Great Self Confidence

...to live the life you want

Does Attitude Count more than Ability?

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Last week I received an email announcing the relaunch of Success magazine. As the email was unsolicited – and technically spam – it didn’t seem a particularly auspicious way to relaunch a magazine! But it did lead me to dig out my old copy of Success, which I purchased in Chicago on my only visit (to date) to the USA – in February 1982.

Its a long story as to why I was in Chicago in winter, and I’m not really sure why my magazine has survived 26 years (and that I could find it!). Ironically 1982 was the least successful year of my life as I spent most of it unemployed and lacking confidence in myself. I had yet to learn that reading self development material isn’t enough – you have to take action..

Reading any old publication gives a fascinating insight into how far some things have changed. There is a feature on a new form of dancing called “aerobics”, an advert using John DeLorean to promote a brand of whiskey and the cover feature/main interview is Johnny Carson (“shy and introverted as a youngster”). The other big interview is Brent Musburger, who I gather is still around today.

In many other respects, the magazine is remarkably undated. [Read more…]

Do you suffer from gluckschmerz?

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Thought I’d step away from goals and resolutions and share with you two new words I’ve learned recently. Gluckschmerz, a German word that means feeling unhappy about the good fortune of others; and Schadenfreude – yes, you guessed it – also German, which means feeling pleasure at the suffering of others.

Sadly, the English language doesn’t always have the panache of other languages! We’re left with envy – perhaps the feeling does deserve such a short and ugly word. Does it affect you? If so, does it motivate you to work harder to achieve what the other person has got? Or, does it drag you down and undermine your self confidence?

Professor Richard Smith, University of Kentucky, said envy:-

“Occurs when we lack another’s superior quality, achievement or possession and desire it or wish the other lacked it. When we envy, we feel inferior, longing, resentment and ill-will to the advantaged person.”

Not holding back he goes on to say [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…]

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…]