The first thing that you should do is to take a quick step back and appraise your life. For too long you have been looking from the inside out of your life, and you may not be able to spot the mistakes that you have been making, so you need to get yourself out of this perspective and look at the big picture. When you are able to look at the blueprint of your life, then you will be able to see what areas you need to strategise.

Next, you need to breathe deep and find a space where you can meditate and relax. A clear and focused mind is one of the most important things you need to have to be able to regain your confidence and self esteem. When your mind is cluttered with negative thoughts or of work (they are one and the same sometimes), then you are not able to concentrate on the act itself.

You now need to strategise. What is it you want to do. Set down clear objectives of what you want to achieve in regards to your own personal development and set out from there. It can be anything from just gaining a little confidence, too being able to talk to the girl you always liked or to even excel at presentations at work. The thing about this is that when one thing happens, it will spill over to the rest of your life.

Make a list of the things that are uniquely you - the positives and the negatives and with this list, you can now find out what is so bad about you and what your natural gifts are. This way you know what to concentrate on and what areas in your life need improvement. When making this list, always recruit the help of your peers and the people that are around you a lot, and by doing so, your list will more accurately reflect the good and bad about you.

Another thing you need to understand is the need to celebrate you achievements as much as you can, and this is the method of channelling as much positive energy as you can to yourself. Whenever you reach a milestone, have a small celebration and involve as many people as you can. This way, the positive energy counter will build up in your favour.

Also, make a list of these achievements, and this will be called your feel good list. Look at it anytime you need to so that you will feel good about yourself, especially during the times of duress in your life. This list can mean the difference between slipping back into areas of low self esteem and the road to a more confident and convincing you.

Last but not least, you need to track your ‘emotional progress’ - to say the least. Knowing whether or not you are improving will help you to re assess the methods that you are using as well as allow you to understand the seriousness of the problem. If conventional methods like these do not work, then a psychologist could be of help to you. ]]> http://www.more-confident.com/how-to-raise-self-esteem-in-7-quick-steps/feed/ http://www.more-confident.com/how-to-speak-with-confidence/ http://www.more-confident.com/how-to-speak-with-confidence/#comments Thu, 18 Jun 2009 05:45:22 +0000 Admin http://www.more-confident.com/?p=128

One of the ways that you can tell if someone does not have that much confidence within them is by the way they speak, the words that they use, the tone and the overall volume. You would classify these people as decidedly soft spoken and sometimes even shy, when looking at the relationship of their body language to the way that they speak as well. There is a way to speak with confidence and this article will detail some of the steps that you need to know about to speak with the sort of conviction necessary to project yourself as someone who is commanding and confident.

The first thing you should not is the volume of your voice, and if you are naturally soft spoken, you may want to do something about that. But the funny thing is, some people who are soft spoken can appear massively confident; so that is not the only thing you need to take note of when trying to improve your speech impediments in relation to confident speaking. The thing you need to understand is that there must be enough volume for people to take notice, and not too much when they will just look at you as a raving lunatic with a hearing problem.

Do not shout. It is all about control. You can have a loud person but with a controlled volume in a sense that your voice never gets away with you. In the same light, you also need to contain your emotions, as some people have the problem where their emotions get the better of them and it seems like they are speaking while being poked by a cattle prod. Being confident means that you have control of the situation, and in speech, the situation is you. You need to calm yourself down and remember, speed is not a good thing here. Nor is speaking like a 500-year-old Sensei master.

You need to have a measure of pace where it is exciting to listen to but you can draw your listeners to what you are talking about. Body language is really important here and you cannot be distracting and you cannot be shy. Never put your head down and do not just try to get eye contact, but grab their pupils from them and exert as much force as you can to pierce through their heads to the other side of the wall.

Use your hands but be subtle and never flail yourself around, the whole lunatic vibe will come back and haunt you. In retrospect, it may not be that volume is everything. It is how you speak, the intonations that you use, the stresses to the important words and how you can just fluidly enter a conversation at the exact time where you should have. It is about timing as well and about the type of body language that you will be using. When you can master all this, then you can take the world by storm with some confident syntax. ]]> http://www.more-confident.com/how-to-speak-with-confidence/feed/ http://www.more-confident.com/confidence-techniques/ http://www.more-confident.com/confidence-techniques/#comments Wed, 17 Jun 2009 05:39:47 +0000 Admin http://www.more-confident.com/?p=125

Confidence is actually half the battle won in mot situations, as well as being a very powerful psychological effect on everyone around you. Confidence is belief, it is purpose and it is movement, it drives you towards a situation where failure is not an option and ‘trying your best’ is just a popular euphemism - even a cliché you might call it.

