Great Self Confidence

...to live the life you want

Are goals necessary?

by

Reflecting on how I have changed over the past 6 months of writing this blog, and interacting with others here and in forums, my attitude towards goal setting has become less clear. I’ve always believed that having clearly defined, measurable goals is essential – even though I have struggled to use goal setting effectively myself over the years.

Since I qualified as an occupational therapist in 1987 I’m now in my 8th job. By taking certain directions I’ve gradually narrowed my options, but I’ve never set clear career goals.

Using the common argument in favour of goals, that without its like asking a bus driver for a ticket to anywhere, you could argue I have jumped on buses that have passed by that happened to be going in an interesting direction! [Read more…]

Overcoming obstacles

by

Although its Sunday lunchtime, when many families gather together, I’m sitting alone in our house as my wife and two younger daughters are all working and our eldest is 275 miles away! I will return to this on Wednesday with a look at habits and routines.

I don’t usually like intrusive noise in my environment, but prefer undistracting music rather than silence. However, at the moment I can hear the television in the room next door which is broadcasting the Great North Run. This is a half marathon road race, where thousands of people rise to the challenge of running 13 miles and usually trying to raise money for worthy causes.

I have touched on challenges like this before, such as my Big Swim, and the Confidence Marathon posts. Important as setting ourselves challenges can be, it nice to be reminded that throughout the world people are having to overcome challenges imposed on them by circumstances of birth and nature. [Read more…]

Affirmation software

by

Following on from my post on affirmations, there is no denying that for most people the act of reciting positive affirmations is quite strange. Like with other forms of goal setting, you write them out with the best of intention  but never get around to looking at them on a regular basis. More importantly, affirmations have to be read with emotion and made to feel real  otherwise your subconscious mind will not take them on as reality.

In the past I have tried computer software and subliminal CDs to help this process and tried to make my own affirmation board  a combination of affirmation statements and pictures/photographs. Despite my interest in photography, this never properly got off the ground. But over the past 3 months I have been trying a new piece of software called “Vision Board”. This helps you create an active screensaver, which is a combination of photographs and affirmations. [Read more…]

Affirmations

by

self confidenceAn affirmation is a positive self talk statement. They are usually goals – such as tangible things (to earn $xxxx a year) – where you can clearly say yes or no whether they have been achieved. But affirmations can also cover personal qualities – “to be a positive person” or “to have great self confidence”.

An affirmation is always stated in the present tense – “I am a positive person”, “I earn $200,000 a year”,” I have great self confidence”. The logic behind affirmations is that giving yourself positive messages, the mind starts believing it to be so. This is exactly the same principle as how negative thinking undermines us – being told repeatedly “you’re useless”, we believe it to be true.

Affirmations won’t work unless you [Read more…]

Goodbye to Jane and Andrew

by

There is a lot more to be said about thinking, but my habit is to bounce around and not get bogged down on one topic. There are many other things I want to address. In a recent post on positive thinking I mentioned, somewhat flippantly, that I recently had a biopsy. This is a test for cancer (in my case prostate). I now know that the results are non malignant, and basically I’m in the clear.

Thinking about ones own mortality is quite a sobering experience. It happens to coincide with my reading about two deaths. One was Jane Tomlinson, which anyone in the UK cannot fail to have been aware of. She was a 43 year old mother of three, who was first diagnosed with cancer in 1991. The disease returned in 2000, when she was told she only had months to live. Despite (or because of) this she undertook various physical challenges over the next seven years, including 3 London Marathons and cycling across America. She raised over £1.5 million, but always maintained she was very “ordinary” [Read more…]