If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times: fake it til you make it. Fairly similar to, “Dress for the job you want, not the one you already have."
You are your own indicator of success. The beauty of life is that there is always more than one road to travel. And that road is what you make of it. We are reminded of a story of a man who showed up to work at a call center one day. He had no interview scheduled and no intention of going through one. He simply sat at a desk and started answering the phone. When payday came around, his boss realized that he wasn’t on the payroll. Given his diligent work, however, he received his paycheck and remained an employee at the company. Later on, he became one of the first employees of his boss’s entrepreneurial venture.
Whereas that was a different time, and probably wouldn’t work today, this story perfectly embodies the “fake it til you make it” spirit. By applying the fake it til you make it mentality to your life, you will notice a remarkable and significant improvement in your self-worth, success environment, and life outlook.
You may be wondering how to apply this mentality to your own life. It’s simple, and isn’t simple—all at the same time. It’s simple because the process starts and ends with a complete and utter belief in yourself. It isn’t simple because, quite honestly, that degree of belief is hard to fully take on and embody. In short: easy to say, hard to do.
Even with a wholehearted belief in yourself, or your self-worth, you’ll find life still has many challenges to throw at you, such as:
Your self-worth is made up of four components. Your image, your belief in what you can aspire to, your current comfort level, and the amount of trust you put in yourself. As you take this journey, you will come to realize that all of these small aspects are obviously synergistic. Also, they are much larger in scope than they first appear to be. Self-worth is both a fluid and lifelong endeavor, and its components are very much the same. Once you commit to pursuing greater value of yourself, you are committing to doing so each day for the foreseeable future—lucky you.
Absent a great deal of self-worth and positive self-image, you will continuously have trouble breaking out of your comfort zone and trying to accomplish what you want most. The fake it til you make it mentality demands that you are centered within yourself and possess an unwavering belief, to the point that others don’t see any chinks in your armor as you are reaching for what you want. Having too much or too little of any of the above qualities will prove to be a detriment, as they cloud your judgment of both internal or external situations.
Situations dealing with, or pertaining to, external self-worth can be examined and navigated in many ways. The most important things to keep in mind here are the energy you project, your eye contact, and most importantly, your body language and body posture. Your body language shapes who you are, how you present yourself to others, and how you believe others perceive you. By entering into new situations and introductions while taking advantage of body poses that can be perceived as a power pose, you will be displaying confident body language to both yourself and others.
As discussed by Amy Cuddy in this TED talk, your body language shapes who you are. It shapes how you feel about yourself in a very scientific, psychological and physiological manner. The physiological effects of your body language and posture are so extreme that even your testosterone and cortisol levels respond to how confident (or unconfident) your body language is in every situation. Seriously, watch this video.
Too much self-worth will create a sense of excessive self-worth and vanity. This leads to a headstrong attitude and gives others the perception that you’re difficult to work with and/or be around. Too little, on the other hand, circumscribes a very limited and never-changing comfort zone for yourself and guarantees your failure in most endeavors before you even make an attempt. With practice, though, we’re able to achieve just the right amount of self-worth and all of its defining characteristics.
Once we’ve reached this goldilocks zone, you’ll be experiencing success and expanding the boundaries of your comfort zone. Not only that, you'll also be fortified in the belief of yourself both now and in the future. And you will experience complete trust in all of your self-perpetuated actions.
As you hit your stride in your pursuit of mastering self-worth, you will be benefited with the following:
The next large benefit you will be greeted with is a reworking and a revitalization of your success environment. Your success environment has four components. All of your actions, the people you surround yourself with, your thoughts and ideas, and everything you do for yourself. If the primordial ooze was what gave life, your success environment is what will give you the life of your dreams. Simply put, a success environment is defined as every input (actions, thoughts, mindsets, people, etc.) that influences any decision you have or have not made at any given time. As you fake it til you make it, your nascent success environment will present you with new avenues of exploration and growth.