We all need to have confidence in you and if you think that you are not a confident person at heart, then it is time to rethink and re assess what you are doing in your life and use some confidence techniques to help you get back in the heat of things and lead the charge to your own life’s success. There are many factors that can lead to the drop in confidence and they can include things like experiential anecdotes, traumas, phobias in your life or even things that you do in your everyday life.

The bottom line about this theory is negative energy and one look at the world would see wave upon wave of negative energy almost becoming a sea that surrounds and would very well threaten you. We are all drowning in our own negative spirits and it is important to note that we need to find a life buoy to keep our selves afloat and get to that little island where we can start to rebuild the foundations of our economic, social and emotional survival.

This is where confidence techniques come in and to quote a popular Monty Python song, you need to start looking at the bright side of life, and this is the only way that you are going to overcome low self esteem and other low confidence problems. Recognise that you are the only person best equipped to solve all your problems, and in doing so, you will then start the momentum needed to better yourself. First and foremost, you need to start celebrating, and I mean about anything, even if the triumph or achievement is something that is really not that large.

Once you are able to do this, you will be pervading positive energy all around you and then and only then can you start to lift your head up above the clouds. Ignore the negative aspects of your life and this can even be the people that you surround yourself with, and this even includes your family members. You have to train yourself to shrug off comments and not take things too much to heart, and believe in your own abilities; this will allow you to maximise the potential of your inert gifts and talents and breathe new life into them.

You also need to take stock of your life and take a deep breath and stress is one of the main factors which will then lead you to the mental breakdowns of all breakdowns. These are some of the techniques and methods you can use to assess, focus, marginalise and destroy the aspects of your life that are riding down your self confidence.

There is a lot of relationship and synergy going around when talking about affirmation and self esteem and this is why. The problem with low confidence is belief and the existence of a paramount amount of negative energy. This energy can come in the form of insults, failures, stress and other negative factors that have the effect of lowering your self confidence on a daily basis.

Affirmation is actually a method coming from the New Age section of modern society, and it basically believes that a person can actually change themselves to a much more positive person with the use and bombardment of carefully sculpted messages. Now these two things are related in the sense that one represents a solution to another. Self esteem issues always centre around the lack of belief in a person’s self worth and this is mainly because of many experiential factors around them. In the halls of psychology, low self esteem is called a behavioural disorder which affects plenty of people all over the world.

This is when they have lost the value of their own self worth, they have no longer the conviction to perform their duties because they simply do not believe in their own abilities anymore. Why this comes about is a question that can be answered in so many ways, from a social, historical and psychological perspective and in this article, we will not be concentrating so much on the why but on the how to solve this problem. You just cannot gain back belief as you would try to retrieve something you misplaced. Belief is like the human liver, and negative energy is like alcohol. Sooner or later, this negative energy will simply suck the liver to a small size, and soon all you will be left is something that is merely a percentage of its former self.

When looking at this, you need to get yourself away from all the negative aspects of your life, and how you need to do this is to make a list of the things you are involved in and how they play a part in your life. You need to take stock of the situation and know your enemy and see how negative energy actually manifests in them. When you can do this, then and only then can you employ the use of positive affirmation. Positive affirmation is carefully sculpted personal words addressing yourself and telling yourself that you CAN do the things you want to do.

Affirmation is a feel good drug that most people use to bombard themselves with positive energy and it is particularly useful when used regularly. Messages like these can then embed themselves in the sub conscious mind and then give you a natural inclination to be positive in the long run. These are the words you can use to empower you and raise your self esteem to levels that would help you to regain your confidence and get back that life you always wanted. ]]> http://www.more-confident.com/self-esteem-affirmations/feed/ http://www.more-confident.com/children-and-self-esteem/ http://www.more-confident.com/children-and-self-esteem/#comments Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:09:29 +0000 Admin http://www.more-confident.com/?p=121 Many mind experts actually will attest to you that self esteem is one of the most important things when talking about the development of a child. What they are talking about is the developmental years of a child, which would be somewhere within the range from when they were born to somewhere around the 6 - 7 age group. Now, at this point of their lives, their minds are very susceptible to suggestion and how they make sense of things when they are at this point of their lives is through basic experiential stimulation and association.

How this works is because their critical thought processes and their logic has not been fully developed yet; and one of the reasons is because that they do not have the experience and the content/knowledge necessary to make sense of things. They are still learning and in the process of learning, they have to rely on the knowledge and wisdom of others to make sense of the world. What can be best described is that children are born as a blank slate, and it is up to the people around them to fill it with the brightest and best colours they can get. One of the emotional and cognitive abilities that they develop is tied down to their E.Q and their own self esteem.

