Great Self Confidence

...to live the life you want

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…]

Distract yourself from self talk

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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 in 1930. A public meeting was held by family, friends and other supporters of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, five days after his death. The photograph depicts an empty chair, left vacant for Conan Doyle in the expectation he would communicate with the meeting in some way. He didn’t.

My other point relates to my last post about the manager of the England football team. Apart from speculating about Britney’s suitability, I mentioned how the sacked manager, Steve McClaren was being vilified in the media. The main thread of the post was “You can’t really care what others say“. Since writing the post I read one of the more reasoned articles that looked at why McClaren had been a poor manager. [Read more…]

How to breathe confidently exercises

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anxietyIt may sound silly to have a post about breathing – after all, we all do it without thinking. None of us were taught how to breath and, apart from pregnant women, most of us don’t get taught how to breath in later life. An interesting exception is those who perform on the stage. To date I have only touched on speaking, but for those who use their voice professionally, learning how to breath properly is an important part of how to use your voice more effectively.

In how to improve your speaking voice I looked at practical exercises to help you sound better. Learning to have greater control over your breathing will help here as well. But as I highlighted in do you sound confident a big handicap to being confident is how our body reacts when we’re anxious. The fight or flight response kicks in, adrenaline is released into our blood stream, and our body prepares to respond physically to an “enemy.” [Read more…]

What habits do you want to change?

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I don’t spend all my time watching TV, I promise, but I’m going to start yet another post with a reference to a particular show. There’s a programme called “Honey, we’re killing the kids” which each week presents a couple with obnoxious children, who live off junk food, take no exercise, etc.

The parents are keen to have help, but the catch of the show is that they present computer generated photographs of what the children will look like in 30 years time. This leads to the parents freaking out and a frantic 3 weeks or so of sudden change in diet and habits – so you can get the new, hopefully improved images of what the children will look like if they sustain these changes.

To be honest the show is of very poor taste – not least because it doesn’t do much for the self confidence or self esteem of the children to be portrayed like this. Also because changes made in this way are unlikely to be sustainable. But it does throw up an interesting idea for us to work on – “what will I be like in X number of years if my current habits don’t change” [Read more…]

How to improve your speaking voice

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help confidenceHaving touched on this last week in Do you sound confident I thought I’d go straight in and include some exercises to improve your speaking voice. But this is a vast subject – like any aspect of self improvement there is no quick fix. Also, there is no one way or one definitive set of exercises.

Firstly, I suggested practicing speaking out loud. This can be to rehearse what you want to say, getting yourself mentally sharper. But it also has the benefit of toning our “speaking” muscles. Lax muscles of the lips, tongue and cheeks can be toned the same way as any other muscle – by exercise.

Its worth coming back to another of my favourite topics – habits. We tend to get in the habit of using our bodies in whatever ways are easiest, and by copying those around us. Through laziness we slouch and stoop, and adopt to the weight we are carrying. Our speech is also a result of poor habits. Speaking clearly takes more effort than muttering or mumbling through hardly opened lips. Or grunting! Unless corrected our tongue, lips and cheeks take the line of least effort. [Read more…]