It’s easy to see why your success environment is glaringly relevant to your overall success. It is almost like an added bonus to faking it til you make it. This is because it gifts you with exponential opportunities to grow even more than originally intended. New people, new ideas, and new ways of thinking will enter your daily life. And just by becoming aware of what opportunities these things present, you can begin to pursue new and exciting options.
The impact that a well-manicured success environment has on the outcome of your life is hard to identify with a numerical value. But there are figures that surround certain events and accomplishments that can help you predict your potential success. The five components of the ultimate success environment are mindset, focus, dedication, discipline, and will.
There is an idea that says, “A positive outlook in life causes positive things to happen.” Your life outlook is largely a combination of your self-worth and success environment. If you’re someone who is relatively sure of the fact that you’re not an absolutely awful person, and you tend to your success environment with even a degree of regularity, you’re going to have a fairly positive life outlook. But if you’re the kind of person that sells unicorn steaks on the black market... You’ve likely surrounded yourself with the ilk and ideologies that tend to proliferate in such an auspicious trade. And you’re probably going to have a hard time trying to figure out how to sleep at night. Once you learn how to believe in yourself and how to perceive the world in a positive light, your fortunes will begin to improve.
Without confidence in yourself and an unwavering belief in your future, you will always be playing catch-up. You will always be fumbling with your life outlook. Better to establish this confidence and self-belief in the first place. That way, your life outlook will not only be on par with your desired success, but will also fuel it. Your life outlook is also the barometer for a variety of other aspects of your personality and behavior. These include your speech, beliefs, actions, and efforts. When you put in the work to reshape your life outlook, these other variables begin to fall in line, and vice versa. Keeping this in mind, the sum isn’t greater than the whole, and the whole isn’t greater than the sum. Each aspect is equal in importance to your overall outlook.
People who have mastered a positive life outlook are able to almost garner success in their sleep. That is because you are not only reshaping your conscious mind. You also reshape your subconscious mind, and the effects are wide-ranging. New ideas and inspiration will continually occur to you, and allow you to further your own actions and begin new endeavors. This is why there are few skills more valuable than learning how to believe in yourself.
Optimal life outlook is identical to a compounding financial investment. Only now, the investment is your own mind, dealing with your own limitless success. It’s everyone’s dream financial scenario: successfully taking advantage of a compounding asset. No action required, waking up in the morning with even more money in the bank. Your energy will always be wasted with a negative outlook. But your energy will always be increased with a positive outlook. Now imagine if we could help you ignite your own success in the same way. Waking up in the morning finding that everything had inexplicably multiplied and grown in size overnight. Your ideas, experiences, business ventures, relationships, knowledge and wisdom, etc.
Now is the time to stop wishing. This mindset and life outlook are simply one decision away from being within your grasp. All you have to do is give yourself completely to an excessive and radiant positivity. The question remains: how bad do you want it? If the desire doesn’t reign supreme over your current contentedness, the stagnation of your life and actions has already taken precedent.
Some say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But the grandeur is self-evident in regards to the "fake it til you make it" mentality. At first, practicing fake it til you make it might seem like a question of how to fake confidence. And if that’s what you need to tell yourself initially, then that’s fine. But just know it’s much more than a small lie we tell ourselves to move on to bigger, better things. It’s a method of forcing positive growth and change by committing to being better.
As you practice this method, you will notice three huge changes. Life doesn’t lose its lustre, your comfort zone is constantly expanding, and you are continuously rewarded with new experiences. All this while growing into your best self. Growing until you don’t have to fake it, because you already have made it.
By employing these three steps, you are well on your way to fake it til you make it. We’d like to welcome you to the club (as experts, of course). We eagerly await your thoughts and/or progress below. We'll see you in the next article.
The Implement Blog discusses topics related to personal development, health and wellness, spirituality, goals and habits, success, and personal passions. The writing directors, Adam and Bryce, bring many years of well-practiced, actionable wisdom and advice, garnered by instructing others in the occasional class taken in the school of hard knocks.