Great Self Confidence

...to live the life you want

Can Gratitude Make a Difference?

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The best time to appreciate something is when you suddenly lose it. Having been ill the past week with a flu type virus I’m suddenly aware how much I’ve taken my health for granted. Suddenly being incapacitated and in pain, lacking motivation to do anything much except feel sorry for myself, it hasn’t been a great week!

The question of gratitude has arisen a few times recently. I was reading Debbie Bills’ lovely blog The Happy Maker, where in her recent post she listed 25 things she was grateful for. Not all were what you’d expect:-

I am grateful for my vacuum cleaner.
Have you ever tried to sweep carpet before?  No, I have never had to try that one, but I have had to vacuum on my hands and knees before, because the upright part didn’t work.

What lists by others can do for you, is shake up your own thinking. Recognise that you have so much to appreciate. Particularly when  going through a rough time (like being ill!) you can forget about what you have to be grateful for.

Gratitude Works!

I have just finished reading a tremendous book, 59 Seconds by psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman. He has written several other “popular” psychology books, one of which The Luck Factor I discussed at length last summer. Among other things, [Read more…]

How to Find Fulfilment

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One of my favourite posts is  How to Develop Will Power. As I say within it, will power is a somewhat overlooked characteristic within personal development writing. Its something we generally perceive as “difficult” or something we don’t possess.new forest self confidence

We can all conjure up times we’ve  given into temptation (and had that cake) or apathy (didn’t go to the gym) – in other words been weak willed. And its very easy to fall into black and white thinking, mentally beat ourselves up, and use those slip ups as irrefutable evidence that we don’t have will power.

My reasons for bring this up again are twofold.

1) As the earlier post discusses, will power (or mental strength, however you want to re-frame it) is a useful character trait to develop as part of building self confidence.

2) It links in well with a new theme I’ve recently added to this blog – finding fulfilment. And a big part of feeling fulfilled, is getting in the habit of doing – pursuing the occupations that give us satisfaction.

[Read more…]

Michael Jackson, the Curse of Talent?

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michael-jackson"Being confident is not always the same as being good at something"? That interesting statement appeared recently on another blog, My Life with Angels, which in turn was responding to a post by Maggie Stiefvater. On several occasions I have touched on the issue of whether being good at something is a key way to develop self confidence or healthy self esteem.  My favourite, How to Build Self Confidence Through Activity, looks at examples of children being taught karate, ballet and magic tricks.  I expressed doubt at the choices of ballet or karate,  as many fall by the wayside.  Unless you reach a certain level of competence neither activity will develop self confidence. Whilst success at an activity can help with self confidence, the argument from the other bloggers was you don’t have to first attain success or accomplishment to feel self confident. 

[Read more…]

Who are you linked to?

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If I had to chose a secondary theme for this blog it would be happiness. One of my favorite posts is how to find happiness, which started as a response to someone else’s happiness project. In this I cite a project run by the BBC in 2005, Making Slough Happy, where they try to do just that – make the residents of a nondescript British town happy.

There is more information on that post and on the BBC page, but the conclusion they came to was there were ten steps to happiness:-

Plant something and nurture it
Count your blessings – at least five – at the end of each day
Take time to talk – have an hour-long conversation with a loved one each week
Phone a friend whom you have not spoken to for a while and arrange to meet up
Give yourself a treat every day and take the time to really enjoy it
Have a good laugh at least once a day
Get physical – exercise for half an hour three times a week
Smile at and/or say hello to a stranger at least once each day
Cut your TV viewing by half
Spread some kindness – do a good turn for someone every day

One important factor seems to have been overlooked from this research. [Read more…]

Do your Beliefs help your Brand?

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If you meet someone for the first time, one of the first questions you exchange is “What do you do?”. Our reply tends to focus on what we do for work, our occupation. We label, or “brand” ourselves as “a student”, “a nurse” or (dare I say it) “a plumber”.

There was a very interesting  post recently on one of my favorite blogs  The Positivity Blog. In describing 10 steps to be the brand you want in life, Mike King says:-

“Work is really just a portion of our lives since working for 40 hours a week and 50 weeks a year for up to 40 years (about 80,000 hours) is actually only about 11.4% of our entire lives (700,000 hours) if you expect to live to an age of 80 years old.

Even if you took 1/3 of your life away to account for sleeping, you still only work about 17% of your waking hours in a lifetime. Think about that for a minute. Is work really that important in the whole scheme of things if it is such a small portion of our lives from birth to death?  I’d say not.”

After going through the 10 steps he feels we need to take to review and build the “brand” you want to be, Mike closes the post with another interesting statement:- [Read more…]