Great Self Confidence

...to live the life you want

How to develop will power

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Since starting this blog I have reread some of my own books on self confidence and personal development, and generally researched and followed up links on the topic. Some I have made reference to, or quoted. I have paid particular attention to any source that has given exercises to build self confidence.

My aim is to build a resource that will be useful, not just interesting or entertaining. Reading books on any aspect of personal development I always feel they have a major drawback – when the reader is presented with an exercise to carry out, its so, so easy to turn over the page (promising ourselves to return to it later!).

Personal development involves change, and you won’t change by just passing by. If you do try to follow some of the exercises you come across another problem – changing habits usually involves effort, some discomfort, and will power. Surprisingly, few books even mention will power, suggesting that just once someone has embarked on a new course of action keeping going is simple. [Read more…]

Build a self confidence portfolio

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I’ve written a lot recently about thinking and self talk, in particular how we tend to automatically focus on negatives. This applies just as easily to confidence. If asked, most of us can list things we cannot do, areas we lack confidence without too much searching.

So lets start at the opposite end. How often do you remind yourself of what you are good at, or remind yourself of times when you felt totally confident? What we think about has a direct bearing on how we feel, our emotional state. And, yes its that habit word again. Getting in the habit of feeling confident is one simple way of raising your general expectation of yourself. [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…]