Category Archives: self improvement

Self Esteem: What Influences Our Self-Concept?

Self-esteem and self-confidence are two terms that are typically thrown around interchangeably. While they are similar in many ways, they are actually two different things.

What is self esteem? What about self-confidence?

Self esteem, otherwise known as self-concept, is a term that refers to how a person evaluates his/her worth. In other words, it’s how you think about yourself. Do you think you’re competent, worthy, intelligent, great? Is it the opposite? Or perhaps, somewhere in between? That’s what self-esteem is.

Low self esteem leads to decreased confidence, which leads to lack of success in life.

Self-confidence, meanwhile, refers to having self-assurance. While self esteem is how you look at yourself, self-confidence is how much you trust your abilities, skills, talents, and so on. In order to have a high self-confidence, one must have high self-esteem. So what influences a person’s judgment about himself/herself? Here are two very important factors that starts within oneself:

Overall opinion about oneself. Honestly, how do you feel about each aspect of yourself—from your physical appearance to your intellectual capacity to your social skills, and many more? You may have high regard for your intelligence but feel insecure about your looks. You may think you look great but think of your social skills as inadequate. But if you overlook your inadequacies and focus on your strengths, that results in a more positive overall opinion about yourself, with improved self esteem.

Personal thoughts and perception. Having a positive outlook in life—your way of reacting to everyday occurrences—can contribute to a stronger self esteem building.

Of course, the environment also plays a crucial role:

Childhood teachings and experiences
Parents’ love, affection, attention, and guidance
People’s reactions to you and what you do
Experiences at home, in school, in the community and the workplace
Relationships with family, friends and people in the society
Illness, health condition, disability, injury
Culture and religion
Social stature

All these shape one’s well-being and assertiveness. Most of the beliefs that you have about yourself are a result of years of messages from the people you grow up with, and spend time with. In the family, parents who generally give positive feedback (and constructive criticism when necessary) are able to raise children who are sure about themselves. When you have strong foundation at home, negative feedback (even the worst kinds of criticisms) from other people wouldn’t affect you as much. Ranges of self esteem…

Extremely high self-esteem – This makes some people think they are better than everyone, resulting in superiority complex.
Low self-esteem – This is rooted from one’s negative self-image, the consequence is often inferiority complex.
Healthy self-esteem – This the perfect balance that puts you in the middle ground. It’s a result of having a realistic perspective of yourself that while you’re good at some things, there are those that you know you need help with.

Importance of self esteem

Here are the reasons why it’s important to learn how to boost self esteem:

It’s easier to form, secure and maintain positive relationships with other people
You feel confident about what you can do, and in turn do better in school or work
You’re open to feedback, which helps you harness your skills even more
You can express your needs and opinions with no difficulty
You can make good decisions and stand by them
You’re more realistic in your expectations
You’re not overcritical about other people and others
You can handle stress and setbacks more easily
You’re less likely to have health problems, both physical and mental

Building self esteem is crucial to having a healthy well-being. It’s about time that you learn to have a much better but still realistic concept about yourself.

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You can develop high self esteem and unstoppable self-confidence with… The Confidence Cure.

Self Confidence is Key to Career Success

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According to a series of studies conducted from 2005 to 2007 by a professor from University of Florida, people with high self confidence showed significantly better work performance than those who lack assertiveness. These people have been found to have high regard for themselves. They were also more motivated and less likely to get stressed or burned out at the workplace. As a result, they have higher levels of work satisfaction, higher income, and higher position in the corporate ladder. Needless to say, self confidence is one of the keys to a successful and fulfilling career. The lack of it, obviously, can be detrimental.

Low Self Confidence May Affect Your Work Performance

Not having enough self confidence about yourself doesn’t only mean that you won’t make it to the top. It may also plunge you to the bottom. Here are ways on how low self-esteem can affect your job.

Lack of self confidence prompt people to subconsciously undermine their abilities and success. The upshot is, these people wouldn’t think they deserve a raise or promotion. Their employers would eventually think the same thing too.
Co-workers and employers are hesitant about the suggestions or ideas of someone who’s fumbling and nervous. In their minds, they’re thinking, “How can you expect us to believe you when you don’t seem to believe it yourself?”
People who are not self-confident tend to stay out of the spotlight, even when they’re brimming with great concepts. They are too afraid of rejection to risk it. When someone else pitches in a similar idea, they regret not having the courage to speak up.
There is a common misconception that people who lack self confidence are inferior in intelligence, which is not necessarily true. Confidence and intelligence are not directly proportional but many employers make the assumption that they are.

