Voices for Voices®

Haters Gonna Hate: But Self-Belief is Your Superpower! | Episode 190

• Founder of Voices for Voices®, Justin Alan Hayes • Season 4 • Episode 190

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Haters Gonna Hate: But Self-Belief is Your Superpower! | Episode 190

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This episode dives deep into the transformative power of self-belief and its importance in overcoming life's hurdles. Host Justin Alan Hayes shares candid reflections on his personal journey, grappling with self-esteem and confidence, particularly during his educational experiences. He focuses on how fulfilling moments can come from the darkest places, creating a rich tapestry of growth and resilience.

Throughout the episode, we explore how societal negativity can weigh on our self-image, detailing stories that many can relate to. Justin shines a light on navigating relationships with those who wish to see us fail and emphasizes the strength derived from believing in ourselves. By sharing his honest struggles and triumphs, he invites listeners to reflect on their journeys and find empowerment through their own stories.

The compelling conversation encourages those feeling marginalized or alone to find solidarity in shared experiences. Justin’s narrative is full of impactful lessons on growing through adversity. This episode is not only a testament to the human spirit but also serves as a rallying cry for anyone looking to reclaim their confidence. Tune in, subscribe, and discover how your belief can fuel change in your life and others!

We discuss the challenges of self-belief and the importance of confidence in our personal and professional lives. Justin shares his journey from feeling alone to finding strength in himself and overcoming negativity.

• Reflections on the importance of self-belief
• Navigating faith and its impact on confidence
• Facing and overcoming negative voices in life
• Personal anecdotes of growth in college and beyond
• The duality of feeling alone yet alive
• Encouragement to believe in oneself despite challenges

Please be a voice for you or somebody in need.

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Justin Alan Hayes, Voices for Voices:

This episode of the Voices for Voices TV show podcast. I'm your host, founder and executive director of Voices for Voices, Justin Alan Hayes, so this is going to be one of the first. So usually I film, we film episodes later in the day, and so this is a morning episode and it can only be described, I think, by how we, how we feel, and I felt like it would be a good time to a good time to do an episode. I've had some good thoughts, some bad thoughts. You're kind of racing through my mind as we're talking about, uh, you know our let's say our uh religious beliefs, if we have them. I do do have that belief.

Justin Alan Hayes, Voices for Voices:

On the Catholic side of things, again, everybody has their opinions. We're trying hard not to judge, and so we don't really, as an organization, care where you're coming from. We don't really, as an organization, care where you're coming from. If you're non-religious, religious, catholic, protestant, muslim, it doesn't matter to us. What matters to us is that we're coming together the best that we can, the best that we know how, the best that we can, the best that we know how, and that we have belief and we believe in ourselves. Now, that can be from a simplified standpoint like oh yeah, I believe in myself, I believe in what I believe in what I like, what I like to do.

Justin Alan Hayes, Voices for Voices:

You know, we talk about professions. If I have an electrician background, an experience, and I don't believe in myself and believe in the work that I'm doing, that's gonna come across to customers at some some point. Now there's always gonna be customers and people that are you know they're. They're the haters. They don't want to see anybody succeed. They want to drag people down, they don't want to see success happen for anybody. And when it does happen, then the negative thoughts, the negative stereotypes, the negative stereotypes, just the negativity, the toxicity. You know we don't have to all love like our individual actions, but from a human species we should have love for all individuals. Again, we can't make decisions for others and we're not trying to push our decisions on others.

