I do. I believe you can do what you set your mind to. I believe in your ability to adapt. I believe you have immense potential. I believe the differences in our perspectives are valuable. I believe you know things that I don’t know. I believe that I would learn something by talking with you.

 

Believing in you makes me powerful. Not because of something in me, but because of something in all of us. Societies move forward, faster, when we feel this way; they come to a grinding reactionary halt when we don’t.

 

I didn’t always believe in you, and that was to my own detriment. It caused me to be more insular and go it alone, or to rule out ideas before I had really considered them.  It made me afraid to fail because everything was a zero-sum game, which made me afraid of other people (though I never would have admitted that). To on-lookers, I was often confidence incarnate. I don’t imagine it was a good look.

 

The better I became at believing in others, the better I listened, the better I learned, the bigger my impact became.

 

I believe in you.