PART 1:  UNSHAKABLE SELF-BELIEF

A huge thank you to Tom Landon-Smith, cross-country skier, eco-endurance athlete and SAS member, and Jen Tight, Argentine Tango dancer and long-time client, for sharing their experiences so openly in our recent LIVE event:

(Tom pictured above left and far right his wife Alina - Adventure Racer and member of SAS.)

What does it really mean to have unshakable self-belief?

Perhaps being unshakable does not mean that nothing ever moves us. Life will shake and stir us. Challenges will come. The deeper mastery may be recognising when we have shifted, knowing ourselves well enough to notice it, and understanding how to come back.

Resilience is part of unshakable self-belief.

This exploration came forward through the remarkable parallels between two very different people: Tom, an endurance adventure athlete and competitive cross-country skier, and Jen, a lifelong dancer whose passion is Argentine Tango.

Both know what it feels like to enter the zone.

For Tom, this appeared in those extraordinary sporting moments when everything flowed. There was no struggle or thought about performance.

He described times when he felt almost carried by the energy around him nature, music, people and the energy of the crowd.

During one race, surrounded by thousands of people cheering, he felt no pain or struggle. He was simply moving on what he later came to recognise as the magic of  life force energy.

For Jen, dance is where her heart sings. It brings presence, trust, embodiment, and feeling with senses and responding. It is something she loves deeply and remains committed to.

Although their sporting experiences are different, the qualities they have developed are remarkably similar:

Determination. Surrender. Presence. Trust. Focus. Embodiment. Inner knowing. Passion. Resilience.

When they are doing what they love, they naturally move out of thinking and into being. They become present. They enter their bodies. They follow feeling rather than thought.

They come into the heart.

The question then becomes:

If we know how to access this state in sport, dance or something we deeply love, how do we bring it into healing and everyday life?

FROM BELIEF TO INNER KNOWING

Much of what we traditionally call self-belief has been created through the mind. We try to convince ourselves that we can do something. We think positively. We mentally prepare ourselves and attempt to override fear.

But there is another form of self-belief that comes from somewhere deeper.

It is not simply a belief created in the head.

It is an inner knowing.

It is faith in ourselves that is felt and embodied rather than thought about.

Both Tom and Jen demonstrated this not only through sport but through significant challenges in their lives and healing journeys. At different times, each had to decide whether somebody else's belief would become their belief.

Their journeys brought forward the importance of intuition, discernment and learning to listen to the guidance coming from within.

This is where self-belief becomes something more than positive thinking.

It becomes knowing yourself so deeply that you don't let the mind have the last word.

Nor do you automatically allow someone else's beliefs, fears or expectations to have the last word.

Your heart, gut feeling, intuition, self-belief and self-determination can put you on a different course.

THE SWITCH

Tom described self-belief almost like a switch.

Sometimes the switch is on and we are thriving. We are present, energised, connected and flowing.

At other times something happens and the switch appears to go off.

The important question may therefore not be how we remain permanently untouched by life, but:

How quickly do we recognise that the switch has changed?

This is where consciousness and the observer become important.

Can we notice when we have moved out of our centre without judging ourselves?

Can we observe what has happened?

Can we recognise when we have moved from self-love into fear, pressure or perfectionism?

And then can we consciously return?

Tom spoke of self-love, non-judgement and observation as essential parts of this process. Rather than judging ourselves when we move out of the thrive zone, we observe what is happening and refocus.

This is also why daily rituals become so important. Our energy is a moving feast. Life, relationships, family, planetary energies and our own experiences continually move us.

The practice is learning ourselves well enough to recognise those movements and return.

PERFECTIONISM OR PRESENCE?

Jen brought another important piece forward through her experience with dance: perfectionism.

Something we deeply love can move us into our heart, yet the desire to perform it perfectly can bring us straight back into our head.

The passion remains, but pressure enters.

Instead of feeling and responding, we begin analysing, judging and expecting.

The very activity that once placed us naturally into the zone can become something we attempt to control through the mind.

This begins to reveal an important difference between striving for perfection and embodied mastery.

In the zone, there is presence.

• There is trust
• There is feeling
• There is responding
• There is surrender
• There is often fun

Tom recognised that some of his best sporting performances happened when he was joking, laughing and having a wonderful time immediately before competing. He was not consumed with what was about to happen.

He was simply in his heart.

This is an important clue to unshakable self-belief.

It may not come from trying harder to believe in ourselves.

It may emerge when we stop interfering with what we already know.

