problem solving

My 19 year old daughter is about to return home after over 3 months working in children’s homes in India. She spent similar time in Ghana late last year. When I was her age there is no way I could have embarked on such adventures.

Throughout my teens and early twenties I was quite shy and lacked self confidence. Leaving home was a very gradual process and looking back I had some lucky breaks that propelled me forward and helped me change.

The bottom line with any form of self improvement is that you have to change from how you are now. Sometimes, like with me, circumstances and people around you help facilitate change without much conscious effort. Other times, it’s down to you to decide that you want to change and take the steps necessary to move forward.

I’m really happy that whatever we got right as parents helped give my daughter sufficient self confidence to undertake this gap year and travel and work abroad.

I have found a great post titled 3 Vital Self Confidence Tricks. The author, Dean Hunt, focuses on building self confidence when suffering from anxiety – such as in a social situation. His third “trick” in particular I like as it’s something that’s easy to do, but easy to overlook. Speak to yourself as you would speak to a friend.

If we make a mistake our self talk can be quite damning, “you are such a stupid fool”. But would we be so hard on a friend? This technique transposes even better when lacking confidence in our ability to do something. If you were a friend of a person giving a presentation or speech what would you be saying to them? You wouldn’t be saying “you’re going to mess up”, “you’re going to forget what to say”, “you’ll lose your job after this”. So why say those things to yourself?! As Dean says – speak to yourself as you would to others.