How to OVERCOME Limiting Beliefs in Racing

How to believe in yourself. So I got a really, really awesome question from one of my YouTube viewers. Love you guys. Elias, who wrote in to say, "Hey Evan, I have a question that is very related to your channel's main idea: believe. My whole life I had a dream of becoming a race driver. Since I was a little child, I would play anything with cars. It started out with silly arcade games to real hardcore simulators. Over the years, I didn't settle with being good enough. I always wanted to be the best. I wanted to be number one." Now here's the strange thing. Every time I go to the track to watch the races, whenever I talk to the drivers, I have the feeling that I will never be able to do it. Yet I have the evidence of friends, family saying I do have the talent for this. I'm really good, they say. Whenever I'm online racing on the simulators, I win a lot. I'm always a designated driver for emergencies. This racing thing possesses me. I wake up and it's the first thing I think about. So now my question: how do you start to believe? Do you lie to yourself until you start to believe it? Overall in life, I believe in myself, but for this racing aspect, I just don't do as much, yet I'm good at it. I feel as though I know I suck, or the evidence is proven that I suck at racing. My life will be meaningless without racing. If you want to make a video response about this, first of all, I would love to thank you in advance, but there is no need to because I feel like I would owe you something since I can't return the effort. I hope this wasn't too long or boring. Great videos, keep up the good stuff. Thank you, Elias. Elias, I am happy to make your video response, and it touches a personal chord for me too because I'm a big believer in that your limiting personal beliefs hold you where you are. We all have limiting personal beliefs that hold you where you are, prevents you from doing great things in your life because you tell yourself a story that prevent you from moving forward. And this is something that I constantly deal with as well. I think everybody does, and You know, I go like this and then plateau and then go like this and then plateau. And the breakthroughs are always when I bust out and destroy one of my limiting personal beliefs. So there's a 3-step process that I think will help you. Number 1 is awareness. Awareness is just understanding that you have a limiting personal belief. And so you've done this already. You're already a step ahead of most people because most people will tell themselves that story of I'm not good enough. And they just believe it and they do nothing as a result. And they don't get frustrated by it. They don't, they don't change anything. They just stay in their life because they feel like they're not good enough for whatever big goal or big dream that they had. They can never be that race car driver because they just tell themselves they're not good enough. So step 1 is just awareness and trying to catch yourself whenever you find yourself thinking this. And the more you catch yourself thinking it, the more it's gonna piss you off. This is what helps me. Every time I have a limiting personal belief, it often takes a while to manifest for me to recognize that I'm doing this to myself. And then the more I recognize it, the more pissed off I get. The more it happens, the more I self-sabotage, the more I get angry and pissed off, and it gets to the point where something has to change. Like, I am not this person. I cannot handle this anymore. Something has to change. So that awareness leads to huge results. But most people self-sabotage their entire lives and never know why, because they don't have that awareness. So you are already ahead of most people. So that's number 1, awareness. Number 2 is one step at a time. A big challenge for a lot of people is you're here, right? You're starting off, you may have started here, you've got here, but you want to be like, you want to be up here. You want to be up here, and that gap seems too big. It seems too big to close, and so you're putting everything on it, right? Racing. You want to be up here, but you're so afraid to go here that if you fail, it's everything. You've lost your whole life. You've lost all meaning, and so you don't do anything, and you stay down here. Well, really, it's one step at a time. You're not going to get from here to here. You're not going to get from simulators to being the best on the track. That's not how it works, right? How did you go from where you were to being the best at simulators, right? You work up, you practice, you get better one step at a time. And so that's what you need to do. You need to go one step at a time. What's your next step? Next up is just getting in the car and doing a race. You don't have to be the best. This is not going to be on TV, right? You're not going to have a fan club or anything yet, and you may suck on your first race. That's part of the learning process. When you first try something, you suck at it. And then you get better. It's not gonna be the end of the world. If you continue to practice and push yourself, you'll get better. Just like you did with simulators, just like you did with the video games. Every time you started it, the first time you picked it up, you weren't winning every single race. And the more you played, the more you practiced, the better you got. The same thing is gonna happen when you get out there. But you gotta just get in the car and enter a race. One. Just go. And don't put so much pressure on it. And that one thing will let you do another step and another step and another step. I remember when I was invited to speak at a conference in Brunei. It was my first big speaking gig. I had an audience of thousands of people, and it was being broadcast nationally across the country. It was a huge event, and I'd never done anything that big. And I was kind of secretly hoping that they would cancel on me, you know, like, oh, it's cancelled, you don't have to come, you don't have to speak, because I was so nervous that what if I bombed and what if I sucked and maybe I would never be able to do this speaking thing again, which I love to do. And I went up and it was good. It wasn't my best thing ever. You know, I'm a lot better now than I was then, but people liked it. People liked the message. People came up to me and said how great it was afterwards. And that, just doing that one act, now made it so much easier for me to go doing the next thing. Every other speaking engagement has been easy, right? Because I already did that. I've