Gaining self confidence to succeed in anything

Where does self confidence come from? How do we get it? Why don’t I have it? The answer to all of these questions can be answered with one word – you! Self confidence starts with you, your perception of yourself, and what other people think about your actions or behavior. For some of us, a lack of self confidence only affects our high ambitions. You might have always wanted to get up on stage, or to be a professional singer or actor for example. Perhaps your life dream is to travel the world, visit different countries or cities, but you don’t have the self confidence to do it. For others, the problem of self confidence is much closer to home - in the office, business meetings, public speaking events or presentations. Self confidence issues affect most of us at some time, and we can usually find ways of getting around the problem. Avoidance is one tactic we often use – if we can get out of an intimidating situation we’ll make up excuses not to take part. However, there are times when we can’t get out of it, or we really don’t want to. If a lack of self confidence is preventing you from doing trying something new, or from succeeding in your working life, it’s time to do something about it. The starting point in improving your self confidence is understanding what causes the problem. Low self esteem, not believing in yourself or your ability, feeling inadequate compared to your colleagues or friends or maybe some kind of trauma from your childhood are all contributing factors. By examining the reasons for your low self confidence, you’re halfway there! Taking positive action to overcome your fears is the next step to help boost your self confidence. A simple way to do this is by taking on small challenges. You have allowed your brain to associate certain events or actions with fear, so you’ve already pre-empted the outcome of these situations. By taking a small step towards conquering this, you’ll find that the result is most likely not as bad as you think – in fact, you’ll probably be surprised about how good you feel and your self confidence will instantly increase. When you’ve completed your first small challenge, congratulate yourself on achieving your aim. A small reward can often help. You’re already on the right path to improving your self confidence, so you’re ready to take it to the next level. This doesn’t need to be a huge task; you don’t want to undo all the good work. Building up your self confidence takes time, and while you might want to leap ahead, it can be a good idea to take things slowly at first. Steadily increase the risks you’re taking to get your self confidence to where you want to be. Risk taking does not, of course, mean jumping off a bridge, but the perceived risk of something happening as a result of your actions is usually the biggest barrier with self confidence. Self confidence problems are common for most people, and there are excellent resources to learn to deal with these issues, but if you do have severe difficulty facing certain situations you should seek professional help.

Quitting smoking can be done

For smokers who have been in that bad habit for so long, say a couple of years or so may have a hard time breaking the habit. Nicotine is a very powerful drug and anyone who gets addictive to it develops a certain kind of dependence to it. The decision to quit is the first step to have a life free from the awful spell cast on by nicotine. Follow these few tips to get you started: Do you know that when you smoke, more than half of what you take in is fresh air? Taking deep breaths help. More oxygen is being aided in to your bloodstream and will help you let go of your old cravings because it makes you feel good almost instantly. So whenever you get the urge of smoking, vanquish them by taking in deeper breaths. Think of all the good reasons why you should quit. You will be able to have a healthier way of living. You will be able to lower your chances of getting sick with emphysema, pulmonary diseases, stroke or worse, cancer! You will then be able to live longer and enjoy what matters more to life. Also, try to think about the bad things you dislike about smoking. It could be that you experience shortness of breath. Or that you feel lousy or dirty with the way your clothes or even your breath smell. Or the concerned looks you get from the people who care about you and your health and so on. Write it down on a piece of paper. Feel free to look at it whenever you can to aid you in overcoming that itch to light that cigarette whenever it arises. You could provide a healthier environment to your loved ones. Research shows that people who take in second degree smoke have a high risk of developing the same ailments a smoker can get. Also, if you're an expecting mother, quitting could increase the possibility of having a healthy baby. Set a quit date and clear out everything that could be associated with smoking (e. g. lighters, ashtrays, etc.). Don't allow other people to smoke in your home or in your office. Try to distract yourself with new things. Indulge yourself with outdoor activities with your loved ones. Plan something fun and productive each day. Get social support. Remember the saying "No man is an island?" You can get a better chance of quitting if you solicit help. Talk to your peers and family about your plans to quit. Get professional help from doctors or health care providers in your area. Enroll yourself in individual, telephone or group counseling. Motivate and reinforce yourself. Whenever you reach a certain mark, say, after a week or a month without a single puff, reward yourself. Recognize your efforts of trying to do something extraordinary. If ever you failed in some way like when you were tempted to smoke and you did, don't feel discouraged and go right back on track. Only this time remind yourself of how bad or guilty you felt when you violated your own rules. Try even harder. Indeed, quitting is not an easy job. It could be conceptualized but may be very difficult to do with just a flick of a finger. But just like any concept, it can be done!

Why hurry worry living life by intuition

Learning to trust and live by our intuitive inner guidance systems is not about developing fancy party tricks to impress our friends. It is about learning to return to a life of balance that is guided from a deeper source of wisdom than our current culture has to offer. The more "masculine" thought processes (I’m not bashing individual men here—we all have masculine and feminine attributes) dominate every aspect of our culture, honoring only the linear and rational ways of thinking. As a result, we find ourselves swimming in massive debt, experiencing disharmony and dysfunction in the majority of our personal and global relationships, and finding millions of the most educated, gifted and resourced people in the world dependent on anti-depressants. All that, and at the same time we face the very real and eminent potential of an environmental disaster that could be beyond repair. What An Intuitive Life Looks Like Living by intuition, you begin to leave fear, doubt, immobilization and frantic action behind. Why hurry-worry? When you realize that you will know what you need to know, when you need to know it (and very often not a moment sooner), you begin to see there is no need to live in the imagined future. There is no need to plan out ten possible outcomes you don’t want, one you do, and then spend precious time and energy making sure those things do or don’t happen. You have the time, space, energy, and faith that you can simply enjoy the “now” in real-time. Of course, you’ll lose a lot of the drama in your life. People will come to see you as peaceful, maybe even serene, and there won’t be overly much to complain about. The old friends, stuck in their old ways, won’t know what to do with you. So they will likely leave. Yet you will begin to attract new friends who have also left a good deal of the drama behind. This drawback is like complaining that someone has dumped gold on your fresh-cut lawn. But you will learn to deal with that. Living By Faith Where the mind will play a thousand tricks a day on you, the intuitive knowing—which you cannot always summon on your personally preferred time table, but which is completely trustworthy when it does come—never fails. Never. Even if the road that rises up does not take you where you thought you were going, in the end it takes you where you most wanted to go. I call this “Smart Reliability” because when I dream big dreams, but plan my route to accomplishing them in ways that are limited to my current understanding, my intuitive drive makes the needed adjustments so that the bigger dreams can actually come true.