What An Unlikely Three Time Olympian Can Teach Us About The Power Of Belief

Did you know that you are just six inches away from achieving great success in life and realizing your dreams?

Just six inches.

It's not much is it? It's the approximate measure of the space that is cloistered between your ears.

In that narrow space you will find, if you care to look, all the potential you require to make your most ambitious dreams come true.

You only need to get the stuff inside that space properly organized - and "there is the rub". Ninety percent of us spend ninety percent of the time inputting negative data.

No wonder the world is so screwed up! (Eek! I just caught myself "entering some negative data"!!)

Seriously, it is vital that we learn how to replace the negative stuff with positive input.

I just read a spot-on quotation about "positive input" by three-times Olympic athlete, Ruben Gonzalez (more about him in a minute). Ruben wrote:

"In life you don't get what you want. You get what you are. The best way to improve yourself is to change what goes into your mind. We are a product of what goes into our minds. What you think determines what you do. What you do determines what you accomplish."

Olympic Athletes like Ruben Gonzalez understand this.

They know that the thoughts they think will ultimately determine how well they perform. Each thought is like a computer 'bit', the smallest unit of information possible. Put them all together and those bits become beliefs.

The importance of beliefs cannot be overstated.

For example, in April 1954, Roger Bannister did what nobody in the history of the world had ever done before. He broke the four-minute mile barrier!

Then, later the same month, several other people also ran a mile in less than four mintues!

Since then, over 20,000 people have broken the 4-minute "barrier".

What happened?

Did the laws of the universe change?

No! BELIEF changed.

Suddenly, a number of athletes began to believe that 'If Roger Bannister can do it, so can I.'

When Ruben Gonzalez was in the third grade he realized he wanted to be an Olympic Athlete. Then, when he was in college he was so inspired by Scott Hamilton's performance in the Sarajevo games, that he made the "incredible" decision to train for the Olympics.

Ruben Gonzalez's decision was, by most people's estimation, "incredible" because, as he is the first to admit, he was nothing more than a second-eleven soccer player, and already, at the age of 21, considered "too old" to start a new sport and achieve Olympian levels of proficiency in it.

But, he did just that. Ruben took up the luge, a notoriously foolhardy sport in which you lie down on your back on a bit of plastic and send yourself down a toboggan run at about 85 miles per hour.

To do that you either have to be nuts, or have a pretty wild dream!

So how did Ruben raise the self-belief necessary to achieve his dream?

The first thing he did was not physical but MENTAL (in the positive sense of that word - really!).

Ruben began reading biographies of great people and discovered that great achievers were all motivated by a dream they were passionate about.

And they never gave up pursuing it.

The other thing Ruben did was to seek out people he respected. Associate with people who think big and you will start to think big too. Gaining the support of those whom you respect is a great way to boost your own self-belief.

Four years later, Ruben Gonzalez competed in the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics in the luge. He went on to compete in the 1992 Albertville Olympics and the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.

He is currently training for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. That will make him the first person to compete in FOUR Winter Olympics, each in a different decade, and also, at the age of 47, one of the oldest!

Ruben says, "I'm not a big shot. I'm just a little shot that keeps on shooting. I'm proof that ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things if they will just put the right things into their minds."