YOUR PASSION SHOWS YOU THE WAY

Both stories also reveal the importance of following what makes the heart sing.

Tom's simple advice is:

Find your passion and your purpose and chase that. Do what you love and love what you do.

Our passion can become one of our greatest teachers because it shows us what we feel like when we are naturally connected to ourselves.

Whether that passion is sport, dance, art, gardening or something entirely different, there are countless pathways into the heart.

When we recognise how we feel in those moments, we begin to understand the energetic state we are seeking to embody throughout the rest of our lives.

We already know the feeling.

The invitation is to recognise it and learn how to return to it.

THE JOURNEY FROM HEAD TO HEART

At the deepest level, unshakable self-belief brings us back to the journey from the head into the heart.

Rather than continually looking outside ourselves for the answer, the journey brings us back to our inner world.

Do we live from fear or love?

The shift is not something that happens outside of us. It is created within us and through us.

The one-foot journey from the head to the heart begins to create a different version of ourselves.

Instead of attempting to bring the head down into the heart, we begin to allow the heart, our deeper inner knowing and our embodied wisdom to lead.

From there, the mind no longer needs to have the last word.

Our experiences become our teachers. Sport becomes a teacher. Dance becomes a teacher. Healing becomes a teacher. Challenges become opportunities to recognise when we have moved away from ourselves and to consciously choose our way back.

This is the school of life.

And the wisdom that emerges is not simply knowledge from a textbook. It is lived and embodied wisdom.

Perhaps this is the deeper meaning of unshakable self-belief.

• Not that we will never wobble
• Not that life will never challenge us
• Not that we remain permanently in the zone

But that beneath everything that happens, we increasingly know ourselves.

• We recognise when we have shifted
• We observe rather than judge
• We listen to our heart, gut feeling and intuition
• We remember the feeling of being in flow
• We reconnect with self-love
• We choose love rather than fear

And we return to our heart.

Again and again, we return.

Until what once felt like a switch we occasionally stumbled upon becomes a state we increasingly know how to consciously embody.

Unshakable self-belief becomes less about convincing ourselves of who we are and more about knowing ourselves so deeply that we remember how to return to who we have always been.

(Tom pictured below Cross Country Skiing.)

 

PART 2:  UNSHAKABLE SELF-BELIEF

THE ANSWERS ARE WITHIN

One of the most powerful messages to emerge from this conversation was very simple:

The answers are within us.

After his session, Tom had a dream in which he was in a room and was guided to reach for something he couldn't see. It was an invisible drawer. He opened it and discovered that all the answers were inside.

The drawer was invisible, yet he knew it was there.

It became a beautiful analogy for intuition and inner knowing. We can spend so much of our lives searching outside ourselves for answers, yet there is an invisible drawer within us that we learn to access through feeling, intuition and knowing.

Tom also recognised how self-judgement and worrying about what others think had sometimes caused him to hold back or not speak up. The lesson was to return to his own guidance and ask:

Does this feel right for me?

This is part of unshakable self-belief, developing such a relationship with ourselves that our own intuition becomes something we consciously listen to rather than something we continually override.

PERFECTION, COMPARISON AND COMPETITION

Perfectionism emerged again as an important part of the conversation.

When we are trying to be perfect, comparing ourselves or worrying about what other people think, we move away from the very state that allows us to perform and live at our best.

The simple message became:

Do your best and stop comparing.

Perfection doesn't get us there.

Practice and consciousness do.

There is a profound difference between striving to be perfect and giving something our absolute best from the heart.

When there is expectation, fear of getting it wrong or concern about maintaining a position, the head begins interfering.

When those expectations fall away, something else becomes possible.

We can simply be.

THE SECRET SAUCE

The experiences shared through sport and dance revealed what could be called the secret sauce of peak performance.

• It is love
• Passion
• Partnership
• Joy
• Presence
• Authenticity
• Letting go of expectations
• And being willing to have a red hot go

AnSaRA shared her own experience as a competitive horse rider. Coming from the back of the field meant there was nothing to lose and no expectation. She could simply go for it.

Yet being at the front of the field brought a different energy, caution, pressure and fear of getting it wrong.

The difference was not necessarily ability.

The difference was the internal state.

Her most memorable performance came when the outcome simply didn't matter. Horse and rider went out to do their personal best. There was no thinking about where they should finish.

There was only the present moment.

That became the magic.

Not thinking. Just being.

This is the zone that Tom and Jen had also described.

It is the place where our heart sings, where what we are doing feels effortless and where our head doesn't interfere.

