of practice and training. But aside from the physical aspects, focusing time and energy towards enhancing self- belief in yourself is vital if you want to be a winner in the ring and have your hand raised at the end of the contest. The only way to do this is work work work, but more importantly, believe in your work. Once you see more positives forming in your reality, the belief that you build will tower over any restricting doubts you have.