People Of Self Confidence Have Better Chances of Success

If you want to be more successful in your chosen career, self confidence is both an armor and a weapon that you need to wear and use everyday at work. People who feel sure about themselves are more likely to inspire the same confidence in others not only among their co-workers but also their bosses.

Prepare Yourself for Success: Self Confidence Tips You Can’t Overlook

Fortunately, self confidence is not entirely an inborn trait. It can be learned and harnessed. Here are effective ways on how to gain self confidence.

Engage in positive self-talk. It’s important to know that self confidence starts within oneself. The best way to get it going is to empower yourself. Face the mirror each morning and remind yourself how great you are.
Recognize your strengths and capitalize on them. Related to the previous tip, you need to acknowledge and appreciate all the good things about you, and the things you’re good at. While it’s true that not everyone’s perfect, it’s healthier for your self-esteem to focus on your positive qualities instead of your negative ones.
Adapt the habits of confident people. Increase confidence by acting like someone who possesses it. Sit in front where you’ll be seen during meetings, speak up, speak loudly and clearly, don’t mumble or fumble, hold your head high, answer questions with assurance, admit when there’s something you don’t know, and so on.
Surround yourself with people who make you feel good about yourself. If you keep on hanging out with people who make you feel inferior, then you’d start feeling like you are, and that’s a recipe for lack of confidence.

Learning how to be more confident isn’t that difficult. It starts with the desire of achieving more success in your career. With proper motivation and the right moves, you can be on your way to becoming more self-assured, filled with self confidence and eventually, successful.

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If you liked this article, then… Discover The Confidence Cure!

Breakthrough To Success & Achievement: Announcing The Confidence Cure

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No self-confidence and no positive belief system leads to… Failure!

In the last couple of posts, we discussed how people fail to achieve their goals and dreams, even if they may be very smart and talented.

We also discussed that the core problem behind this failure for most people is a profound lack of (1) high self-confidence, and (2) the positive belief system needed to play full out to win.

Without high self-confidence, people tend to easily give up, or be distracted at the first sign of difficulty or resistance. Deep down, they don’t believe they can pull off the result they desire. Or if they do, they don’t feel worthy of it.

So, what can you do if you suffer from this kind of problem?…

Clearly, the answer is to develop the inner state of supreme self-confidence. This will give you the unstoppable drive to persist to your goals, no matter how stiff the opposition that stands in your way.

But this isn’t so easy.

We’re not talking here about some sort of phony positive thinking “hype.” This isn’t about pretending the garden is rosy when everything sticks to hell. It’s not about “fake it till you make it” or anything like that.

No. What’s needed are changes at the deepest regions of your psyche. These changes then give rise to genuine self-confidence of the highest order. Once this is part of your mental structure, you become unstoppable.

Now, making this sort of transformation is NOT easy. People can go their entire lives trying all sorts of methods, but failing to make substantial progress.

That’s why I recently created a brand new system called The Confidence Cure.

It does exactly what the title says. It uses very powerful brain-mind techniques to rapidly transform your consciousness from a failure to a super-success mechanism.

This means, you don’t have to spend years trying to change yourself. This new super-charged system can produce very rapid change indeed.

That’s because The Confidence Cure goes deep. It gets to the essence of the issue and fixes it. Once the core issue is resolved, everything else unfolds from there. Success becomes much easier to achieve.

You can certainly take the findings that I’ve shared with you in these messages and try to boost your self-confidence through other means. It may take years to get the same result. Maybe it will eventually work. Maybe it won’t work at all. Who knows?

Or you can try the fast-track approach and use The Confidence Cure system to blast away the inner obstacles and put you on a rocket ship to success and achievement.

The reason for the vast majority of failure and low achievement in people’s lives is lack of
self-confidence.

Cure this, and you cure the core problem, and thereby attract more abundance, happiness, better relationships… in fact, whatever matters to YOU in life.

Click the image to learn more about The Confidence Cure!

The Key Determinant For Success In Life

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In the last post, we talked about the fact that Success is apparently uncorrelated to intelligence or talent. There seems to be a hidden factor involved that underlies it all; invisible and yet irresistibly potent.

