Growing Your Self-Confidence
How to get self-confidence is the central issue when tackling about the development of self-confidence in an individual who, for long, have believed that his self-worth is deficient.
It goes without saying that those confident individuals can bear themselves better than those who have lower sense of the "self". They are the achievers, the people of the limelight, the center of the society. They walk straight, speak their meanings very well and influence people, both subtly and obviously. In short, they are those who care recognizable even from afar. Sometimes, self-confident people are very much loved by the society. It is maybe due to their charisma or they are, by nature very amiable. However, there are those self-confident individuals who, just by leaving makes the room lighter.
These are two very dissimilar display of self-confidence. One, destroys a person's credibility and the other intensifies his personality. And obviously, you would not want the consequences of being too confident of yourself that the people no longer view you as effective, instead they see you as annoyance to their daily affairs. Self-confidence comes from within. Outside stimulation may help but it would all still boil down to knowing yourself and using that knowledge to gain confidence. To get self-confidence, you must realize that your limitations must not limit you and your attributes must not destroy you. Instead, use all these factors to develop a personality that would be productive for you and all those that surround you. "Know thyself!", says the Oracle at Delphi.
Though this might have been said thousands of years ago, it is undeniably true that we still can use the wisdom it says. Know yourself and get confidence. Recognize though that knowledge comes nowhere but inside you. Thus, you have to accept the reality that unless you embrace you flaws and perfection, the demons of low self-confidence would stay forever lingering in your being. There is a great risk in knowing too much of yourself though if your foundations of self-control is not much too developed. You would be exposed to your imperfections and since control is not yet yours, it is possible that you will be eaten by your own flows. This condition is closely intertwined with thought rumination wherein you seem to go around in your circle of thoughts about your losses and failures regardless of your achievements.
Another danger of having no control of yourself while trying to get self-confidence is that you might get too confident that you would forget the real value of having the sense of self. As we have mentioned earlier, over confidence is just as dangerous as having no confidence at all. This would send you back to failures or worse to eventual downfall. Knowing yourself is one factor that may either be dangerous or productive. Self-awareness often times help people realize how wonderful their creation was. They learn to give worth to their capacities and attributes that are obviously as special as those that may be found with other people. We are all unique and that is a fact. Our marks of unique can be seen through closely looking at our capabilities and our incapacities. Our uniqueness is manifested on the natural gifts that add to our greater self-value. Our uniqueness can be seen though our potentials that we may either ignore or maximize at will. All these are truths that would stay hidden to you unless you have learned to contemplate on your being and be aware of who you truly are.
A Step in Building Your Self Confidence
Everything has to start somewhere. Unless you start revamping your self-confidence, you will have to agonize endlessly with the very thing you are fearful of- low self-confidence.
Our self-confidence is the accumulation of all our reactions to the experiences that life brought us, the manner by which we were guided by the older people in our environment and how we and the society view us. Many factors are contributors to our personal understanding of confidence. One determining factor is how well we expect ourselves and the circumstances of our lives should be. Many tend to fall into the trap of creating unrealistic expectations. In the process, their losses are becoming too painful that they eventually suffer the effects of creating lower self-confidence. Others, on the other hand, lean more on playing safe and thus create more achievable goals that are easier to attain.
And because achievements add largely to the development of self-confidence, these people benefit from knowing that they are somehow capable of doing something. You may already have heard the phrase - "it’s all in the mind". And to many psychological and emotional conditions, we can actually say that everything is all in the mind. They rooted and develop from the mind and so, the antidote might as well come from the same source. You can always condition yourself to feel the way you want or to feel the way you don't want. You can suppress emotions and in the process, help emotions materialize. Say you want to feel hatred of yourself over not being good enough. If you make yourself believe in that hatred and you truly are convinced that you are not good enough, you will only get two products one, genuine hatred and two, lower self-esteem. The majority of us are caught unaware with our words. We sometimes fail to check ourselves of the things we are registering in our subconscious mind.
You may not have deliberately said it recently but since you are used to hearing yourself mumble- "I am a looser", or "I'm not worthy of anything", your subconscious self might as well believe that these are the facts. Even now as we speak, many out there believe in these statements. They are not mere words. They are for real and they will actually dig deep in your subconscious mind, which will then be integrated into your being. If you believe in these then there is no way that you won't believe in their direct opposite.