Justin Alan Hayes, Voices for Voices:

We're just coming to you in a raw form of a very popular Voices for Voices TV show and podcast. We just received notification that one of the software packages that I purchased just over a month ago and I was really hesitant to do that, because there's a lot of great people, a lot of great organizations, a lot of great organizations, a lot of great software out there to help try to navigate a little bit better through optimizing titles, descriptions, keywords and you heard me on an earlier episode talk about that. And so I got that notification that just in the month or so that we we've had this, that we received 30,000 views on YouTube alone, and YouTube is only one of the 16 plus platforms that this show is on in the video form and the audio form. And so that really blew me away because, as some of the earlier episodes came across, as this episode is very raw people going through crises, going through disagreements, arguments, being unsure about ourselves and I'm living proof of someone that has lower self-esteem, lower confidence, on more days than I would like and so that's where the belief and believing come in. Bringing it back to the topic of discussion for this episode, and believing and believe it can come in many different forms.

Justin Alan Hayes, Voices for Voices:

I mentioned confidence success. You know success, having success, is definitely something that helps. When we look at believing in what we're doing and how we're doing, it started out terrible skipping classes, skipping exams, having to retake an econ economics class for the very reasons I'm missing class and getting I think it was like a D and that was unacceptable on all levels. So I had to retake that. So that cost extra money, just a fact of the matter. And through the roller coaster of college, university or even just high school, and not even that, just life.

Justin Alan Hayes, Voices for Voices:

We all have ups and downs. We have things that that go our way and things that don't. So if we're driving and we're hitting all green lights when we're on our way to our destination, then that's an example of hey, today's going to be a good day. Vice versa, we all run into what seems to be all red lights, could add. The other side of things. Oh no, this is just another thing that it's going wrong, going against me, going against us and I've spoken at length about an organization like ours, voices for Voices, or us as a human being, justin Allen Hayes. We progress in life. We talk about, you know, high school, middle school. We develop friendships with a lot of people or, like me, not not a lot of people that friends and that I wasn't in a popular group and and whatnot, and we've covered that. So that's the water under the bridge at this point. But that affects our confidence in what we're doing.

Justin Alan Hayes, Voices for Voices:

So fast forward to my education at Youngstown State, which started out awful, as I mentioned, but it ended great. I was not only attending all my classes, I was actually studying, I was preparing, I was leading presentations, I was leading group projects, I was running point on those and I don't know what came over me, but there was a switch. I'll say a switch because that just sounds like transactional, but there were just a series of events that occurred of what am I going to do? Am I going to be in college the rest of my life? You know my I'm not going to have any financial support. Uh, and you know, and the list goes on and on. But when I finished strong, that gave me the confidence of all. Right, justin, I can believe in you. You know going on in my head, you know I can believe in what we're doing. I'm doing. However, we want to refer to that, and so when that was happening, I had a high positive belief of what I was doing, heading into later stages of my education at Youngstown State and then even my master's at Walsh University.

Justin Alan Hayes, Voices for Voices:

I was trying to think the best way to share this, because it's hard. It's hard to share intimate personal details with 52 countries, 560 cities across the world, those 30,000 views on YouTube and even more on all the other platforms. We combine those together, there's a sense of feeling alone. Well, we know we're individuals, we're all made different, we all have different traits, characteristics that we're good at. Others may be good at as well, or maybe they're not, and that doesn't matter. But when we talk about feeling alone, when we're leading a project, when we are taking the time for our mental health, our health in general, our profession, it's really and I've felt it at various times and no more than where I'm at right now of feeling alone.

Justin Alan Hayes, Voices for Voices:

And there's a third eye blind song. It's off their first album. It might be motorcycle drive-by, and what that really talks about is at least the part I want to share is I've never felt so alone and I've never felt so alive. And that line, or those two lines of that song that I just shared, those two lines of that song that I just shared, that is so, so true, because the song also goes on to talk about you know, as you're building something, and that there's others that don't want to see it happen, and this isn't. I mean, third Eye Blind is my favorite band of all time, but this isn't a plug for any stretch. I love the band, love the band members, stephen Jenkins, brad Hargraves, etc.

