Overcome Your Lack of Self-confidence and Feel Strong Immediately

Overcome Your Lack of Self-confidence and Feel Strong Immediately

by | Food for thought | 0 comments

Let’s talk about common misconceptions of self-confidence and learn what it is and is it possible to attain it at all.

So, I got a text recently from a dear friend who sent me a screenshot of an email she recently received from a recruiter inviting her for an interview.

I immediately congratulated her and wished her a good luck. The next thing she texted me sank my heart a little. “What congratulations? I’m not going to get it….”

In the time I got to know her she has always been meticulous in her job, achieved so many academic and professional milestones, never missed a deadline and delivered a quality work. And yet her self-doubt and imposter syndrome have been keeping her in a place which didn’t make her happy.

All the other stories I hear from amazing ladies across the globe sound quite similar to me. Today another client was asking me advice on several options of her career advancement and self-development. I was suggesting her how to get a job in a desired place. She immediately responded to me saying that all those people who apply for those kinds of jobs are very experienced.

I asked her how she knew that and whether she met or spoke with any of those people?! And what makes her think that she has less experience and knowledge than any of those mysteriously amazing people?! We ended up having a long discussion.

Don’t reduce your destiny thinking some unknown people out there are better than you for the job! You are as good as any of them. If they can do it, you can do it! Instead of giving so much confidence and trust to those people who you’ve never met, who may not even exist, give that level of confidence to yourself.

Instead of saying: ‘I can’t do it’, say “I too can do it’, instead of saying: ‘others are better, smarter, more confident, more experienced’, say: ‘I too can be the best version of myself, I too can get to the place where they are, ‘I’m too gaining all the necessary experience and growing my mindset’.

Change the narrative in your head, change the words from negative to positive, and not a lala land positive, but action oriented, highly inspired, well planned positivity. Read my post on positivity here if you need some tips.

Remember, confidence comes from knowing who you are, remembering what is important for you in life, connecting with your inner world instead of blocking it and distracting yourself. Your values give you confidence, your hard work and small accomplishments can serve you as a proof that you are able bodied and able minded person. You just need to give yourself that attention you give to other successful people, if you could live one day in their shoes, you would know that what the outside world sees is not pure success filled with smooth and painless endeavours.

Remember, no one possesses confidence every single moment of every single day. In fact, if you ask the most confident and daring people, they will tell you how they question every decision they make, think through their every step million times, plan and re-plan things all the time. There is no failure proof action out there, everyone is bound to make small or big mistakes, sometimes losses and failure can be so painful and paralysing, but only those who can live through those moments, stay resilient and pick themselves up every time when they fall, can get to see the face of success. Confident people are not successful because they never failed or did any mistakes, but because they failed more than anyone else around them.

Once you realise how it works, it will not be that difficult to get into that mindset. But in order to shift that mind, you need to practice self-awareness and accept who you are and where you stand in your life with compassion. If a friend comes to you all beaten up with failure or heartbreak, would you ever say things like “you messed it up”, “you can’t do anything right”, “you are not good enough”? No, you wouldn’t. You would show compassion, support and reassurance to them, and give them all the help they might need. So, why don’t you do the same for yourself?!

At the end of the day, only you can change your situation. Other people can only support you, encourage you and be there for you at best. But if you don’t choose to act, you still will be in the same situation. Do yourself a huge favour and decide what kind of life you want to have for yourself.

Here are some actions you can take to start building confidence:

  1. Take a break from a social media for a day, week or as long as you can. See if it helps with your thoughts of comparing yourself with others. That can help you create some room for your own thoughts about what is happening in your own life. Glossy pages never helped anyone feel better about themselves. Strangely enough, even when we know that most of those social media photos are fake, polished, and filtered so much than it is what it looks like in real life, we still continue self-bashing with comparison. Acted out frozen moments in the pictures cannot show you the whole life and tell you their stories.

2. Walk in the nature, fresh air will boost your mood, but most importantly you will connect with the world and see that you are not a singular being detached from the world, but the opposite. That you are an equal part of this world and can equally access the good experiences life can offer. When you connect with nature, you can find inner peace and see the harmony of the world in one piece. That can give you the sense of belonging and a personal space to hold.

