Believe in YOU, Always Be Your Own Truest Fan

Rob: As a dad, as a leader, as a coach, one of my favorite times is when I’m working with folks and I see them break through to a new level of success, because the person that I’m working with finally believes in themselves.

Hello, folks. This is Rob Brown, host of the Truest Fan Podcast. Welcome to Episode No.2, and today we’re going to talk about believing in you, because to be a truest fan, you must first be your own truest fan. Babe Ruth one said, “It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.” That’s what I want you to be. That’s the mindset I want you to have as you think about believing in you, being your own truest fan. 01:13.5]

Sometimes we’re our worst fan. We don’t cheer ourselves on. We have a setback. We get stuck in some way and we don’t want to push forward. I was talking with somebody the other day about this, and he said it’s kind of like thinking about your favorite team. Now, most of you know that my favorite team is the Cleveland Indians—excuse me, now the Cleveland Guardians—and they’re a tough team to root for. In my lifetime, they have never won the World Series, but every year I have hope.

Right now, as we’re approaching spring training in a couple of months, I’m thinking this is the year. This is the year that we’re going to win the World Series. I am the Cleveland Guardians’ truest fan, but sometimes we don’t think that way about ourselves. 02:11.5]

We have a failure. We have a setback. We miss the numbers in our business. Something goes wrong with our kids at school and they’re not achieving the level of success that you want them to achieve, and you take that on yourself and you tell yourself, “I’m not being a good dad.” You’re raising money for a big cause and you can’t get those big donations. You tell yourself, “It’s all about me. I’m just not good enough to do that,” when, in fact, you are good enough.

You’ve probably done it before. You just need to break through to that next level. You’ve got to start believing in your awesomeness, your ability to make things happen, to make a difference in all of those places that you want to make a difference. You need to be your truest fan. 03:09.5]

If you doubt that ability, I just want to simply remind you without getting overly-preachy that you were made in the image of God. Your creator made you, which means you must be awesome or He wouldn’t have bothered to waste His time. That might sound flippant, but I totally believe that. We were all made to do great things and, too often, we forget that, so we leave that out of our thinking as we go about our daily lives, as we go about our businesses, as we go about caring for our family. 03:51.0]

It’s really, truly important to be your truest fan, to urge yourself on, to be your greatest cheerleader, because when you do, you’re able to cheer on other people more easily. You’re able to appreciate the successes that you have more regularly. You are able to put behind you those failures that you had, because you know that, in any great endeavor, you’re going to have setbacks, but it’s not because there’s something wrong with you, because you are still awesome. You’re still really good at what you do. You are still a child of God, and we have to constantly be thinking that and reminding ourselves of that.

You might be thinking, Rob, I get that and I’ve heard a little bit of that before, but give me an example. Tell me where this happens. I see it happen all of the time in my coaching business. I see it from year to year. I even see it from quarter to quarter. 04:58.8]

As I’m working with my client, one of the things that we do is we put on sprints. We concentrate on three-month periods of time and the things that my clients are trying to accomplish during those sprints, in those shorter periods of time. When we do that, we’re able to focus our efforts, but oftentimes, or I shouldn’t say oftentimes, but more often than I would like, in some of those sprints business comes to a halt.

For whatever reason, you just aren’t closing the business with new clients that you’d like to close. You lose somebody on your team and, all of a sudden, you feel like you’re losing momentum. Again, maybe you blame yourself for that. You stop believing that you are the person who built the business, that set the goals, that decided on that three-month or that 21-day sprint, and you pull back and things get worse. 06:03.2]

But when my clients stop that way of thinking, when they say, I’ve got this set of goals. I have this action plan for the next few months. It was built based on my best knowledge of my business and what was happening at the time, and then they go about it, good things happen. 

Are you ready to discover your true purpose, live with impact, and build an ever-greater legacy? Then you need to make time for what truly matters most. Go to TruestFan.com/Challenge to begin the free “Truest Fan” seven-day quick start.

Just a few months ago, I was talking with a client in the middle of a sprint. He had missed his goals for adding new clients for the first two months of the sprint. He was sure he wasn’t going to hit his goal for that sprint, and since it was towards the end of the year, he was sure that that meant he wasn’t going to be able to hit his goal for the year. 07:10.0]

But he just kept at it. I kept reminding him to believe in himself, to continue to do those things that he knows that he is capable of doing. A month later, not only did he hit his goal for that sprint, he exceeded his goal for the year. He exceeded it in a big way.

When I asked him, I said, “Why do you think you were able to get that done?” and he said, “It was because I didn’t give up. I knew that if I kept at it because I was doing the right things, I’m really good at what I do. The whole rest of the year had been successful, but I let doubt creep in. But when I stopped doing that, everything got better. Everything got easier. I felt better about myself, about my business.” That’s the way that you should feel as you think about yourself, when you’re going about your life, about your business. 08:13.0]

I’ve seen this in fundraising efforts that I’ve done. I’ve been part of several really big capital campaigns. We’ve tried to raise money for big projects and we set about those projects, and we give people goals for who they should talk to and what they should ask for, and the way that they should say it. Inevitably, when somebody falls behind on their target when they’re feeling down and dispirited about what’s going on, they say something like, You know, I’m just not good at this. I’ve never done this before. I’m never going to be able to hit the targets that we agree to. 08:56.6]

But then, when we take the time to say, stop thinking that way—stop that negative thinking about yourself. Believe that you can get it done. Believe in yourself. Go about this cause, this really important cause in a way that inspires you to believe in yourself—they break through that plateau. They hit those numbers and things get better, and the building gets built and the activities that go on in those buildings to help others in the community happen. But it’s all part of and it all stems from believing in yourself, not just believing yourself, but it’s an essential element. It’s at the foundation of being a truest fan.

In the last podcast, I encouraged you to dream big. I encouraged you to write down some big goals for where you want to be over of the next 5–10 years personally and professionally. 10:00.0]

As you continue to think about those goals, what I want you to do is to also take this lesson and attach it to those big dreams, because your big dreams will happen even faster. They’ll feel even more real and satisfying if you believe in yourself.

Stop. Take the time to think about who you are and why you’re so awesome, what you’re so good at, what you would say to yourself if you were somebody else and were highlighting the good things that you do, the good things that you’re good at, the way that you have succeeded in so much stuff. It’s all about believing in yourself, being your own truest fan. 10:50.0]

Let me end there, so a quick podcast, but let me end there and remind you that you can go to TruestFan.com/Challenge to get access to my seven-part challenge of becoming a truest fan, of implementing the truest fan effect. It’s free. Just go to TruestFan.com/Challenge. 

Inside of that challenge, Challenge No. 1, is an activity around believing in yourself. It’s an exercise that you can do in less than 30 minutes that will allow you to take action on believing in yourself—and let me end by saying, I believe in you. I am your truest fan, and I hope you begin to believe even more in who you are, how awesome you are, and what you’re able to accomplish when you believe in yourself. 11:48.8]

Take care,

Rob Brown