During my life i have been lucky enough to witness the power that self-image has in all the things that we do and think of ourselves. In high school i wasn't a particularly good student, if i had to define my academic performance during that time i would have said it was mediocre but not necessarily bad... i think the correct word would be average.
When i entered college i decided ( and that is the important part , i decided) that i could become a better student and possibly the best in my class. that little change in my self-image was the first and most important step towards a successful academic life.
I wasn't really aware of how or why i was able to achieve such a drastic change in my habits until i took a class in my last semester with a professor that had the same experience as me, but for him it was an even extremer change.
This professor told us that he was a dreadful student in high school, only getting bad grades in the courses he didn't failed. When he entered college he had a really good first semester because he took classes that he had to take several times in high school because he failed them, so naturally he was very familiar with the subjects of the course and was able to get good grades.
Thanks to his outstanding performance in that semester he was awarded with the "highest grades of the class" award in that semester; in that moment he realized that the self-image that he had of himself ( that was highly influenced by a lot of students of his high school and even by some teachers that told him that he wasn't going to achieve anything in his academic life) was wrong, and it also was the one thing that held him back from even trying to achieve good grades, because his self-image of a good for nothing student told him it would be useless to try.
He decided that he was going to be the best student in his class for the rest of college, and he did, he was awarded with the best of his class award and he didn't stopped there, he went to his masters degree with the same positive self-image and was also the best of his class there, and thanks to that he could do a doctorate in arguably the best college in the world for his area of studies.
Hearing this story helped me realize that this life changing thought could be applied to every aspect of our lives and that everyone can do it. The first step is so little that sometimes we overlook it and it is to change our self-image. Think about it, picture a person that has been trying to loose weight for some time, he or she always focus on the basic things like what training routines to do or what food to eat, but he or she can have the best training routine or the best meal plan but if the person starts the project of loosing weight with a self-image of someone that is unable to follow a diet or training (something like, "i´m going to try but i'm a person that can´t keep a diet for more than a month"), then the project is doomed to fail from the beginning. The first step should be creating a self-image of someone that can and will succeed in the project.
Being able to make this mental process of changing our self-image will remove the barriers that we put in our own road towards our goals, it is very different to start something believing that we are capable people, than start it believing that it is something we will most likely fail at because we have a negative self-image about ourselves.
Learning this things that i'm trying to share with you has helped me a lot in my life, not only in the academic aspect of it, but also in several personal aspects (it helped me to stop drinking sodas, for example). I encourage you to start any project with this small yet giant step, because i really believe that it is one of the strongest tools towards self-improvement and also mental health.
I would like to finish this post with a quote of one of my personal role models and childhood hero, the 3 times boxing heavy weight champion of the world and civil rights activist Muhammad Ali. I think that this quote relates perfectly with how self-image can help us in the road to success, because it shows that Ali started his journey with the self-image of being capable of doing great things inside and outside the boxing ring.
"I am the greatest. I said that even before I knew I was"
- Muhammad Ali