gotten here. So I can stay here. Staying here is easy now. It doesn't push me. It doesn't stretch my comfort zone. I've done it before, so it's easy to stay there. Now if it was Evan, we want you to speak at a sold-out Madison Square Garden, I might get nervous again. I might start freaking out. I might say I might start secretly hoping that they cancel on me, right? And recognizing, right, back to awareness, recognizing that that is a limiting personal belief. If I keep thinking about that, it's gonna piss me me off, I'm gonna go and do it. So taking those little steps each time gives you the confidence to go one more and one more and one more. And don't just try to leap, take those small steps to get you there. Number 3 is your environment. This is so critical because you are the product of your environment. You look at the people around you, the books you read, the people you look up to, the mentors you have. You are a product of the people around you in your life and you want to be like them. It happens, right? As people, this is what we tend to do. You're the product of your best 5 friends. And it's great that your friends are supportive and your family is supportive and they're telling you, "Hey, you can do this. We believe in you." That's great. But you need somebody to challenge you. You need somebody to say that you're great, but you could be way better. Right? You need somebody to be on your case. You need somebody to give you some props for what you're doing by saying, "This is still nothing, man. You have such a wide open net in front of you. What are you doing? Get in the freaking car and go race." And it's great that you don't have the little man in your life, the people telling you why you can't make it, but sometimes that's good. Sometimes that serves you as fuel. What I would look at is to, if you don't have the friends to push you, Start reading about great people. Start reading about great drivers. And I don't know their stories, but, you know, look at Michael Schumacher or the movie Driven, right? Those two race car drivers who are battling it out. Look at the greatest racers in history and look at their story and look at the problems that they had and be inspired by what helped get them there and surround yourself with that. Pretend like Michael Schumacher is your friend. Right, that might sound stupid, but close your eyes and imagine you're sitting at a table with Michael Schumacher and, and you're asking this question. What's he gonna tell you? Is he gonna tell you sit on the sidelines? He's gonna tell you don't do it? No, man, he's gonna say get in the freaking race, right? So you need people in your life to challenge you, and this is a constant struggle. You're asking this question, it's a very personal question, but this is something that everybody goes through, and it's something that I continuously go through. I'm going through this right now. Let me, let me share a personal story of mine. I want to have a huge impact. It's what drives me. I want to, I want to have a big impact, and I know I can help people on a small scale. I know I can help you with the videos, and the videos are taking off, and everything I've done is, you know, it's growing quickly. But I want it to be bigger, right? I want it to be life-changing on a world scale. And I don't always believe that I can do it because I've never done it before, because it seems like such a big goal. And I'm writing a book right now, and it's— I want it to be an important book. I want to be one of the, the top 10 most read, most valuable business books of all time. And that's an easy goal to say, right? Anybody can say I I want to have this book to be the top 10 book. Anybody can say that, but who actually believes that, right? Do I actually believe that I can write that book? Because if I don't, I'm not going to write that book. And when I'm talking to people, I'm not going to get them excited. And there's a fine line between confidence and arrogance or cockiness, but that's the challenge that I'm going through right now, is believing that I can create this amazing book. And when I'm talking to Jessica Alba and saying, "Hey, you're a superhero in the movies, but you should be a superhero in real life as well. You could be a superhero for entrepreneurs and help them and be a model for success through your Honest Company." I have to do that with a lot of confidence. I have to do that believing that this is truth. I go through that process too, all the time, right? The more I find myself frustrated and thinking that I can't do it, I get angry. And eventually it gets to the point where, like, I can't handle anymore and I gotta just do it. I gotta break through because that belief is just in my head. It doesn't exist. And then I start taking small steps, small steps to achieve my goal. Write one chapter, reach out to one person. They said yes, okay, let's go get somebody else and build it up. And then create an environment that supports me. I surround myself, and I have this challenge in my business where there aren't a lot of people in my life who challenge me. There aren't a lot of people who challenge me to be better, who have done what I'm trying to do and say, Evan, it's great, like, awesome what you've done, but dude, like, you're just scratching the surface. You should be up here, man. Here are the 10 things you need to do to get there. And so I surround myself with people who I don't know, you know, like Steve Jobs, like Jay-Z, people who have built great things and have a lot of confidence and want to have a huge impact. I'm drawn to those people and I surround myself with them, and I will close my eyes and imagine what Steve Jobs would tell me, or what Jay-Z would tell me, what Donald Trump might tell me, and I use that as fuel to help me keep going. It's a great question and one that, you know, maybe we can't solve in one video, but every major breakthrough that you'll make in your life comes from stepping outside your comfort zone and shattering one of your limiting personal beliefs. And it's hard and it sucks and it's painful, but when you get through it, you look back and say, well, that was, that was stupid, man. That was nothing. How was I afraid of that? And then the pattern repeats itself all over again. So do, do those 3 steps and break your limiting personal beliefs. So remember, step number 1, awareness. Step number 2, one step at a time. And step number 3, your environment. Believe. For those of you watching, you like the video, you can subscribe to my channel, see more videos like this. Thank you so much. I'll see you soon.