James Smith’s Info Serv

Author: John Vespasian

If you are well prepared, good things will happen to you. Closed doors will open, opportunities will materialize, and jobs will become available. Preparedness brings not only material benefits, but also psychological, such as self-reliance, which is a highly desirable trait in all walks of life.

Through education, apprehensive kids can become stars. Through training, people who are fearful of every shadow can thrive in new challenges. Through preparation, men who are suspicious of every innovation can turn themselves into self-confident individuals.

We should all welcome any means and ideas that help us face life courageously. Dejection and despair lead people to retreat into disaffected railway tunnels. Self-reliance motivates men to seek out the shortest way to attain their objectives.

Training and education, reading and learning, enable man to see farther down the road. Preparedness builds the conviction that achievement is possible and within reach. Looking ahead with confidence raises individuals above the average. Those without goals are so afraid to slip and fall that they tend to keep their eyes focused on the ground. Those with a vision use preparedness to reinforce their self-confidence.
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Author: Coach Sharon

When I was young, there was a girl who was a year younger and a foot taller than me. She bullied me for approximately two years. One day something inside of me snapped; I decided I wasn’t going to take her abuse any longer and stood up to her. Unfortunately, our confrontation ended in a fight, which I won. She never picked on me again. I learned at an early age that if you allow people to bully, harass, or cut you down, then they will do so. If, on the other hand, you make a decision to stand up for yourself and not allow the bully to take control, then s/he will move on to someone or something else.

Avoiding defending yourself and confronting others in difficult situations can have many origins. Your parents may have told you not to fight with other kids, you may not have had the self-confidence to confront someone’s bullying tactics, or you may have felt that you would lose in any kind of physical battle. If you never developed the self-esteem and self-confidence to defend yourself, you still may be allowing others to take advantage of or bully you.

If you are ready to battle and defeat the bullies in your life, there are four steps you can take to develop your self-esteem, ensuring that you meet all future battles with self-confidence and success.

1. Loving yourself. The first step is to learn how to love and appreciate yourself by itemizing and reminding yourself of your unique gifts, talents, attributes, and skills. Everyone has something to offer the world; you are no different. Also, understand that no one deserves to be abused, in any manner. We all deserve happiness and love, and a life free of abuse. Do things that make you feel good, and be around people who love you unconditionally.
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Author: Greg Frost

Losing confidence is something that is really not strange and even the best of us have come across a time or situation when they felt that they were not up to their 100%, and because of this, they start to lose confidence about themselves and their own abilities. The strange thing about abilities is that they only work if you believe in them. It really is not some magic formula or some spell that you cast over yourself, but it is really a question of believing in something and making it work.

You can be a brilliant sculptor, but if you have been exposed to the sort of conditions that make you not believe in your own abilities, then you may lose all your abilities altogether. The thing about this is that most of our abilities lie in the mind. The way we do things, the expertise, our own brand of excellence and the methodologies all lie within the mind and when that happens, what we get is basically a blueprint of our gifts and talents written in the mind.

When we believe in them and are not affected by the sort of things that give off negative energy, then we have mental clarity. When we have mental clarity, we can then focus on our abilities and divert our energy into doing them. Now, when we lose the confidence to do them anymore, this is when our mind is clouded with negative thoughts and events that seem to be dragging us down. The end result is a mind that is not clear and is not able top focus on the gifts that we already have.
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Having supreme confidence and power in dealing with people seems like a skill that only the masters of interpersonal relationships and persuasion would be good at. But you would be surprised to know that there are simple tricks to get to the point where you could have a firm confidence and power in dealing with people.

Of course, everything that needs confidence and power needs to come from within. Thus, it is only logical that you must first be confident in general if you want to be confident in dealing with people.

If you notice, the most assertive individuals are those who know themselves well. Thus, the road to confidence and power in dealing with people starts in knowing yourself. Knowing yourself is a function of knowing your capacities and limits. When you know these, you would have confidence in yourself, and that would consequently practice the habit of being firm with yourself and with people.

Asserting yourself is a practice and habit of one who is confident in dealing with others. Unless you are assertive, no one would believe your authority.
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It is well worth discussing what self-confidence is, before describing how you can change your low self confidence into healthier and empowering confidence.

