You don’t need to believe in yourself to do great things

Last week I gave a keynote to a room of business owners, and one of them decided to challenge me.

I was talking about how the beliefs we hold about ourselves are usually just stories we've repeated so often they start to feel like facts.

A gentleman in the front row raised his hand:

"What if the belief is actually true?" he said.

"For example, I'm not tall enough to play in the NBA. This is a fact." (He's a little under six feet.)

I love when people challenge me. It helps me clarify what I am saying, learn something new, and come up with a better way to share my message.

So I asked him a question: "Do you actually, badly want to play in the NBA?"

He said "Sure!" but when I pressed him, admitted that it would be super cool, it wasn't something that was truly calling to him.

Here's what I've come to believe:

You don't need to believe in yourself to do something new and hard. You need it to truly pull at you.

When something truly pulls at you, you find a way. You try things, you learn what you don't know, you keep going while you're still scared, because the pull is bigger than the doubt.

Take John Stockton for example.

(Fair warning: I am about to talk about basketball, which will make my husband Avi, a super-fan, very proud, but this pushes the limit of my knowledge about basketball.)

John Stockton played for the Utah Jazz at about six foot one, which is on the shorter side for the NBA.

He couldn't out-height anyone. But the game pulled at him so strongly that he got extraordinarily good at the one thing he could do better than almost anyone who's played: passing the ball so his teammates could score.

Decades after he retired, he still holds the record for the most assists in NBA history, by more than 3,000.

His height never changed. But he made it work because he felt a true pull to play the game.

It's been true for me, too. When I started my first company a few years out of college, I didn't believe in myself and I knew nothing about the industry. But I had an idea and it was pulling at me, so I started anyway.

So here's the harder question, and it's worth being honest with yourself about it:

You've built a career, maybe a business, and you've done hard things before. So when you feel the tug toward your next chapter, the book you'd like to write, the business you've been circling, and then hear yourself say "but I don't think I can," it's worth asking:

Is that really true? Or is it that this particular thing doesn't actually pull at you the way you thought it did?

"I don't believe in myself" is often more comfortable thing to say.

"This doesn't really pull at me the way I wanted it to" is harder to admit, but it's the more honest answer, and it's the one that sets you free.

And if it doesn't feel like where you want to go next, that's completely okay! It's good news actually, because now you can let that particular thing go and give yourself space to uncover whatever actually does.

And if it does pull at you, really pull at you? Then you already have what you need to begin. The belief will catch up.