Central to building self-confidence is one's belief in himself. Whatever you set your mind to believe will all be taken as factual. Thus, you only have to manipulate the values that you would like to acquire. Otherwise, no amount of waiting can make you change. The motivation must come from you. Suggestions may come from outward sources but in the end, it will be you and yourself that will set out to do the battle. Changes must begin from you. You may start with talking to yourself using positive statements like "you are great" (for you truly are a great individual waiting for your talents to be tapped). Or "you are beautiful" (because believe in this or not each one of us were created beautifully to give glory to our Maker). You can’t stay long in your madness over having low self-confidence. Somehow, you have to change your perspectives and live a different life that looks forward to better things.
A Philosophy to Increase Your Self Confidence
Everyone takes pride with all the things that we possess. May it be the achievements that we had, or the present living that we were able to produce, each one of us has become an achiever on our own.
Many of us may have denied this truth though. But you see, it is obvious everybody is capable of doing anything only if we give our hearts into it and we set our minds in doing it. No one is deprived of the capacity to enjoy life's successes. Only those who deprive themselves of these gifts are the sufferers. Are you among them? Leave your answer hanging then whisper it to yourself. Whatever the output is, see to it that you would change things for the better. If you can say that you are confident enough then good! But don't settle yourself with what's enough.
There will always be gaps and you should cease the opportunities for improvement. If, however, you answered no then don't tarry. Wasting your life to senseless whimpers of negativism would obviously cause you to regret everything at every moment you depart. How painful it would be to know that you were equipped with everything you need to achieve but dared not use them. There was once a young eagle who happened to be raised in village of chickens. He was oriented to chicken living and was raised to believe that he is one of them. For long, he has been watching the eagles hover in midair with their display of magnificence. For each time that he stands in awe of these airborne eagles, he wishes that he was born like them. He dared not to spread his wings though yet every day, his heart cries for soaring the heights eagles soar. He failed to discover his potentials and real self and thus, he died a chicken- ever longing to become one of those to which he truly belongs.
Every one of us is an eagle. We are all capable of flying to the maximum of our potentials. Unless we spread our wings and dare to discover our real self, we will forever be bounded by our failure to transcend heights and become the real people that we were meant to become. Now, if we would only realize the eagle that is sleeping within us then we could have all lived a life of happiness and contentment. We were all born entitled with achievements and successes. The Universe is too good for us that she took time to secure everything that we would need to soar. Don't waste this very opportunity by putting loads in your back so you would be delimited and thus, incapable of flying. Be like an eagle who has unearthed himself from the mud of being a chicken. Chickens are meant for slaughter. In the same way, if we choose to be chickens then we would have to accept the reality that our purpose would be defeated. That is, to give glory to the Universe who has kept us in her arms and fed us with everything we needed. Be like an eagle and live a life free from the damaging culture of the chickens. Be like an eagle and make yourself benefit from the confidence you can get from being a mighty creature.
Building Confidence and Self Esteem
Optimism! It all lies in our positive perception of our personality, the events occurring around us and life itself. So long as we believe in the goodness that we may have in life, we are bound to enjoy it the way every man should.
Unfortunately, many of us cannot grasp optimism from a life that is muddled with miseries, morbidity, and struggles. Of course, life's pleasure would not be appreciated if it were not equaled with unhappiness. Pain cannot be felt if all we know is joy. Tears would lose its worth if we always experience happiness. Confidence would not be recognized if we do not fall flat on our face sometimes. Life is a gratifying privilege and we can make everything we want from it. We have to start early in building our foundations so that we won’t have to loose precious moments that shall never pass by us again.
A moment that's gone is gone forever but your light won't even lose its value long after you have gone. With optimism in life we would be able to recognize the fullness of our potentials. Everyone has an equal chance for recognition yet many of us fail to share with the limelight because we surrender even before the battle begun. If you would want to share with what the world offers, you must be brave enough. Nothing should stop you from living your life, not even the miserable demons of low self-confidence. Those who braved life are those who are confident enough of themselves. Sometimes, we just have to take risks so that we might discover what lies in our road. Taking risks though requires lots of faith in yourself. Without this, you would be like a warrior who has lost his armor. From birth, we were equipped with all the skills that we will use in the later stages of our lives. One such skill is the ability to face challenges and to face them with faith, both in ourselves and to Him who has created all of us.
