Everyone has it in them to become champions, whether in work, relationships, family, endeavours, sport, whatever. The key to our success lies in the following 7 world-beating mental qualities.

1. Attitude. Attitude is the start and end point of all championship work. Without the right positive attitude of self-belief, you will not achieve anything of importance in your life. With it, everything is possible. As Charles Swindoll put it: "I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it."

2. Ability. You'll have a tough time achieving your full potential in life if you try to do something you have no gift for. Better to take time to find out your own unique gifts and develop these. Here's what Quentin Crisp says: "It's no good running a pig farm badly for thirty years while saying, "Really I was meant to be a ballet dancer." By that time, pigs will have become your style."

3. Faith. The one thing that distinguishes those who realize their full potential and those that don't is Self-belief. In fact, the strength of your self-belief is the one thing that determines whether you conquer mountains or conquer foothills. But self-belief, or faith, is not easy. It means a belief in something that you can't prove or be certain of. It means believing in life's magic. "Faith is like a bird that feels dawn breaking while it is still dark." (Scandinavian proverb)

4. Industry There is a common fallacy that championship work is purely a mental undertaking. Much of it is, perhaps most of it. But when the mental side is right, you still need to take action and work your socks off to achieve the goals you want for yourself. Charles Dickens put it this way: "Industry is the soul of business and the keystone of prosperity."

5. Courage. It is easy to start the process of self-development, much harder to keep it going, particularly when the score seems to be going against us. That's when we need courage. Lots of it. Sometimes we need a bold David versus Goliath kind of courage. At other times, we need a quieter courage, the kind described by Mary Radmacher-Hershey: "Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying: "I will try again tomorrow"."

6. Chance. The combination of all the factors of genuine self-development, such as ability, faith, self-belief, and awareness, are the factors that produce what we call "luck". Quantum physicists tell us that there is no such thing in the universe as random accidents. Everything that happens to us is a result of our mental preparation and our physical action. In fact, we always get what we expect to get, no more, no less. Anatole France described it this way: "Chance is the pseudonym God uses when he doesn't want to sign his name."

7. Perseverance. All champions know the feeling of working hard to what they imagine is the finishing line only to find that the line has moved somewhere else. The real finishing line can only be reached through diligence, patience, and perseverance. "All endeavour calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours' toil. In the fight to the finish, spirit is the one characteristic we must possess if we are to face the future as finishers." (Unknown).

In the final analysis, it doesn't much matter whether you become a champion on the world stage or a champion in your own little neck of the woods. The feeling you will have will be exactly the same: one of wonder, achievement, and triumph.