3. Reconnect with your values, find out what is important for you. You might be fearful of other people’s judgement, but no one can actually tell you or know better than you what is important for you. In times of anxiety and stress from the uncomfortable situations, connecting to your core values can help you ground yourself and take the right course of action, which then will turn into confidence.

4. Find out what type of support works for you. Some people like sharing and advising with close friends and family, and some people like to keep their plans to themselves until they are sure and ready to share. I for instance share my intentions with handful of people who can just listen to me and ask me right questions which then put me to the right direction. However, I don’t involve people in decision making process, because I like to choose the actions which work for me, and if they don’t, I still want to live through them, so I learn something from my mistakes. So, if you like to share and consult with your circle, then choose the right people who won’t preach, or jump into telling you what you should be doing, or worse, projecting their own fears and insecurities. Choose someone who can give you solid, objective opinion and can help you plan your steps.

 It takes a lot of courage and resilience not to fall into the pressure of the other people’s expectations. You don’t wake up to a big and full confidence, it is often the small decisions you take to take control over parts of your life build your confidence. My secret weapon is to say ‘NO’ to things which don’t suit me. I find people pleasing ungratifying, long, and exhausting act. It also somehow takes the power off your hand and makes you forget about your own needs. Being able to say no each time to situations which make you uncomfortable is very empowering. As long as it is polite and true to your core values, people won’t get offended, and you will end up gaining extra ‘ounce’ of confidence.

How to Become a Positive Thinker

How to Become a Positive Thinker

by | Food for thought | 0 comments

We are all way too familiar with the term positivity and positive thinking. One can’t even see three pictures even on social media before bumping into dozens of positivity posts. It has become one of the trendy buzz words, hashtag, and a popular escape thing to say to people around us. We start conversations with things like:

“Things are not well, but I’m trying to be positive”, or console each other with “let’s have positive attitude”. Is there any truth in it?

We live in a world where the time is the most precious thing to have, and everything moves with the speed of light, one moment we are reeling from the devastating news of death, wars, and diseases, and the next minute we are happily engaged in the chitchat gossip of celebrity life, viral social media posts, and let’s not forget the adorable cat pictures floating everywhere. Who wouldn’t love those, after all they are the epiphany of positivity motivators.

But how easy is it to make our minds become positive? What is it anyway to be positive and think positively?! Is it even good, or helpful to have better attitude, better days, finding better solutions?! And if the answer is yes, then how do you learn to become a positive thinker?!

Let’s speak honestly though, we all are humans, and we all go through ups and downs of life, and we live in a society which constantly tells us that everything will be fine, that things happen for a reason, to get on with it, to be positive and if things are going wrong, then your negative mind is attracting negative vibe from the universe. We even scold our children with words like wipe off your nose, chin up, be a man, don’t be a girl, be a big girl, big girls don’t cry etc. so we teach ourselves to sink into denial of reality, to things happening to us and to people we love and care. We master the pretence of being ok and being positive that we ignore our true feelings, true emotions.

But what happens when the true feelings and painful emotions do not go away, that it becomes a struggle, and alienates us from our friends, families, and wider society?

We falter, because if we don’t deal with our emotional pain and push aside our human experience, we end up developing internal struggle to cope. So instead of dealing with an unpleasant situation, we spend all our energy pretending that the problem doesn’t exist.

Do you just pretend that things are great, or do you delve into the reality and find out what is happening around you and to you?

In truth, I often struggle with such beaming positivity, my hard-wired realist and slightly sceptical nature always weighs up the pros and cons, especially the cons. Leaving the comforts of my familiar environment at a young age made me rely on my meticulous judgment of situations, risk aversion plans and make my life as safe as possible. It made me a bit of an overthinker too, but it has always helped me to make more or less good decisions.

Popular myth, the idea of this holy grail that we all should strive to become positive, and happiness as a goal is not supported by research.

If we set happiness as a goal, over time it sets us to fail, because as it happens, the happiness is a bypass product, not an end goal. Striving to think positively do not heal the pain, nor does preaching to be positive can actually teach you to become one.

