Great Self Confidence

...to live the life you want

Habits & Routines

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This is my first post in October, and September has proved a challenging month in many ways. Two weeks ago our eldest daughter started University in the north of England. We drove 5 hours up various motorways up to Yorkshire, traipsed up several flights of stairs with large boxes before spending a fortune in the local supermarket. My wife and I then drove the 5 hours back to the south coast.

Meanwhile our 16 year old twins have started a waitressing job at a local pub. This means most of the week one of them has to start work at about 5.30, and so gets their own evening meal. I’m the main cook in our household, and one family habit or ritual I have always tried to maintain is having an evening meal together as a family. Suddenly, with one daughter leaving and two now working, that has had to be abandoned. [Read more…]

improve self confidence

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This is going to be a fairly rambling post! Recently I joined a self development forum, partly to promote this site, but also to try and interact with others either with problems or solutions. The problem when you start blogging is you don’t get much feedback as to whether or not anyone is out there!

What I’m getting around to saying, is on a recent response to a question on self confidence, my reply was:- [Read more…]

Can you improve self confidence with a smile?

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improve self confidence
 Everytime I see this photograph it makes me smile, which is why I’ve included it today. Reading my free book “How to improve self confidence“, one quote I liked was

Have you ever tried to smile and think of a negative thought? Usually the result is that one of the feelings will win out.

Try it and see! Basically humans cannot hold attention on more than one thought at a time – if you sit in front of a TV reading a newspaper, your attention flicks between the two, it doesn’t attend to both at the same time.

Positive thinking is cental to developing self confidence, and we will return repeatedly to ways of driving out negative thoughts. But smiling is simple, free, and something we all can do. Is your natural expression a smile or a frown? Observe other people – which ones look confident and at ease with the world?

If you go around with a frown you may find your too serious to let others near you! So smile – even if there is no reason to smile.

Free self improvement products

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“How to access 77+ high quality self-improvement products for free”
update – this site has now gone….

Well I was skeptical myself when I came across this site. But it was a link from an ezine that I trust, so I registered, and (having waded through a few sales pages!) found the free products.

These vary from “Get everything you want in your life – guaranteed” and “The self improvement handbook” to “How to improve self confidence” and an “Exclusive interview on self esteem”. There is also an MP3 audio “Ultimate confidence with self hypnosis” [Read more…]

Using positive feedback (praise)

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Many years ago, when I first worked in a mental health team, the manager had a simple method of quality control. Whenever we discharged someone the team assistant would send out a letter asking for feedback and comments on how they had found the experience and whether the intervention helped. I’m sure this is common practice in other fields.

Apart from the obvious use of helping to audit the service, the manager encouraged us to copy any feedback letters we liked – i.e. the ones that said nice things about us! Her attitude was,

“There will be times when you’re having a bad day, nothing seems to go right and people complain about what you are doing. It’s nice to having something to remind you that you are actually very good at your job.”

This was my first community job and I remember having positive feedback to read did give me confidence and helped me progress. I reminded of this, because last week one of my staff left for pastures new and wrote me a lovely letter, thanking me and praising me for the support I had given her.

Rather than sticking the letter straight into her personnel file, I took a copy and have kept it my work action file – which I refer to daily. In a world full of negativity and criticism, we all have times when it’s nice to be reminded that we’re doing a good job. When someone gives you praise or thanks, capture it in some way, as we never know when we might need it. Its a great way of building self confidence.