What do you believe?

Just read a post by Seth Godin which touches on something that I have been experiencing the last few weeks.  He opens his post with the comment:

It’s not always the stories that we tell to prospects and consumers that matter. It’s often the stories we tell ourselves.

I have long believed that what we believe and what we think will have an impact on our experiences in a very real and tangible way.  However you see it, the way we think about something affects our experience of it.  There are different takes on that ranging from us having a different experience of something mainly because our mood or frame of mind is not conducive to any other experience to our ability to literally summon a particular result as a result of a creative ability we all possess.

Godin reckons there are three types of people who don’t have the right mindset when it comes to self-perception and perception of the market and your business:

1. A belief that they deserve more attention. That their product or their service is so good and so beneficial and so fairly priced that the story they tell and the way they tell it shouldn’t matter. I don’t think this is arrogance… I think it is a natural byproduct of hard work and high pressure.

2. A lack of authenticity. This is almost the flip side of the first, but, surprisingly, it often shows up at the same time. This is the feeling that you don’t have to tell the truth, that it’s "just marketing." Talk to someone at a company on a mission–Southwest or JetBlue or Acumen Fund and you’ll hear the same story, told with desire and belief and honesty. These are people on a mission to really do something. Contrast that with someone who wants to know the ROI on a monthly basis from a blog–they’re busy doing the math, not living the story.

3. The third trait, which shows up a bit less often, is the marketer who doesn’t believe that she deserves success. This is the self-critical marketer who is being brutally honest–and is frustrated at the state of her market and of her product. The obvious but often difficult solution is to either change the product, change the story or get a new gig. The wrong but most common response is to just be frustrated.

What I am wondering is how to achieve that right mix of humility, confidence and optimism to begin to manifest the kinds of returns you would like to see manifest in your experience of the market or your business or your everyday life?  Could the solution be to "fake it till you make it"?  The key ingredients seem to be confidence in your approach or message and the humility to accept that it is what you have to offer others that will carry you to that tipping point Malcolm Gladwell talks about.