I asked you to ponder what that factor might be; the key determiner of success or failure in your life.

Do you have any ideas?…

I hope you gave it some thought. I know I did. For years.

You see, I’ve experienced that very sort of frustration. I know what it is to set goals, see nothing come of it, and feel the listlessness that results. Not once, but many times. And afterwards have that “there must be something wrong with me” feeling.

Well, I’m here to tell you that there is nothing wrong with you. You are NOT a failure. And you are not less worthy than anyone else.

So, what is that factor that separates the successful from those who perpetually spin their wheels.

OK, it’s time to let you out of your suspense. In one word, the key differentiator is…

CONFIDENCE!

Self-confidence, real belief in yourself and your expected happy outcome, is so critical that it really does make the difference between outrageous success and total blinding failure.

Can it really be this simple?

Yes, it really can.

Think about this for a moment…

What if you absolutely KNEW, without any shadow of a doubt, that if you simply took the actions needed, you would succeed in achieving your goal with 100% certainty.

If this was true, what would stop you from taking action? I think you would agree that the answer is nothing!

If you truly knew that you MUST infallibly succeed, and all you had to do is act… then of course you would do it!

Hence, to the extent that you do NOT have confidence in yourself and your desired outcome is the extent to which you will either take no action to begin with. Or else, you will give up prematurely at the first sign of resistance.

We give up because we do not believe, deep down, that we have much chance of success.

OR else we simply do not believe that we are worthy of that success. After all, who are YOU to think you could pull off such an enormous thing?

Do you see where I am going with this?

Basically, if you can reverse the process and actually have the self-confidence necessary, virtually anything you desire is potentially possible for you.

There are no limits to what you might achieve apart from those you yourself impose. You imposed those limits due to your own lack of self-confidence. And it’s you who can break them.

So what is the solution?…

Well, clearly to the extent that you can achieve a high level of self-confidence is the extent to which you can set goals. And persist with them, until they come to fruition.

But that’s easier said than done. It’s not so easy to overcome the habits of a lifetime, let alone the deep-seated system of thoughts, belief and behavior that have been instilled into you from the womb onward.

And we’re not talking about “fake” confidence either. We’re talking about the confidence that comes from having done something a million times, and KNOWING you can do it. Except, you have this sort of self-confidence and inner belief even if this is your very first attempt!

So, what is a person to do? How do you make the breakthrough to success and achievement via genuine self-confidence?

That’s the topic of my next post.

Why Do Some People Succeed While Others Fail?

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One of the things that has intrigued me for a long time is simply this..

What is the core issue behind why some people fail to achieve their goals, but others succeed?

After all, we’re all born with certain gifts, talents, and a good degree of intelligence too. Yet, these seem completely uncorrelated to the success that some people experience in life, or the mediocrity that others must tolerate as their lot.

The “super-talented” derelict is almost proverbial. Those with the most intelligence and talent frequently under-utilize both. You often see people in senior positions in business, giving orders to people with more intelligence and talent than they themselves ever had.

Many people strive to better their lives. They ponder and imagine their future, set goals, and maybe even make some serious effort to achieve those goals.

Yet, it all mysteriously comes to nothing.

So they end up doing the whole thing over, either with the same goal or with new ones.

However, they inevitably find that the cycle repeats. Nothing much is ever achieved.

Set more goals? Visualize? But it’s failed already!

Maybe you have experienced this very thing in your own life? Many people have. And it’s very frustrating.

The prescription frequently given is basically to do more of the same. Set more goals. Get precise on what you really want. Visualize your future reality. Use more determination. Persist. And so on.

All of this is fine and well. It works for the right people at the right time. It should work for everyone, but apparently it doesn’t.

And there’s a simple reason for that. It’s not that some people are smarter or more talented. Intelligence and talent actually have little to do with it, as I mentioned.

No. There’s something else going on. Can you think what it
might be?…

I’ve pondered this issue for a long time. The answer is by no means obvious, but I think I’ve finally hit upon it.

And in the post tomorrow, I’m going to tell you what it is that causes this failure that so many people experience and are frustrated with.

In the meantime, think for yourself about this yourself. See if you can come up with the answer.

Asoka Selvarajah

Creator of The Confidence Cure