RECREATE THE FEELING

If we have experienced this state even once, then we already know something about it.

We know its feeling.

That becomes incredibly important when life changes or we temporarily lose access to something we love.

Rather than only focusing on what we cannot presently do, we can remember:

• What did I love about it?
• How did it make me feel?

And:

What else can help me recreate that feeling?

• Nature
• Music
• Movement
• People
• Visualisation
• A powerful memory
• Something that inspires us
• Something that reconnects us with joy

The external activity may change, but the feeling it awakened within us can still be accessed.

This is where our past experiences become resources rather than simply memories.

We can remember the feeling and return to it.

GET YOUR SIZZLE BACK

The same principle applies beyond sport.

Are we allowing our authentic character to come through?

Are we having fun?

Or have we begun judging ourselves, worrying what others think and dulling our shine?

One person described finally allowing himself to be his quirky, authentic self at work and discovering that when he had fun, everyone around him began having fun too.

Another suddenly recognised:

“I've lost my sizzle.”

That sizzle is part of the unique quality within each of us that appears when we stop judging ourselves and allow ourselves to be who we are.

It is childlike joy.

• Authenticity
• Passion
• Fun

The simple enjoyment of doing something because we love doing it.

We already know this state.

The practice is recognising when we have moved away from it.

And sometimes the journey back can be as simple as observing what has happened, taking a breath and returning to the heart.

There really can be two very different zones.

Tom described it as a switch.

We can be in the head or in the heart.

We can operate through pressure, expectation and judgement, or through presence, feeling, intuition and life force.

The more conscious we become of the difference, the more consciously we can choose which system we are operating from.

WHEN LIFE KNOCKS US DOWN

The real test of self-belief is not necessarily when everything is going well.

• What happens when we are injured?
• When we are at rock bottom?
• When what we love doing is temporarily taken away?
• When we experience challenge after challenge?

This brought another essential quality into the conversation:

Patience.

There may be times when we cannot yet see what lies ahead. We may not know how the situation will resolve itself.

But we can continue looking for the next step.

• We can observe what is happening without judging ourselves
• We can remain open to solutions
• We can set goals
• We can learn
• We can keep moving

And above all:

Never give up on yourself.

Not necessarily never give up on a particular destination, outcome, trophy or version of how life was supposed to look.

Never give up on you.

Life is the long game.

It is a marathon, not a sprint.

THE JOURNEY, NOT THE TROPHY

Sport can easily teach us to focus on the destination, the win, the medal, the result.

Yet one of the deeper messages of the evening was that life is not about one moment of achievement.

It is the whole journey.

What is the point of reaching the destination if we haven't enjoyed becoming who we are along the way?

The trophies and medals eventually pass.

What remains is how the journey shaped us.

• The experiences
• The resilience
• The wisdom
• The ability to get back up
• The willingness to give life another red hot go

This begins to shift achievement away from ego and towards self-knowing.

As we grow, we also learn to listen more deeply to our bodies and our guidance.

Perhaps strength is no longer simply pushing harder.

Sometimes strength is knowing when to push.

Sometimes it is knowing when to surrender.

Sometimes it is patience.

Sometimes it is changing direction.

And sometimes it is simply continuing to put one foot in front of the other.

THE SPIRITUAL ATHLETE

This conversation brought the sporting and spiritual worlds together.

Someone may begin through the physical world training the body, developing determination, resilience, discipline and focus and eventually discover the importance of the inner world.

Another may begin through consciousness and spiritual development and later recognise the importance of caring for and strengthening the physical body.

Ultimately, both pathways bring us towards the same understanding:

We are whole beings.

• Physical
• Mental
• Emotional
• Spiritual
• Soul

To focus entirely on one aspect while ignoring the others leaves something incomplete.

This is where the idea of becoming a spiritual athlete emerged.

We are all spiritual athletes because life continually asks us to practise.

• To become conscious
• To know ourselves
• To develop resilience
• To listen to our bodies
• To understand our emotions
• To follow our passions
• To recognise what brings our heart alive

And to bring all of these aspects of ourselves into greater balance.

It is not about reaching a destination.

It is about becoming increasingly whole.

EMBODIED WISDOM

There is another important part of this journey that comes with experience.

We accumulate wisdom.

Not textbook wisdom.

Embodied wisdom.

• Wisdom created through living
• Through mistakes
• Through injury
• Through healing
• Through winning and losing

Through listening to the wrong voice and learning to trust our own again.

Through getting knocked down and discovering that we can get back up.