All of us had an equal chance to develop our sense of self, even when it feels like our fellow is much blessed than us. We normally have the common notion that life is unfair when in fact, it is not. We all have our shares of blessing and our shares of challenges. It just lies in our perception of things and the manner by which we handle things.
The same thing goes with self-confidence and self-esteem. Many of us think that the man we are looking up to shared much of life's blessings because he can bear himself better, he can face the public better and he is much eloquent and more confident than most of us. Remember that before he even got there, he has to face challenges that contributed to his self-esteem and self-confidence. All of us can be that man, only if we believe in ourselves enough.
We just have to find our own enlightenment to be able to achieve the building of good foundations for our self-esteem and self-confidence. Changes must come from within before we can accept the assistance that comes from outside. Realization of how valuable you are and how beautifully you were created cannot be helped by outside reinforcement if you, yourself do not want to accept this one simple truth. Go on, help in the discovery of yourself and that is among the most wonderful venture you will take in life.
The Roots of Low Self Confidence
There is no single factor that we can consider as the pool from which low self-confidence comes from.
In fact, it is the accumulation of mishaps and lacks in the past that we are failing to unearth and give due remedy. It is the outcome of our failure to recognize who we truly are and what are the hampers to our own growth. Low self-confidence is obviously delimiting. It would send us stomping on our endowed capacities and instead, take our failures as early defeats. It would confine is in our comfort zone where everything is safe from potential humiliation and further mistakes. The comfort zones will then make us believe that we must not go out from its four corners because out there, disappointments and losses await. But even when we tell ourselves how harsh and messed up things may get, we must still not surrender to the inner critic that thrives inside us.
We must at all rate, defeat it and show off ourselves to the world. Low self-confidence develops during our childhood. Unfortunately, many of us have parents, teachers, friends and enemies who are keener to our deficiencies than with our talents. They would tell us of our mistakes and kill our inner drives. These may not actually be said direct on our face but their actions and sneers are enough to convince us that we are losers. Perhaps you live under cold critical eyes that know nothing of imperfection. Or maybe you are the underling of a brother who achieves in school, thus the intense focus on him and frequent disregard for you. Probably people do things for you when they feel like you can’t do things on your own. These are subtle triggering instances that would all contribute to your eventual loss of self-confidence. Because of such poor models and lack of attention given on you, you would soon find that you are really incapable of doing things when in fact you have gifts beyond your own reckoning.
Your belief on their beliefs would then send you blaming yourselves for all your failures. And at times, you would even convince yourself that you are also responsible for the failures of those people you have close contact with. As a child, sweeping statements will be a commonplace for you. You will convince yourself of how stupid you are even without the reinforcement that comes from the warped people surrounding you. And as the process goes on, you would learn to ignore the blind negative accusations that other people throw at you. And to add up more miseries on your already-piled up problems, you would learn to accept that there is nothing more to life but defeats and failures.
Your faith in yourself by now is much too weakened. Therefore, you would not try to resolve your conflict on sense of self and would not dare plan how to get around this self-tormenting course of life. Solutions and helpful people would come to you though. However, your reactions would either be to push them away or totally disregard them. Continue at this phase and you would soon discover that salvation from low self-confidence is presenting itself to you but you are all too muddled in your own world that it would be way to impossible to cure the problem. Unless, a life changing miracle would cross your way.
Thoughts on Improving Self Confidence
Don't be fooled. Even the most confident people have their insecurities and the most competent are flawed.
Though we may have dreamt of being the perfect persons we see in other people, we have to understand that nothing can be perfect. The things we would want to happen in our lives don't necessarily happen the way we want them to be however tactful our plans were. The very things we want to attain will not pass by us so long as we won't work towards achieving them. It takes effort to make things happen though. And the self-confident people have acquired their attributes not out of luck. An author once said that the most beautiful people do not just happen.
They must know hardship, they must know suffering, they must know defeat, struggle and loss before they truly understand the depth of their worth. Everyone is built for recognition, for achievement, for fame. The capacity to be confident of oneself was not given by random, it lies in all of us. Like with all other things we are in equal standing with that of the fellow sitting next to us. The difference though lies in our personal treatments of the capabilities that we were endowed with. Initial development of self-confidence roots from our childhood, the fashion by which we were reared, the opportunities that honed us to be the persons that we are and our reactions to the challenges that were given to us. At a very young age, we already know how it feels to be humiliated or encouraged.
