The Sydney to Melbourne snakes across Australia's beautiful south east corner covering a distance of almost 550 miles and is considered a real man killer even by seasoned ultra-runners. In 1983 Cliff Young decided to enter. Cliff was not your average athlete; in fact he was not your average anything. Most of the entrants were super fit runners in their prime, whereas Cliff was a 61 year-old cowhand with little competitive experience. There were calls for him to be banned for his own safety, but whereas the rules excluded runners that were too young, nobody could see anything discriminating against people being too old. So the organizers allowed Cliff to run and strike a blow for over 60's the world over.

I was thinking about this story the other day when I was talking to a client that was really struggling with career advancement due to a crippling lack of self-belief. Here was a person that had rarely failed in anything in his life. On the surface he appeared successful, but was simply afraid to take it to the next level because of the concern that he may fail. He actually felt physically nauseous at the thought of stepping outside his comfort zone for any length of time. Most people have some self-limiting beliefs like this but more often than not they are erroneous and serve no purpose other than to stop us fulfilling our true potential. Think back to the last time you said to yourself that you could not possibly achieve some task and then went on to surprise yourself and succeeded. Now think of a task you said you could not achieve and you did indeed fail, or worse still, did not even try because of the fear of failure. Which was easiest to recall? If it was the latter, then you need to re-evaluate. Failure is simply feedback, it is nature's way of telling us that we need to alter course, to adjust and reassess. To fail a task does not mean to be a failure as a person. Walt Disney was turned down by over 100 banks, many of which ridiculed his idea for Disneyland, Thomas Edison failed thousands of times in his quest to develop a light bulb and Tiger Woods loses many more tournaments than he wins.

The thing that sets people like that apart from most others, is the beliefs that they hold about themselves actually help them to keep going when things get tough. We all have strong beliefs about certain issues. However, what most of us seldom do is evaluate and re-evaluate them, to see if they are still relevant and helping us in life rather than holding us back Beliefs are not set in stone, after all most of us believed in the Tooth Fairy at some time.

Think about some of the beliefs you hold about yourself. Are any of these stopping you achieving your goals through fear of failure? If so, then some work is called for. Break the belief down into bite size chunks and look for examples in your past when you have succeeded at each aspect. If you have achieved something once you can almost certainly do it again. If something is in there that you have never attempted before, look for examples of other people that have succeeded doing whatever it is and model them. Get advice from experts, read up on the subject, search the Internet, look for a mentor, hire a coach, just do whatever is necessary to obliterate that belief and give yourself a new beneficial one in its place. It really is that simple.

It was a hot day in Sydney when Cliff turned up wearing overalls and galoshes over his work boots inviting howls of derision from some of the 150 competitors and growing interest from the press corps. He did not collapse after a few hours or even die as some had predicted; in fact he did rather well. Cliff Young went on to not only finish the 550-mile race, but to win it. Nobody had told him he was supposed to stop for a rest every evening, so he just kept on running whilst others took sleep breaks. Cliff Young decided what was possible for him, not his family, his friends or even society as a whole, he set his parameters in life and he set his own beliefs about what he could achieve. Who decides what you can achieve?