As human beings, we action many tasks automatically and without having to think too much about it. An example would be riding a bike. Even though we might have gone through a few years of not using a bike, if we needed to, we would not find any difficulty in getting back on a bicycle and riding again. This is because we have done it so many times before that we know just what to do and do not have to give it too much conscious thought. So if you were to ask someone, how confident are you that you can ride a bike, as long as they had learnt to ride a bike in the past, they would probably say ‘very confident’. They feel confident about it because they have done it many many times successfully before. In fact they now give very little thought to actions required to ride a bike. It all happens automatically.

This can be called a type of self confidence. Knowing something so well, that as the saying goes, you could do it with your eyes closed or you know it like the back of your hand.

Now when someone says that they have low confidence, they can so easily make the mistake of encompassing their whole life with this label. They might even say ‘I never have any confidence in myself’. By saying this out loud to others who will listen, or even thinking it to themselves, they will be setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy. The label you give yourself or the label you accept as being true will invariably mean that you start to fit yourself to that label, and, can make it your own living reality.

However, that person above will be able to successfully accomplish many things confidently but, and here is the big ‘but’ they will not use these successes as evidence of confidence. They will dismiss or belittle them in some way (e.g. saying “I was lucky”) so that they can maintain this need to say they have no confidence. This is a pity as it is only through taking a realistic view of what happens in their world, will they then be able to feel more confident about themselves.

It can be quite startling how someone will say they have no confidence and yet 5 minutes later they will tell you about some amazing things that they do such as talking in front of 10,000 people, or they go mountain climbing. Despite undertaking these events, which ordinarily seem nerve-wracking events, they may still say that they have low confidence.

So confidence or the lack of it, has a lot to do with how you view yourself. If this is the case then really it is down to a perception. Perceptions are not a true reflection of reality all of the time. Often perceptions, even between just 2 people, can be remarkably different even though these 2 people have in reality, experienced exactly the same thing.

Perceptions are the filters we use to process what happens around us. Our perceptions can make us feel good, bad or indifferent. They can give us a boost of energy or deflate us into an anxious and fearful mass. Our perceptions have power.

Our perceptions are, more often than not, based on our past conscious and subconscious experiences. They are our way of analysing what happens around and enabling us to decide the implications for us. When experiencing anything, our minds will very quickly compare the current experience to past experiences and, these past experiences will indicate how we should react to this current experience. If we have had a bad experience that seems very similar to the current experience, we will feel in a similar way to the feeling we associated with that past bad experience.

So our perceptions are based on past experiences and what we have learned from them.

This gives us a clue about how we can change and become more confident. Our perceptions can be so inaccurate and if they were formed at a young age may also have lacked understanding. Most of us have had the experience of perceiving someone or some situation in a particular way, only to realise that we got it completely wrong. With this in mind, although our perceptions are a form or protection and are meant to enable us to weigh up a situation quickly, they can also be wholly inaccurate.

Healthy and robust self-confidence begins by accepting that your perception of yourself may be wrong in certain matters. For example, some friends will be astounded when someone announces (may be on a drunken evening), that they have low confidence. These friends will say will all sincerity that they find this hard to believe as they always appear confident and in control. Yet that person will still insist that they lack confidence. Obviously the signals that they are externalising are not the same as those that they are internalising. Often the person who appears to be the most confident and out-going will have terrible doubts and internal conflicts. The external bravado will be their way of masking how they feel inside.

Balanced self-confidence begins by admitting and accepting more evidence of what you can do well. It also begins by accepting positive and complimentary comments made to you as well as other forms of evidence. In the past you may have dismissed a positive comment that was said to you because you didn’t know how to handle it. You may even have made a joke of it or tried to dig up the tiniest fragment of evidence as to why you don’t deserve such praise. Many people say something like this ‘Oh, it was nothing’.

It would be virtually impossible to retain your self-confidence if you are someone who always dismisses or belittles their achievements. So make up your mind from today not to do it. Decide from this moment onwards to say just two words when someone says something nice or complimentary to. The two words are ‘thank you’. Try it out next time and see how you feel about it. It will help you start to feel the confidence that has always been theyre waiting for you.

About The Author
Steven Harold
Clininical Hypnotherapist http://www.hypnosources.com
Confidence Hypnosis Cd