Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonalds, was over fifty when he started making money. Kroc was a paper cup salesman who obtained the marketing rights to a multi-mixer invented by Earl Prince. He criss-crossed the US for seventeen years selling these mixers until he met up with the McDonald brothers. Dick and Mac McDonald ordered eight of his mixers and had them churning away all day.

Kroc was entranced by the effectiveness of the McDonald's operation and started thinking about building McDonald's restaurants all over the US. He thought he could then sell more multi-mixers. The McDonald brothers weren't too keen to the idea so they franchised the restaurants to Kroc. He ultimately bought out the McDonald brothers and as they say - the rest is history.

Ray Kroc's belief in himself was unshakeable, as he noted later - "I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland." Kroc didn't allow his age or his physical condition to hold him back.

If you have negative beliefs about yourself that are holding you back, here's a way to change them.

Your subconscious will always attempt to move away from pain and towards pleasure. So start to associate massive pain to your negative belief. Think about how it will hold you back and stop you achieving what you're trying to achieve. Think about how miserable you'll feel if you don't even try.

Old people rarely regret what they've done in their life but they do regret what they haven't done. So think forward to when you're 75 or 80 years of age and imagine how you'll feel if you've never tried.

Then start to think of the pleasure you'll receive in fulfilling your beliefs. Think about how good you'll feel when you achieve what you set out to do. If when you're older you look back and think about things you didn't achieve, at least you'll be able to say - "I tried, I gave it my best shot and I didn't sit on the sidelines."

Thing Big! The level of your success will be determined by how much you believe in yourself. If you think small and expect small achievements - that's what you'll get. If you think big then you're more likely to have big successes.

Thinking big and having big expectations are often easier, and no more difficult, than having small plans and small expectations.

The psychologist Abraham Maslow said - "If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being; then I warn you that you will be unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capabilities, your own possibilities."