Let in the Light

Today on the Building Self Confidence Blog I would like to reiterate the value of building success into your life.

There is a famous quote by Denis Waitley that goes "To establish true self-esteem we must concentrate on our successes and forget about the failures and the negatives in our lives." When you're feeling at your lowest it may be something you don't want to hear but take it from me never were truer words spoken! I liken it to letting light into your life. When you do this the darkness goes away. There is no room for low self-esteem or lack of confidence when you start to experience success. They are mutually exclusive.

It's not like you have to shoot for the moon straight away. Start with small things and work your way up. Just having some direction will do wonders for your self confidence. Make a list of the things you would like to achieve and take small steps to get there. A good idea would be to introduce a new discipline into your life every month associated with what you wish to achieve. As each new discipline becomes habit you can add one more thing to your list of successes. You see, you now have guiding light. You will instinctively know what takes you towards your targets or what leads you away. Before you know it, life will have changed beyond your imagination and you will feel better able to take on the bigger challenges life has to offer.

Remember this, it's not the goals that are important. It's what you become through their achievement. You grow in self confidence by overcoming lifes challenges and not through letting life take you where it wants. We choose to build ourselves up by swimming upstream or we choose to grow weaker by going downstream. Don't let someone or something else decide your fate.

Make a choice now!

Finding Role Models

Hello, today on Building Self Confidence I would like to talk about the importance of role models.

One way to build self confidence in yourself is to analyse people you know, who are themselves self confident. When you do this correctly you will find that over time their characteristics will rub off on you. If you think about it, it's a bit like the master/apprentice relationship. You learn by watching and then doing. As an apprentice, you are targeting the qualities of confidence exhibited in other people to improve your confidence in the areas in which you consider them to be masters. There might well be situations where you are more confident than them but by carefully selecting situations where they show more confidence you can learn a lot of useful techniques.

For a given situation in which you are not so confident, you should try and analyse how the person you are using as a role model handles it. For example, what posture to they take; what of their voice tonality and their facial expressions; how are they dressed; and what gestures are they using?

Write the information down (very important) and try to use some of these qualities the next time you are in a similar situation. Try not to avoid the situations you don't like with excuses. Someone once said that excuses are guarded lies. They are only usually made to make life easier on yourself and will not help you on your path to building self confidence.

Go find that role model!

Letting Go

Today on Building Self Confidence I would like to address the issue of letting go.

We are not born with a lack of self confidence. We just unconsciously followed a certain path. A path made for us by the opinions of others and influence of the environment. We have been trained out of our natural ability to let go and have learned to suppress our feelings. We have effectively stored up a whole host of problems that do little to raise our self esteem, in fact do quite the opposite.

For all of our lives we have been soaking up the opinions of others. We are told not to cry and we are told to grow up. We are told to keep quiet and to keep our opinions to ourselves. Is it any wonder that we carry with us a huge weight of suppressed emotional garbage. You see when we suppress or avoid emotions they stay with us. Time does not heal, we just tend to bury those things we suppressed a little deeper. We then wonder later in life why we experience such things as tension, stress, anxiety and depression!

We do all sorts of things to avoid how we feel including watching TV, exercise, eating and drinking. It's not that there is anything wrong with these things, it's just that we do them in excess. We have effectively become masters of suppression and built the very walls that hold us back. We are being held back by the prison of our past. The trapped emotions make us do things that are not good for us. We then blame our condition on some external effect rather than dealing with the cause. For example, it's not our weight problem that gives us low self esteem, it's what caused the weight problem in the first place. This is obvious when you see examples of overweight people with high self esteem. For them, the condition has a different root.

What we need to do, is to learn to let go or release the emotions we have built up. In certain circumstances we do this naturally. Have you ever lost something and then frantically searched the house only to find whatever it is you lost in your pocket. You have? Then you will remember the relief you felt when you found the missing object. This was 'letting go in the moment' and it is what we should be doing with all our emotions even the ones we have suppressed.

For 'letting go' of your emotional load I can recommend two very popular resources. Here is a great book by Hale Dwoskin called The Sedona Method. Also, you could try The Secret Key by Charles Haanel.

Building Self Confidence

Hello and welcome to the Building Self Confidence Blog.

When we have little self respect for ourselves or a very low self esteem it becomes very hard to be a success in anything. We often fail before we even start something, simply because we tend to avoid situations we fear. The good news is that building self confidence is not as difficult as it may seem. The view that self confidence is something we are born with is simple not true. It can be learned like anything else.

Imagine how you will feel when you can face any situation with a spirit of adventure and a calm attitude. When toleration of uncertainty is second nature. When you become a "take me as I am" person who is not scared to fail once in a while. This is not arrogance, this is simply you being yourself and not dancing to the beat of someone elses drum. It is a big problem to go through life wanting to be liked or fearing others opinions of you. All our energy is diverted in the wrong direction. If I'm making a speech I want to making the speech and not be thinking about what the audience is thinking.

The true path to building self confidence is to devote yourself to excellence in all that you do!

Here is how it works. When making a decision, do your best to choose the better option over the easy option. The choices you make determine whether you 'remain in' or 'move out of' your comfort zone. The better option usually takes us out of our comfort zone. You see, we often settle for the easy choice because it is the one we are familiar with, even if it is not helping our cause.

When you have made your choice, devote excellence to the path you have chosen. In the beginning you will still probably avoid some of the more uncomfortable situations but this is to be expected. Mahatma Gandhi once said "No matter how insignificant the thing you have to do, do it as well as you can, give as much of your care and attention as you would give to the thing you regard as most important. For it will be by those small things that you shall be judged."

As your sense of positive pride grows through giving your best, you will increase self confidence and build your self esteem. You will begin to feel good about yourself and have more energy and passion to take on bigger things. We will never conquer low self esteem through analysis alone. Building self confidence is only possible by allowing success into our lives on an ever increasing basis.