At a very young age, we are already capable of giving interpretations with the way things happen to us. If at childhood we failed to react positively due to reasons like lack of or improper guidance, poor models and insufficient knowledge, it is likely that the succeeding phases of our lives will become dependent with how the things went during these ages. But with age comes maturity. And maturity arises from the experiences we are encountering. Experiences, as we know them, are among the great teachers we have. Failure to take advantage of the experiences we encounter will only send us back to the same circumstances until we are able to spot where we have gone wrong. Therefore, we have no excuse that we were not given the chance to improve with each experience. You see, improving self-confidence is just a matter of becoming mature. If you will become complacent with the idea of setting back to lack of achievement and recognition then you will fail to comprehend that life is more than mediocre living.
Everyone can improve self-confidence regardless of how we were in the past. What only matters are now- the present. If you would take stock of yourself and believe that you have the capacity to be anything and everything you want to be, you are sure to be a step higher towards achieving self-confidence. There are lots of ways that you may take to help you improve your self-confidence. The keys are to have the positive attitude that anybody can do anything and adaptation of the belief that you can be anybody and you can be anything you set your mind to be. If all else fails, remember the moments when you felt good because you were able to achieve something by feeling good about yourself. That way, you will be encouraged to become a better person you always wanted to be.
What To Do When You Need to Boost Your Self Confidence
Small differences make great changes. It all boils down in a single idea that would recreate your self-image.
Remember when you were so confident of having done something then someone commented on how bad things went? Remember when you were struggling to finish your work satisfactorily when someone said you would never make it to promotion? Remember when you set out to run a mile and people scrutinized you for having such goal?
Remember all those times. They all rooted from pessimistic commentaries that were of no use but to destroy the positive spirit in you that says " you can". Self-confidence lies near to positive thinking. If you think positively of yourself and take stock of all positive attributes you have while considering the worth of those you lack then you can at least make yourself believe that you can actually do and can make things happen. Positive thinking is not being overly hopeful of something that is unachievable.
Central to boosting self-confidence and positive thinking is the setting of realistic goals that you can reach for while not delimiting your capacities. Normally when we set out to do something we tend to over calculate things and plan to achieve things beyond our present reach. This, we say, would encourage us to work double time. But the point we are missing is that once we fail our expectations and the expectations of the crowd that is watching us, we will be discouraged to try things again. You see, on our initial tries it is not bad if we would set achievable goals rather than confidence boosting-unrealistic goals that would leave us dismayed. When you really need to feel good about yourself, remember that self-confidence is largely controlled by the hormonal balance in our body.
Thus, you can alter your mood by stimulating yourself to do so. Say, if you have this vivid memory of having been able to achieve something or you once had "cheerleaders" who pushed you to achieving greater things, you can surely use them to manipulate your emotions. If not, then remember the moments when you really felt happy about yourself. Controlling the reins of your moods and emotions can contribute to your overall confidence. At one point of our lives, we all have been our own critics. Undue criticisms don't only make us vulnerable to negative thoughts, they also affect us overall personal perspectives.
Have you noticed how we criticize ourselves without even realizing that we can’t utter those very things to other people? We are harsher to ourselves than we can imagine. Thus, with every negative input we receive from this critic, we are left upset and unconfident. It is like tearing the walls that we have built for long in exchange for a few unjust remarks that we rarely need. Avoid using sweeping statements about yourself because these are the very things that would eventually strip you off your good self-image. Recreating the comments, you give to yourself will have a huge impact on your self-confidence. In the end, destruction comes from within us. Other people may argue that we are affected by external pessimism. True, yet this would only affect us once we allow entry towards ourselves. Thus, you only have to create barriers from negative inputs while strengthening your underlying foundations.
Advises to Help You in Increasing Self Confidence
Confidence is the stuff of life that we are all made from. The difference just comes with our understanding and acceptance of things.
Some people are just keener at recognizing themselves and their capacities than others. It all lies on our perception of ourselves, our understanding of possibilities and our capability to put our understanding and perception to good use. Like being rich, we think that self-confidence is something that all others have except us. You see, life was created equal and it is meant to be equal. Inequality just comes with our notions of what we already have yet fail to recognize and what others have that we crave for. Don't be harsh with yourself. Don't deprive yourself from the enjoyment of life. Take stock of yourself and refrain from making excuses such as looking at your neighbor's fences while blinding your eyes from the gold mine that is present in your own grounds.
