Improving Your Self Confidence – A Lasting Legacy

Do you lack self confidence in one or more areas of your life and struggle to find a way to regain your confidence for the benefit of you and those around you?

Fundamental to move from “wishing” for higher self-esteem and actually taking the steps to improve your confidence is being driven by a big enough WHY.

If being sick and tired of having people ride all over you, of being embarrassed in front of loved ones isn’t enough to motivate you, what about passing along a well-balanced self confidence to your kids?

After all, your kids model his or her parents and to the degree that you struggle with your self esteem, your kids will “learn” this patterned behavior from you…but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Improving Your Self Confidence – 4 Critical Steps

1. Be driven by major purpose or reason

Digging deep and finding a highly emotional reason to get to work on improving your self confidence is critical.  Wishing it to happen will not work, instead drawing on a deep pain of having others constantly leap over you or pulling from the highly emotional desire of modeling healthy self confidence for your kids will give you the motivation and drive required to carry through and make the changes in your life that will lead to higher confidence.

2. Mindset

Most of us who have suffered from low self confidence are stuck in patterns of thinking that are toxic — beliefs that we can’t succeed, that we can’t handle failure, frustration or setbacks.  These beliefs are then reinforced daily by our own thoughts an self-talk.  To make a difference we need to Interrupt these thought patterns.  Mindfulness, meditation, writing out our thoughts all help bring light to our current thought patterns and help us realize how we are setting ourselves up for low confidence instead of the other way around

3. Certainty & Belief

Before we can program our minds to change, we need to have a certain degree of certainty and belief that we will turn out the way we want.  The often used example here is that nobody thought the 4-minute mile was possible (and so it remained unachievable for years) UNTIL Roger Bannister made it happen, suddenly the floodgates opened and it became quite common.  Growing your certainty and belief in a positive direction can be done via affirmations, visualizations, modeling others who inspire you, meditation, etc…but you have to do this daily to reverse the negative mindset replacing it with certainty and belief

4. Create New Patterns

Now that you have set the stage by interrupting old patterns, altering your mindset and learning to re-program based on setting a foundation of certainty and belief – you need to take action and stick with it long enough that your new mindset leads to new behaviors reinforcing new patterns.

Depending on where you are in life there may need to be a step 2A which involves dealing with fear, phobias or other obstacles that can stand in your way between changing your beliefs and thoughts.

On the one hand, this all takes work, but on the other hand the rewards are very sweet and in my mind, there is nothing more valuable for you to model for your kids than working through this.