Overcoming Discouragement through Belief

Are you discouraged? Don’t despair, you aren’t alone. Everyone has been discouraged at some point. But discouragement isn’t a final destination. If you find yourself there, it’s important to look forward to your way out and to reflect back on the path that led to discouragement.

Four Causes of Discouragement

There are four main causes of discouragement. Any one of these can you lead down the pathway to discouragement. The real danger is the following factors are cumulative and accelerative when joined together. That is, each one stays with you and leads you to the next one quicker than you got to the last. The four causes of discouragement are fear, failure, frustration and fatigue.

Fear is the first stop on this path to discouragement. Fear is the product of negative thoughts played over and over in your head. “I’m not good enough or smart enough.” “What if I don’t succeed?” “I know this isn’t going to turn out good.” These thoughts taunt our mind and convince us to believe something bad is just around the corner from us. That belief triggers our feelings of fear. What we often fear the most is failure.

Failure is where fear leads us. Because of its paralyzing power, fear keeps us from being the person we really could be; in our careers; in our finances; in our relationships. Inevitably, we will experience some failure, magnified by the lens of fear in our minds. And when failure comes, fear doesn’t go away. It becomes stronger and leads to more failure in more areas of our lives. This leads to frustration.

Frustration takes hold when we see repeated or expanding failures in our lives. Goals aren’t being met; expectations aren’t satisfied. It feels like success is slipping through our fingers every chance it can. Often times the response is to work harder and harder to try to fix the failures… to no avail. We spend all our energy trying to get out of the rut of failure and we end up exhausted with fatigue.

Fatigue leaves us worn out physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. Once we reach the stage of fatigue we no longer have the strength or will to fight the fear, the failures or the frustration. At this point, we become utterly discouraged. Every opportunity has turned into an obstacle; every hope has ended in futility.

Belief is the Key

You’ll notice this spiral to discouragement began with negative thoughts creating fear. Those thoughts created negative beliefs. But you can change those beliefs with new positive thoughts. Your mind is a powerful tool, but it can only use the resources provided to it. If you are always filling your mind with negativity, your thoughts and beliefs will be negative. But if you begin to feed your mind with positivity and affirming thoughts, soon you will discover a whole new feeling: encouragement! Through positive thinking, new beliefs will develop leading to success, happiness, joy, contentment and confidence.