Believe in Yourself : Part 1

Winning Nice: How to Succeed in Business and Life Without Waging War
by Dawna Stone, Matt Dieter

Radio show host and founder of Her Sports + Fitness magazine, Dawna Stone shares her recipe for personal and professional success. A successful executive, entrepreneur, athlete, and public speaker, Dawna Stone credits her incredible success to a simple formula: be nice and treat people with respect. Her refreshing, straightforward approach and insights inspire and motivate women to be themselves while succeeding in business and in life. Using real-life anecdotes and actionable tips from her personal experiences, Stone presents 10 steps to developing interpersonal skills.

Winning Nice demonstrates how to build an empowered team, how to both lead and follow, and how to handle the toughest situations - including firing employees, sexual harassment, and negative coworkers. Readers will reap exponential rewards as they progress through their business career just by being nice.

Chapter 1

"You sort of start thinking anything's possible if you've got enough nerve."

J. K. Rowling

Joanne Rowling was once a single mother, unemployed and living on state benefits. She worked on a book manuscript for years, and when she was done, she packaged up the first three chapters and sent them to an agent "who returned them so fast they must have been sent back the same day they arrived." But she believed in her manuscript and found another agent. After a year and a dozen rejections she finally received an offer for her book. Now known as J. K. Rowling, her Harry Potter series has been published in sixty-three languages, sold more than 300 million copies, and is credited with inciting an increase in child and adult reading. Rowling is now a billionaire. What if Rowling didn't believe in herself enough to keep pushing forward with her manuscript? What if she stopped trying after those first three chapters were rejected?

You have the potential to take your life to a whole new level. No matter how satisfied you currently may be in life, believe me when I say your life can be much better than it is today. It can have more passion, humor, fun, excitement, and meaning. And when it does, your career will take off, and success will no longer be a question. But before you embrace any of the Winning Nice principles, you must first believe in yourself. This is the foundation upon which everything else is built.

In order to improve your life and the lives of those around you, you must believe that you can truly make a difference. We are capable of so much more than most of us realize. The secret to tapping into your ultimate potential is to understand that with hard work, determination, and unwavering conviction you can realize your dreams. You can do anything as long as you believe you can!

Developing a strong belief in yourself will not happen overnight, but I've seen dozens of examples where in just weeks or months, people have gained incredible amounts of confidence and literally transformed their lives. To start building your inner belief system, you need to do these things:

• Stay positive.
• Start with you.
• Never give up.
• Overcome your doubts.
• Eliminate the negative whenever possible.
• Find the silver lining.
• Embrace the small things.
• Spread positive energy.

Stay Positive

Dale Carnegie said, "Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all." What if Albert Einstein had given up on his research when no university would hire him? What if Thomas Edison had pulled the plug on his experiments after two years and hundreds of failed attempts? Einstein, Edison, and Rowling all persevered despite many failures. Every day people make the choice to either push forward or give up. If you stay positive and look at failure as a lesson learned and an opportunity to persevere, incredible things can happen.

After inventing the Ballbarrow, a wheelbarrow with a ball instead of a wheel, James Dyson turned to another mundane item - the vacuum cleaner. Inspired by a system used at a local sawmill, he created a prototype of the cyclone vacuum, which uses a spinning action to separate dirt from air, rather than a filter or bag. Three and a half years and 5,127 prototypes later, he had a unique product that didn't require a vacuum bag. Dyson went on the road, visiting British and European manufacturers, all of whom rejected his device. Over the next decade Dyson rode a roller coaster of rejection, bad licensing agreements, and lawsuits. But he remained committed to his design, and by 1995 he had the best-selling vacuum cleaner in Britain. By 2005 Dyson's company had an annual profit of over $173 million, and his 100 percent ownership of the company was worth an estimated $1.1 billion. He continues to run his company as he wants (no suits and ties, no internal walls), and he operates under a simple but straightforward philosophy. As he says, "We try to get people to do things in a different way."

To paraphrase a famous quotation by Thomas Edison, Dyson didn't fail; he simply found 5,127 ways that didn't work. By viewing all these attempts not as failures but as opportunities to learn and develop a better prototype, Dyson was able to maintain the positive attitude necessary to achieve his goal.

We all face what's commonly termed failure or rejection from time to time. What sets winners apart is how they perceive the situation. Those who remain positive in light of numerous obstacles are often the ones who succeed.

On May 6, 1954, twenty-five-year-old Oxford medical student Roger Bannister became the first person to run a mile in less than four minutes, shattering a nine-year record. People said it couldn't be done, but Bannister had a secret weapon others overwhelmingly underestimated: a belief in himself. According to one writer, "Bannister studied the four-minute mile the way Jonas Salk studied polio - with a view of eradicating." Collapsing at the finish line after 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds that reshaped the idea of what the human body was capable of, Bannister made world history on the Iffley Road Track at Oxford. Afterwards he said, "Doctors and scientists said that breaking the four-minute mile was impossible, that one would die in the attempt. Thus, when I got up from the track after collapsing at the finish line, I figured I was dead." What's even more amazing is that by believing in himself, Bannister actually helped others believe in themselves. In the next five years alone twenty additional people went on to break the 4-minute mark.

Copyright © 2007 by Dawna Stone and Matt Dieter

About the Author

Dawna Stone is a highly successful entreprenuer who has a wealth of corporate experience as an investment banker, management consultant, company president, and senior executive at a publicly traded company. Her business skills as well as her calm, professional demeanor enabled her to win THE APPRENTICE: MARTHA STEWART. Dawna is an inspiration to thousands of women through her magazine, HER SPORTS + FITNESS, and her motivational talks. Still an avid athlete, Dawna regularly competes in sprint and Olympic distance triathlons and has finished the grueling Hawaii Ironman World Championship. She lives in St. Petersburg, Florida where she continues to live her dreams with husband Matt and two dogs Buffett and Valkyrie.