Great Self Confidence

...to live the life you want

Archives for December 2007

Build a self confidence portfolio

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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. How often do you remind yourself of what you are good at, or remind yourself of times when you felt totally confident? What we think about has a direct bearing on how we feel, our emotional state. And, yes its that habit word again. Getting in the habit of feeling confident is one simple way of raising your general expectation of yourself. [Read more…]

What are you worrying about?

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Desiderata

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 one interesting thing I discovered writing that post was a definition of worry:-

“To torment oneself with or suffer from disturbing thoughts” (dictionary.com)

Torment sounds altogether more serious than “worry” – a rather weak word to describe what can be totally destructive. Having covered ways of distracting from negative self talk – another way of describing worry – I wanted to round this off by emphasizing some points:- [Read more…]

Challenging negative thoughts

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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 challenge. This second technique is equally simple in practice, you challenge the negative thoughts you are experiencing and come up with positive alternatives.

It is useful, whichever technique you use, to monitor your thoughts. keep a rough diary of what thoughts you get. The underlying principle is to get on top of what automatic thinking habits you have got. You may find all you negative thoughts center on just one problem. [Read more…]