There are many factors that lead to this, and when looking at the complexities of the human mind, there is still so much that we do not understand about how the sub conscious works and how it really controls every part of our personality and our character. But this much we do know, the mind of a child is in a crucial time and anything that gets inside of his or her head - will stay there. It could be a trauma, with emotions so strong that it gets wired into their psyche and forms into the building blocks of their character. Another thing is messages and examples set by the environment and the people around them play a large part in developing their self confidence.

One thing you need to know is that when children are exposed to plenty of negativity, this will be reflected in who they become later on in their adult life and when they are exposed to people who keep putting them down; and this could even be their parents, then they would have a level of very low self esteem. It is also one thing to note that it is also down to the strength of the mind of the child and other factors; like of course like their social network, psychological conditioning, the diet they are exposed to, any other volatile factors that could affect how they view the world and how the world interacts with them. In children, developing self esteem is very important and children need to develop one that is high at an early stage, because it is something that they will carry with them till they are adults.

The definition of someone who mopes is really someone who is dragging their feet all over the place, with no self-confidence, believing that the world is better off without them and finally convincing himself or herself that they are worth as much as bag of money with the bottom ripped open. Surely, you have seen or met this person before, and it seems that a dark cloud seems to follow them where ever they go. It rains when they come and generally, they spoil the party atmosphere faster than someone with bad gas. In fact, you could have been this person at one time or another and it does not feel good to be going around in the world thinking of dark things like death and suicide and cutting and drugs and overdose - they wear you out pretty fast.

The good news is that there are established step by step methods that you can follow to make sure that your confidence comes back to you. This is not saying that these methods will be really easy, but there are ways that you can regain your self esteem after some practice. You do not need to simply turn your life around, but it is a gradual process that requires one very special and key ingredient. And it is called desire.

You must have the desire to want to change things around and you must have the desire to regain the confidence that you have lost. The first and most important thing is to identify the enemy and the enemy is you. You are the one who is the main cause of your no confidence and it is you that must initiate the change. Ironic isn’t it. The explanation behind this is quite simple because it alludes to the fact that you and your skewed objectives have led you into areas of failure. For example, a person who is not a natural singer, convinces himself that he is, and starts a failed from the start career move into the singing industry. Constant failure leads him to get disappointed over and over again and slowly this person loses all of their self esteem.

As you can see, it is the person who believes in something that he has no gift in. You need to recognize what you are good at and develop this from there. Now take a good look at your life. What are your strengths? What are your natural and developed gifts that have made you the person you are today? Next thing that you should do is to recognize whether or not you are making full use of these gifts. It is very easy and simple to burn out and lose all confidence in yourself when you are doing something you are not made to do. Once you can get this list up, you need to eliminate the things in your life that are causing you grief, channel your energies to your talents and progress from there. Soon, you will have regained the self confidence that you need to be a better person. ]]> http://www.more-confident.com/confidence-building-exercises-to-sweat-out-your-moping-self/feed/ http://www.more-confident.com/self-esteem-tips/ http://www.more-confident.com/self-esteem-tips/#comments Sat, 13 Jun 2009 09:31:43 +0000 Admin http://www.more-confident.com/?p=116 The first step that you need to take is to know that you have self esteem issues in the first place and this can be the hardest thing for you to do. Admitting that you have lost some of your confidence and that you need to do something about it can be a hard fact to swallow but you need to start listening to what people close to you are saying about you and one of the most important things you need to understand is that it is their advice that will be the alert you need. Once you know that you have a self-esteem issue, you then need to proceed on to step two.

The next step that you need to take is to actually go out and have a self assessment test done on your self esteem and it is not that difficult to find a qualified psychologist and therapies that can perform this. All you need is a controlled environment and the simple test needs no expensive and involved equipment at all; in fact, all you need is the psychologist, a test full of questions and an appraisal after that. After you get your score, then you will be able to know how you fair and whether or not you need to get something done.

The next thing that you need to do is to find out exactly what are the factors that are causing you to have low self esteem. If it is the environment that you are exposed to and the people that you are in contact with, it is time to change that or adapt to another one. If it is the job you are holding or other activities that are taking up your time, then you need to identify them. If it is within your mind because of your past, then you need to explore therapeutic and regressive methods needed to reconcile yourself with the pat and dredge yourself out of your self esteem hole.

Another thing that is common in an exercise to get back your self confidence is to build up a small journal or list of the strengths and aptitudes that you have as a person. When you are coming up with this list, it is quite important that you get feedback from other sources all over your social circle, your loved ones and sometimes, people who just only got to know you. This way, you can compare what you know about your own abilities versus what people perceive about you in the first place.

Last but not least, you need to celebrate your achievements and your gifts, and do it as often as you can. You need to turn that list into a feel good list that you can turn to uplift your spirits every time you are feeling down. It is like a shot of espresso or whiskey in the morning, it should get you going and make you elated and remind yourself of how good you can be whenever you have doubts of yourself. With this, you can regain your self esteem in no time at all.