Every person carries pearls of wisdom created through their own journey.

When we are willing to share them authentically, others can learn through our lived experience.

That is the school of life.

KEEP LOOKING FORWARDS

One of the simplest pieces of wisdom shared during the evening came from Uncle John:

Keep looking forwards. Don't look back. And smile.

Life will continue to present experiences.

The key is not allowing those experiences to define us.

Instead we can ask:

• Why is this showing up?
• What am I learning?
• What is this experience asking me to understand about myself?

Then we keep moving forwards.

Our experiences shape us, but they don't have to imprison us.

We learn from them.

We embody the wisdom.

And we continue living.

PERSONAL ACTION + TRUSTING YOURSELF

By the end of the conversation, unshakable self-belief had become something much broader than confidence.

It was not simply thinking positively.

It was not believing we would always win.

It was not perfection.

And it was not pretending that difficult things don't happen.

It was about taking personal action and trusting ourselves.

Knowing ourselves deeply.

Listening to our intuition.

Having discernment about what we allow into our belief system.

Observing ourselves without judgement.

Recognising when the head has taken over.

Returning to the heart.

Following what brings us joy.

Recreating the feeling of flow.

Remaining patient when we cannot yet see the answer.

Learning from what shows up.

And never giving up on ourselves.

The athletic world and the spiritual world may appear to be two different worlds, yet at their highest expression they begin to reveal the same thing.

Presence.

Embodiment.

Inner knowing.

Self-trust.

Personal action.

Heart.

Perhaps this is the real switch we have been exploring.

We already know what it feels like when we are switched on.

• We feel alive
• We are authentic
• We are present
• We are in flow
• We are connected
• We are sizzling

The practice is becoming conscious enough to recognise when we have moved away from that state and developing the tools, self-knowledge and trust to return.

Again and again.

Until we no longer need to search outside ourselves for the answer.

We remember the invisible drawer.

It was within us all along.

 

PART 3: I AM UNSHAKABLE SELF-BELIEF

The Core of Creation / From Thought to Embodiment

MEDITATION TRANSCRIPT:  

This practice takes us on a journey into the zone, that place deep within our core and our being where we know ourselves intimately.

It is the place within us that knows how to keep moving forward, to learn, reflect and never give up.

Because life is about the journey, not simply the destination.

BREATHING INTO THE CORE OF CREATION

We begin with the breath.

Rather than simply noticing the breath entering the lungs, we become conscious of where it moves within the body.

We feel the breath travelling through our inner core, through the throat, the centre of our being and down towards the root chakra.

What we have previously known as the Hara Line is upgrading into the Core of Creation.

Like the crystalline core of the planet, we begin breathing consciously into our own Core of Creation.

This changes the relationship we have with the breath.

The breath is no longer simply air moving through the body.

It becomes part of conscious creation.

WORDS ARE THINGS

• Our voice carries vibration
• Our words carry frequency and direction

Words are things.

Through our Core of Creation, our consciousness and our vibration, we use words to create our reality.

And within our inner world, our thoughts can be just as powerful.

This brings us into a time of creating more consciously and responsibly, with self-love.

• We begin to notice what we are thinking
• We begin to notice what we are saying

And importantly, we begin to notice where those words are coming from.

Are they coming from the head?

Or are they arising from the heart and our deeper inner knowing?

CHANGING THE GRIP

Moving from the head into the heart takes practice.

There may still be days when we flick back into an older way of being.

That's okay.

The mastery is in noticing.

• We observe
• We take a breath
• We change our stride

It is like an athlete learning to change their grip. At first, the new grip can feel unfamiliar, challenging or even annoying because the body has practised the old way for so long.

But with determination, coaching and repetition, something changes.

Eventually, the new way becomes effortless.

From learning flows mastery.

And even within mastery there is always somewhere to learn, grow and change.

THE OLD SYSTEM

The head has been the place where many of our beliefs have been created.

Those beliefs can be limiting or limitless.

Negative or positive.

And they are continually reinforced through the words and thoughts we choose.

Much of what we think and say has simply been learned and repeated without consciousness.

Then comes a point in our journey when we realise:

Much of what I have learned to think and say is no longer relevant to who I am and who I have grown into.

We begin swapping systems.

We have grown through systems that focused heavily on the head, beliefs, expectations, comparing, competing and achieving a particular definition of success.

But as we grow in frequency and grow in heart, we can begin to feel an emptiness in creating solely from that place.

Something deeper is calling us.

CREATING FROM THE HEART

Now we consciously create from our heart.

