Do you approve of yourself - or do you seek the approval of others? When we lack confidence and in particular have low self esteem, we find ourselves needing the approval of others to feel good about ourselves.
Unfortunately, in this day and age of being over worked and under valued, the approval of others may […]

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Perfectionism came up as a comment on my last post, being good. It sounds fine - searching for the highest standards, being displeased with anything less than perfect. But it can lead to distress and self condemnation when you do anything thats less than perfect.
I’ve come across this interesting test that gives you […]

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I’ve written a lot recently about thinking and self talk, in particular how we tend to automatically focus on negatives. This applies just as easily to confidence. If asked, most of us can list things we cannot do, areas we lack confidence without too much searching.
So lets start at the opposite end. […]

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Some of you may have seen the above photograph before, as I used it to illustrate my post for Bob Clubb’s series on Desiderata, a few months ago. My post was based on the line from the poem: But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings
I took “dark imaginings” to mean “stop worrying” and […]

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This post and Distract Yourself from Self Talk was inspired by a previous comment saying “how am I supposed to stop caring about what people think? It’s not a switch I can just turn off…”
I said there were two techniques, one - “distraction”, which featured in the Distract yourself post, and two - positive […]

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I’ll start with a postscript to my recent posts. My wife and I have just returned from a weekend visiting our daughter in Yorkshire. Whilst there we visited the Museum of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford.
One exhibition had a large display of news photographs - including one from the Albert Hall, London […]

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