There are established psychological tests and appraisals that allow the psychologist or the therapist to actually measure self esteem. While the numbers will never be accurate there will be scales of measurement and generalities that they can be placed in. About 50 years ago, one social learning theorist named Morris Rosenberg came up with the Rosenberg self esteem scale, which is one of the measuring tools used to assess how much of the potential self esteem in a person is being used as well as how they appraised the ’self’. Rosenberg believed that worth could be taken on to its literal meaning, that there was some sort of human currency to be measured and this currency, this value, this rate was actually measured by the person himself.

Others argued that self esteem is not something to be placed on a scale, because it was a basic human need, a crucial element in human psychology and the make up of the human personality. Everyone needs self esteem and no one can survive without it. Another camp believes that self esteem is something that is automatic within us, in the sense of the consciousness and the subconscious at work. Of course, when we are talking about self esteem, we understand the processes that lead up to its build up happens in the subconscious, which opens up much more theories of the process of cortical and neural evolution and how it ties in with emotional maturity and processes in the brain that gravitates around personality, character, rationale and confidence.

It is no mystery that all these areas are related, and that the subconscious has a part to play in all of this. To put it simply, the subconscious has always been seen as the director of all human emotions, perceived or not, and self esteem, confidence and assertiveness are large parts of this equation. This is where the idea of the self concept also comes in, as the self concept is how one perceives one self, and this is the neural imprint of their perceived self. This person may be either higher or lower (in image) than the person that is represented in real life. A person with high confidence might project an image of a person that is much better than what they really are, and the confidence makes up for the difference. If you believe you are that good, then others will too.

You can be a brilliant sculptor, but if you have been exposed to the sort of conditions that make you not believe in your own abilities, then you may lose all your abilities altogether. The thing about this is that most of our abilities lie in the mind. The way we do things, the expertise, our own brand of excellence and the methodologies all lie within the mind and when that happens, what we get is basically a blueprint of our gifts and talents written in the mind.

When we believe in them and are not affected by the sort of things that give off negative energy, then we have mental clarity. When we have mental clarity, we can then focus on our abilities and divert our energy into doing them. Now, when we lose the confidence to do them anymore, this is when our mind is clouded with negative thoughts and events that seem to be dragging us down. The end result is a mind that is not clear and is not able top focus on the gifts that we already have.

We get obscured and we cannot divert the energy needed to get this machinery going because all the energy is either lose within the superstructure of our cluttered mind or gets diverted into negative energy. So what we need in this case is to be able to boost confidence back in ourselves and clear our mind.

The first thing that you need to do is to step back and take a deep breadth. Meditate, go out in nature or take some yoga. If you can, go for some aromatherapy and a massage to clear your head and use that time when you are slipped into a relaxed state to take stock of your life and identify the negative things in them.

Next, create a list of these negative things and assess what exactly they are and how they play a part in your life. This is the most important part of this because what you are doing is essentially drawing up a battle plan for yourself and recognising your enemy.

When you know your enemy well, what you do next is the third and most important part of this plan, which is to decide how to best deal with it. You can eliminate it from your life, or you can tweak either yourself or your situation to turn the negative into a positive. Boost your confidence today.

Think that you are horizontally challenged? Then you are more huggable than any guy out there. Too short? Then you have a unique perspective on the world. Have two left feet? You just invented a new dance style. It can be anything, just as long as you think it is great. When you start to think that you are great again, then this will show. Confidence is part of natural charm and people will be attracted to the confidence factor.

Have you seen guys which are not the best lookers in the room start to talk to girls and actually get some numbers? Well this is because they are confident and if there is one thing a woman likes is a confident man. Another thing to do is focus on the failures of others and make yourself feel and look good. It sort of follows the same mentality of imagining that everyone is naked when you go up to make a speech. No one is perfect and if you really concentrate, you can spot the things that make them this imperfect being. When you can do this, you will realise that everyone is like you and that there is someone else worse off and this will raise your confidence levels like nothing else in the world.

One thing that you need to do is to also focus on having as much fun as you can and not caring what people think about you. Once you care too much and want to be popular, then you are just setting yourself up for some low self esteem issues. If you do not expect anything from anyone, then you will not come face to face with failure, and with this you can slowly inject some confidence back into you. Stick with what works.

Experience can be encouraging and can boost up your self-assurance. If you know you look grand in that shirt, wear it. If you have a tete-a-tete opener that always works, use it. There is no rationale to rupture away from what works. You can forever try innovative things when you feel more convinced, but when you’re in a sentiment that is less than secure, use your tried and accurate systems. These are some of the confidence boosters that you can inject into your daily life and slowly build yourself up to the person that you want to be.