• We breathe into our Core of Creation
• We connect with our heart space
• We allow our thoughts and spoken words to arise consciously from within

And with that comes responsibility.

Like an athlete, we practise.

Like a spiritual athlete, we develop determination.

• I AM never giving - keep going 
• I AM practising being in the heart
• I AM speaking from my heart
• I AM  listening to my intuition
• I AM speaking with embodied wisdom

And we practise knowing when nothing needs to be said at all.

With practice we begin experiencing the feeling of flowing with ease.

• Not trying
• Not judging
• Just being

LET THE WORDS FIND THEMSELVES

The breath can become the doorway.

We breathe into the body and drop into ourselves.

Instead of reaching into the head to find the next words, we pause.

We allow the words to find themselves.

Because beneath the noise:

You know.

There is a difference between thinking of what to say and allowing words to arise from a place of knowing.

The practice becomes allowing ourselves enough space to hear that knowing.

I AM IN MY HEART CENTRE

Words can direct our consciousness.

When we consciously say:

I AM in my heart centre.

We direct our consciousness into that anatomy.

Then we deepen the practice:

I AM in the Organic Divine Blueprint of my Sacred Heart Space.

We visualise the flame within the heart.

Within the flame, the pink diamond.

And we enter our I AM Space.

From here our I AM affirmations are no longer simply words repeated by the mind.

They are spoken from the most powerful aspect of who we are as a soul.

Again, this is practice.

An athlete or dancer practises and repeats something until eventually they don't have to think about it.

• They know
• They feel
• They become
• This is embodiment

HEART → CORE → THROAT

From our Sacred Heart Space, we now begin consciously connecting the heart, Core of Creation, throat chakra and thyroid.

We visualise the pink diamond within the sacred flame of the heart and allow that beautiful sparkle to move into the centre of our Core of Creation and into the thyroid.

We see the multifaceted pink diamond and its fractals of light.

As we breathe and speak from our Core of Creation and heart, we consciously activate this soul spark in another pink diamond within the thyroid and throat chakra.

The throat becomes more than the place where words simply leave the body.

It becomes the place through which our inner wisdom is given voice.

Words guided by the soul carry their own resonance, energy, frequency, vibration and consciousness.

Our voice becomes part of conscious creation.

PRESENCE, PRACTICE AND REPETITION

There is no perfection required here.

There is simply:

• Presence
• Practice
• Repetition

We begin noticing when we forget.

We notice when we start speaking from the head.

We notice when we are no longer pausing and allowing the words to arise from our Core of Creation.

And rather than judging ourselves, we simply become conscious again.

Sometimes the wisdom will be to speak.

Sometimes the words will arise from a place of deep knowing and discernment.

And sometimes the wisdom will be silence.

We also begin noticing those moments when old words simply fall out of our mouths without our conscious permission, habitual responses arising from old belief systems.

This isn't failure.

It is another opportunity to observe.

And then we get to play.

We practise again.

We change the grip.

UNSHAKABLE DOESN'T MEAN PERFECT

Unshakable self-belief is therefore not about maintaining some perfect state.

It is the determination to keep practising.

To notice.

To return.

To consciously create again.

We learn to recognise the difference between words coming from an old belief system and words arising from our heart, our inner wisdom and our I AM Space.

With repetition, this new way of being becomes more natural.

Just as the athlete eventually stops thinking about the technique and simply performs it, we begin to embody what we have practised.

We don't have to continually think our way into our heart.

We know we are there.

• We feel it
• We live it

I AM UNSHAKABLE

From the pink diamond within our heart, through our Core of Creation and into our voice, we can begin to embody our I AM:

• I AM determined
• I AM moving forward
• I AM never giving up
• I AM living with faith in myself
• I AM unshakable because I AM me
• I can only be me
• I love being me
• I AM living my best life
• I allow myself to be me

All is divine.

Shiny, shiny.

And then we feel the inner smile.

The smile within the heart.

The smile within every cell of our being.

Because ultimately unshakable self-belief isn't something we have to force ourselves to believe.

It is something we practise until we embody.

Breath by breath.

Word by word.

Choice by choice.

Returning from head to heart.

Speaking from our inner wisdom.

Creating from our Core of Creation.

Until there is less trying and more knowing.

Less thinking and more being.

And we remember:

I AM unshakable because I AM me.

 

To watch this go to Folder:   LIVE EVENTS 2026

The meditation is also in folder:  LATEST ACTIVATIONS 

Enjoy the audio meditation attached to this blog.