So, what to do then?! In reality ‘positive thinking’ does not and should not omit the acceptance of bad things or negative things happening in your life. But instead, it should include how to better cope, how not to lose faith in goodness in the world, and hope for change. And it takes hard work discipline and practice. There is no magic way of waking up in the morning as a positive person. Believe me! I tried and waited for that miracle…

Develop solid healthy habits

Mine is running, when I run, things immediately change in colour, shape, and nature in my heart. I also find that when my eating habits are out of control, somehow it really affects my mood negatively even more. But I will talk about it in another post.

Use empathy

Empathy is an important nutrient for your soul. Always practice empathy. For yourself and for other people around you. By using empathy, you will understand that you are not a lonely soul, nor is your situation the worst one. And there is always a way out even when it feels like you are in the eye of a tornado at the moment. No need to whip yourself out of guilt or shame, remember you can’t change the past. Don’t say things to yourself which you wouldn’t say to people you care about.

Acceptance

Like I said above, the good place to start thinking positively is to accept that there is nothing much positive about this certain stage of your life. Whatever might be your dilemma; family issues, broken heart, loss of a loved one, financial problems, health issues, workplace bulling, being stuck in a rut… Just by accepting that your situation is not ideal at the moment, that it feels like your world is falling apart, that you feel pain in the places you never knew existed before, you can stop being in denial. Blame, guilt, anger, and sense of unfairness, they all accompany the devastation of a bad stage in life. Once you accept that all, you can then make some head space to think what you can focus on, and which feeling should be prioritised. Keep busy, have your mind occupied with work, study, or whatever routine you have going. Do it with discipline, it still may hurt or feel uncomfortable, but the pain will slowly get duller, anger will subdue and so on. One day you won’t feel so negatively about that particular painful experience anymore.

Cut or reduce toxic relationships.

Well, this is a bit tricky, the advice is to cut friends who consistently pull you down, make you feel insecure etc. I once had to cut my best friend loose, because we were not on the same page anymore. It hurt like hell, considering all the breakups I had, that one hurt the most, because I really loved her. Of course, years later we rebounded again, although the quality of the friendship is not the same, the new boundaries keep our relationship healthy. So, you can permanently or temporarily cut them off, it won’t be easy, but it is doable. The hardest part is when the negativity and toxic relationship come from your own family. It is much harder to cut your mother, father, or siblings off. So, what to do then? According to my observations, of the worst mental duress and negative conditioning came from the closest family members. Especially almost all the women I met had some kind of negative baggage from their mothers, fathers, or siblings. Although many women still prefer not to share such experiences out loud for fears of stigma and embarrassment, worst of the mental, physical, and sexual abuse also were caused by close or more distant family members.

Of course, then, these events would shape their entire outlook in life, their trust, coping mechanisms, mental health, future relationships, and confidence. Those experiences cannot be easily brushed off with the breeze of positivity as they suggest. However, by actively choosing to move forward and choosing to be happy, one can find some level of peace. For those who are struggling to cope, I strongly recommend seeking help from mental health specialists. Moreover, if you can, use regular therapy as a maintenance, once you get to a good place with your recovery.

Practice Regular Meditation.

Meditation also has become an all too often repeated trend. But I swear it works. People who never tried it before, like me before I tried, might imagine it as something only regular practitioners of yoga, and bearded Indian gurus and Buddhist monks do it weirdly folded positions. No, it couldn’t be further away from the truth. Meditation has many levels and layers. The basic one is just to connect with your breath. We know that whenever we are emotional, our heartbeat changes, our breathing accelerates, the face gets flushed, and the muscles become tense. These are also the symptoms of panic and anxiety attacks when we think we lost control of certain situations or of our lives. Just by connecting with your senses, breathing deeply in and out, focusing on your present surroundings, your sense of smell, vision, and touch, you can slow down the racing mind. Mastering the connection with your present is a great power and it gives you the biggest tool to take back control over your thoughts and emotions. And that is very important to change the course of your thinking from painful to pain free, from negative to positive to put you back to the present. The more you practice it, better you master the meditation.

Last but not least, being positive is not something which should force you to block your pain, your trauma, and your bad experience. It is a state of mind which gives you ‘despite things are not going so well right now, I will be alright, I can change this, I got this’ attitude. And believing that even when you don’t want to wake up to face the world or do some serious damage to everyone who hurt you, deep down you know that you can fix it, and choose happiness over and over again. To me, that is a damn good place of positivity!