Author: Mike Paetzold

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.

About the Author

Mike Paetzold has more information on improving your self confidence at this site on Self Confidence.

Author – Paulyn Lloyd

Life can sometimes get on top of you and make you feel as if you have no hope and as a result you can start to feel depressed and powerless. But you may be feeling depressed but you are not powerless.

If you want to begin to feel better then first you need to just put your worries aside for a second.

I know it’s easier said than done but just trust me on this one.

Get a pen and paper and write down the things that you have in your life to be grateful for. Even if it’s as simple as running water, clothes on your back, a roof over your head, eyes to be able to read this etc, etc. Keep writing until you can’t think of anything else that you have to be grateful for. Have a think about this and think about how lucky you are to have these things.

Now take a fresh sheet of paper and write down all the things that you appreciate about yourself. What’s great about you? Are you a good friend? A great listener? Maybe you’re really good at drawing or a great cook? Be honest because if you look hard enough there is something amazing about all of us. Again keep writing until you can’t think of anymore or your arm hurts through writing whichever comes first.

Now just think about these things, who you are as a person and what you have to be grateful for and you should begin to feel a heck of a lot better. There is always a way out, you just need to believe in it. Do not beat yourself up over what you haven’t done just give yourself credit for what you have done. Don’t ponder of what you haven’t got, be grateful for what you have and I assure you, you will start to feel a whole lot better.

When you begin to feel better you will feel more motivated and like you can do more but you have to start with yourself. Do something you enjoy, put on some music you love and start to dance or a comedy. But shake off them blues because they don’t change anything they don’t help anyone least of all you.

Keep your chin up because you have plenty to be grateful for it’s just sometimes hard to see this when you are feeling down. When you start believing that you can feel better you will start feeling better.

Start with a smile, just a little one and then feel it deep inside your soul till you’re grinning like a Cheshire cat. Smiling helps shift your emotions and your mood. You deserve to feel better, the fact that you’re reading this tells me you want to. So go on, enjoy yourself do something fun.

Is it possible that your mental performance hinges on how you think people perceive you or how you perceive yourself? Professor Robert Rosenthal of Harvard University discovered many years ago how powerfully your perceptions of people can affect their behavior. The same principle applies to your perception of yourself.

Rosenthal and his colleague Lenore Jacobson, in 1968 reported a study of what they called Pygmalion in the Classroom. The title refers to the George Bernard Shaw play about the way in which a linguist shaped the speech of a Cockney flower girl. Rosenthal and Jacobson discovered that perceptions can affect even children’s measured level of intelligence. They divided the children in this study into two groups. He told teachers that the children in the first group had a high IQ and that the children in the second group had a lower IQ. In reality, however, there was no difference in average IQ between the two groups. At the end of the school year, he measured the children’s IQs again. What do you think he discovered? The teachers’ perceptions had actually changed the children’s IQs! Now the children perceived as having the higher IQ by their teachers really did have higher IQs than the ones perceived as lower in IQ. Since then many other experiments have confirmed the same fact. Your perception of people itself often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What causes the Pygmalion Effect? Teachers often give more help and encouragement to certain of their students even though they consciously try to treat all children equally. Sometimes the differences are overt. Certain students may receive more attention in class or more stimulating assignments. Teachers often genuinely feel that it is appropriate to favor certain students in this way. They may think that the most able students require more attention than the others do if they are going to develop their special talents.

Sometimes the differences are subtler. If an “intelligent” student gives a wrong answer, teachers are likely to attribute it to laziness or carelessness. They will therefore encourage the student to work harder or to be more careful. On the other hand, if an “unintelligent” student gives the same wrong answer, teachers are likely to attribute it to lack of ability. They will expect neither extra effort from the students this time nor a better job next time.

Pygmalion Effect research tells us that other people’s perceptions of you influence your performance. How will this effect you? The manner you perceive your yourself can have an even more powerful effect than how other people perceive you.

Let us examine the lives of 2 people, Annie and Joyce. They both perceive themselves as intelligent; nevertheless, their sense of the source of their innate intelligence is quite different. Annie views herself as having been blessed with an unusually fine mind. She sees evidence of this in her ability to master large amounts of information. Her mind sometimes seems to her like a sponge, because it soaks up information so quickly. Joyce views herself as having been born with rather average abilities. She considers herself as unusual only in her ability and determination to surpass her supposed limitations. In other words, Joyce plans to be an overachiever. Even though she may not start out being particularly good at organizing information, she believes that she can learn to become much better. Joyce starts to train her memory with memory techniques that she finds suits her personality. She finds that she can learn faster as she improves her memory.

What happens if you observe Annie and Joyce over the course of several years? At the beginning Annie does well assimilating information, and Joyce has a great deal of difficulty. Look again, however, a few years later. By this point, Annie is still where she started. On the other hand, Joyce has learned so much that she become just as successful as Annie is. Come back after another year and Joyce has clearly surpassed Annie.

Why did Joyce improve so much while Annie did not improve at all? You will find the explanation in their respective images of themselves. In the case of both, having a positive self-image served to create a powerful Pygmalion Effect. Nevertheless, no matter how useful the Pygmalion Effect was in the case of Annie, its significance was greater in the case of Joyce. Why was this? Seeing yourself as competent at learning is more powerful than seeing yourself as competent in other ways.

Joyce believed that she could learn to improve her memory and learning prowess; Annie believed that her skill depended on innate ability. In both cases, their image of their minds affected their performance. The difference between them is that Joyce sense of herself as intelligent relied on confidence in her own ability to learn. This is what gave her an advantage over the long run.

As you have more experience, you will come to understand your mind better and become more skillful at taking advantage of your unique abilities. Belief in your own ability to learn, change and improve your memory is one of the most powerful assets that you, as a user of information, can have.

A recent study by New York University study confirms this principle. Comparing two groups of African American college students, one group says intelligence is a fixed ability that does not change; the other group was encourage to see intelligence as changeable. Otherwise, the members of the two groups were interchangeable. They found that the students who saw intelligence as changeable not only on average earned a higher grade-point average but also reported enjoying the academic process more.

Those occasions usually put the lie to a highly elevated sense of one’s innate ability to organize information. On the other hand, being good at learning is much less rare. For that reason, many of us can be like Joyce. We have the ability to learn as long as we are able to remove all the mind blocks that happen to get in the way.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/psychology-articles/how-you-perceive-yourself-affects-how-well-you-learn-4784902.html

About the Author

Martin Mak has developed a new program to help people enhance their memory and learning experience. Find out how with his free and popular ecourse at

http://www.mightymemory.com