Justin Alan Hayes, Voices for Voices:

But there are there's people that they don't want to see it happen. They don't want to see your success, my success, organizations, affiliations that we have, you know, as we, we would come back to the beginning of this episode. You know we're talking about believing and beliefs and if there's a lot of haters, as I mentioned just as a term, the haters are the people that don't want to see it happen. They don't want to see your success, they don't want to see my success. They don't want to see my success. They don't want to see the success of Voices for Voices. They don't want to see Voices for Voices helping three billion people.

Justin Alan Hayes, Voices for Voices:

They want to see, as a lot of times our media portrays, you know, these shock value statements or, you know, coming out against a particular topic, a particular experience. And there are, you know, call them sheep and wolves, a wolf in sheep's clothing. There's people that want to stay close, they want to find out what you're doing, how you're doing it. They want to get those what we'll call trade secrets and intellectual property, and all that really means is all the work, all the training, all the apprenticeships, all the apprenticeships, the internships, all that experience that nobody was there to see that happen. They thought, like this show, that it's magic where I sit down or stand at the studio, the things are magic, where we film it and then boom, it's, it's, it goes out. That's part of it.

Justin Alan Hayes, Voices for Voices:

But the reach and to touch as many lives as possible for that one individual and that one individual might be you, because that was me and it still is me, because I'm still learning and I'm still struggling with the belief and believing in myself and the organization, because it feels, from many different directions, that people and organizations, they don't want to see it happen, they don't want to see the success, they want to focus time and energy on other people, other organizations and I know there's a lot of great people and great organizations out there. But to me, the people and the organizations, the people that are donating to other organizations very similar to Voices for Voices, but they won't donate $1 to Voices for Voices, but they won't donate $1 to Voices for Voices it feels like high school, it feels like school, it feels like a clique, it feels like a group, it feels like groups. Now, this could be no response from emails reaching out, no response from emails reaching out. This could be no response from attending an event and sharing a QR code or a brochure about our organization that those things never really escalate to the point of, yeah, we want to support Voices for Voices, we are non-traditional, we don't have the connections that others have. We can reach out, but we just don't have that, at least at this point.

Justin Alan Hayes, Voices for Voices:

And so, talking a little bit more in the middle part of the show today, a feeling alone that there's others, there's people that don't want to see the success, don't want to see the people shift from one organization to another. There's people that want to again take your ideas, your experiences, my ideas, my experiences, my board's experiences, and they just want to pop in here and there and then they want to take notes on what's going on, how you're doing it, what software you're using, how you're finding your guests, who future guests are, who future guests are. There's a lot of that when the Voices for Voices walk is going to be this May or June, where people want to take advantage of situations and just pop in for that photo op or that photo bomb where this scene is happening, and then somebody just pops in at the last minute to take all the ideas that have been happening. And so part of me feeling alone is put on by myself. Because just as I was finishing out at a high point in my undergrad at Youngstown State and I told the story before I'll tell it again there was a summer class I was taking, there was an exam that was coming up.

Justin Alan Hayes, Voices for Voices:

I studied, studied, studied. The day of the exam came and a student raised their hand and asked if we could have an oral exam, meaning the professor would read through all the questions but then they would select students to respond and based on their response, the whole class would get the same grade. So question one student got wrong, that's one question that everybody in the class is going to get wrong, and so that gets deducted from the score. And so at that time I wasn't going to see it happen that way. So we had a little I guess little survey of who wanted to take the test as a plan pen paper, pencil paper and who wanted to do the oral exam. So we all put our heads down. Professor asked which way, and I was. I raised my hand because I wanted to take the exam the old-fashioned way, because I had studied and I didn't want to be taken advantage of because I was doing very well, I was answering a lot of questions.