All has a beauty that no one can take away save ourselves. We were all gifted with talents and skills and beauty and wonder along with the gift to use or disregard them. But once we recognize our potentials, we will find that life has more to offer than mediocrity. We have to understand though that there are a couple things that we are limited from. But these are compensated by the fact that we carry the potential of excelling on other things. Only we have to find our veins and fortes. Our understanding might be limited with our past experiences. Yet this does not negate the fact that we can widen our perception towards ourselves if we just push one step higher towards creating positive images of who we truly are.
Remember that our improvement and our downfall our dependent on how we choose to carry things. It doesn't mean that when your fellow achieves far better thing, he takes these achievements from your own vaults of potentials. It just means that he was able to recognize his capabilities and put this discovery on his own advantage. Generally, self-confidence and the manner by which we increase them are achieved only when we dare to do things that we first thought are way out of our own capacities. We sometimes fail to recognize that simple things can help in delivering to us the glories of confidence. We can achieve the development of our confidence is a multitude of ways. Activities like developing your verbal skills through writing and public relations will help largely in increasing your sense of self. Most of us have the fear of facing the public.
Yet once we get over this fear, we are likely to discover more of our capabilities later own. You may also find reinforcement of self-confidence from cultivating your innate talents. Say you are fond of combining notes and poetry, or you have the natural tendency to get involved with music, you can help save yourself from low confidence by redirecting this interest to more useful activities. You can perhaps write music and allow others to appreciate your compositions or get involved with poetry and develop the genius in you. There are endless possibilities, you just have to be open to them. Remember that the only being that would stop you from developing is yourself and the only being that would spar you towards your own happiness is also yourself. Decide- will you be your greatest enemy or your greatest help?
Get Self Confidence From Within
How to get self-confidence is the central issue when tackling about the development of self confidence in an individual who, for long, have believed that his self-worth is deficient.
It goes without saying that those confident individuals can bear themselves better than those who have lower sense of the "self". They are the achievers, the people of the limelight, the center of the society. They walk straight, speak their meanings very well and influence people, both subtly and obviously. In short, they are those who care recognizable even from afar. Sometimes, self-confident people are very much loved by the society. It is maybe due to their charisma or they are, by nature very amiable. However, there are those self-confident individuals who, just by leaving makes the room lighter.
These are two very dissimilar display of self-confidence. One, destroys a person's credibility and the other intensifies his personality. And obviously, you would not want the consequences of being too confident of yourself that the people no longer view you as effective, instead they see you as annoyance to their daily affairs. Self-confidence comes from within.
Outside stimulation may help but it would all still boil down to knowing yourself and using that knowledge to gain confidence. To get self-confidence, you must realize that your limitations must not limit you and your attributes must not destroy you. Instead, use all these factors to develop a personality that would be productive for you and all those that surround you. "Know thyself!", says the Oracle at Delphi. Though this might have been said thousands of years ago, it is undeniably true that we still can use the wisdom it says.
Know yourself and get confidence. Recognize though that knowledge comes nowhere but inside you. Thus, you have to accept the reality that unless you embrace you flaws and perfection, the demons of low self-confidence would stay forever lingering in your being. There is a great risk in knowing too much of yourself though if your foundations of self-control is not much too developed. You would be exposed to your imperfections and since control is not yet yours, it is possible that you will be eaten by your own flows.
This condition is closely intertwined with thought rumination wherein you seem to go around in your circle of thoughts about your losses and failures regardless of your achievements. Another danger of having no control of yourself while trying to get self-confidence is that you might get too confident that you would forget the real value of having the sense of self. As we have mentioned earlier, over confidence is just as dangerous as having no confidence at all. This would send you back to failures or worse to eventual downfall. Knowing yourself is one factor that may either be dangerous or productive. Self-awareness often times help people realize how wonderful their creation was.
They learn to give worth to their capacities and attributes that are obviously as special as those that may be found with other people. We are all unique and that is a fact. Our marks of unique can be seen through closely looking at our capabilities and our incapacities. Our uniqueness is manifested on the natural gifts that add to our greater self-value. Our uniqueness can be seen though our potentials that we may either ignore or maximize at will. All these are truths that would stay hidden to you unless you have learned to contemplate on your being and be aware of who you truly are.