Justin Alan Hayes, Voices for Voices:

Again, I was doing very well, and so, after everybody voted, our heads came up, we opened our eyes and a professor said okay, if you want to, if you raised your hand to take the exam, you know the old-fashioned way pen and paper, pencil paper, you know, go ahead next door. There were 20, about 20 students in class and I was the only one that walked over next door because I wanted to take the exam as planned, as I had studied my butt off and I didn't want to see others ride my coattails. So I was sitting there next door and then a minute or two went by and one or two students came in, and then another couple students came in and then, finally, professor said okay, everybody, come back to class, we're going to take it the old-fashioned way. So we're going to take it as planned. We're not going to do the oral exam.

Justin Alan Hayes, Voices for Voices:

And I felt a sense of accomplishment, of standing up for myself, that I don't know up until believing in my abilities at that point, and I was able to impact that process by wanting to take that exam, whether it was next door or in the class with everybody, and I was not going to be the one that was going to answer all the questions on the oral exam and have the person or persons, other students, basically get the score that I got. And I have that exam somewhere because it meant so much to me and my growth as a person, an individual that was buried for such a long time because of my alcohol addiction, just my this utter lack of not caring about a whole lot of things, and it wasn't healthy at all. So that was the first time that I can remember that I believed in myself and had belief Again, substance-free sober and had belief Again, substance-free sober but I felt alone because I was the only person that went next door. I believed in myself that much that I was willing to take an exam the old-fashioned way and have the other 19 or so students take the exam. They want to do an oral exam, that's great, they can do that. I'm going to be responsible for what I did, what I done and I had studied again so much no-transcript.

Justin Alan Hayes, Voices for Voices:

What do you do when the day the paper or the presentations do and and that student or person comes in and again trying to steal all that hard work that I did, that my team that actually did the work, or there were times where I was the only one on the team. There was a team of five, so I had four students that didn't do a darn thing on a project and I ended up telling the teacher I don't like being a tattletale and that, however, I had that belief in myself that I wasn't going to be taken advantage of if it was up to me, if that was possible. Again, sometimes that is possible, sometimes it's not. But when, and those two instances that I stood up for myself, that I believed in myself, it felt really good, felt really good inside, but I felt alone. And the other people in my group, the other people in my class that wanted to ride my coattails, people in my group, other people in my class that wanted to ride my coattails, those were the individuals that they didn't want to study but they wanted to get all the credit from the person that did study or the person that took the initiative and got that project kicked off and and said, okay, well, nobody responded to my messages, so I'm getting started. And so it was alone because I was the only one in those instances that was doing the work and here at Voices for Voices, and we have a quite interesting board of directors. We all have our busy schedules and I'm probably not the best at doing the managing part, but that's just me, you know.

Justin Alan Hayes, Voices for Voices:

I've gotten messages where people want to help me, so I don't say um as much or like a lot as much. I've also gotten feedback that because, for whatever reason, I don't know if it's the medications that I'm on or what, but when I'm thinking, sometimes my eyes it looks like my eyes are, you know, they're darting up, they're down, they're side, they're side. And I got a message it was very hurtful on TikTok. It said that, oh, I was feeling that stroke you were going through and that was very hurtful. And I know that no matter how successful anybody is, there's going to be haters, there's going to be people against what we're doing and against me as an individual, because they don't want to see it happen, they don't want to see that success. But they'll come in and and steal guest ideas, organization ideas, and so the people don't want to see it happen.

Justin Alan Hayes, Voices for Voices:

And although and I'm working through this as a human that at this point in life, as you're watching, listening to this episode. I've never felt so alone, and that's hard to talk about. I'm talking voices for voices predominantly here, but whether it's the hair, whether it's playing some songs and butchering them and not saying I'm not a great guitar player or singer, but I just like to do that, it's comforting. So I've never felt so alone at this point, but I've also never felt so alive. But I've also never felt so alive. People don't want to see success happen, but success is happening for Voices, for Voices. Thank you for your support. Please give us a big thumbs up, like, share, follow, comment If you're able to donate. Really appreciate that. Voices for voicesorg. Until next time. I'm justin allen hayes, founder and executive director of voices for voices. Be a voice for you or somebody in need.

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