Creating Confidence and Success

Do you wish you felt happier and more confident in your life?  If so, I’d like to share with you a couple of simple, fun techniques that you can use right now to help yourself feel better.  If you take the time to practice these techniques regularly, you will soon find yourself feeling much more positive and confident in every area of your life.  Before I go into what they are though, it’s important for you to first understand what’s really causing your to feel less positive and confident than you would like. 

The Real Reason You Don’t Feel Confident In Your Life

No matter what you may have heard, there’s really only one reason that you feel negative and uncertain about yourself and your life.  Once you know what it is, you will realize you have the power to change your life for the better because it’s something that is completely in your own control. 

The real reason that you don’t feel as confident as you would like is this: you have learned to think negative, critical thoughts about yourself and your life.  It’s not because of something that happened many years ago that you are powerless to change.  In every moment, you have the power to recognize that you are feeling bad, notice the negative thought that caused it, and then change that thought pattern to one that feels better.  And I’m going to show you how in two fun and easy steps. 

First Step: Don’t Believe the Crazy Monkey

The first step in changing your negative habits of thinking is to recognize them and remind yourself that your thoughts are not reality.  They are just thoughts, ideas that you have in your head about what you think about a situation.  To help remind you of this fact, I encourage you to imagine that your negative thoughts are coming from a crazy little monkey sitting on your shoulder, whispering negative opinions and ideas into your ear.  This will really help you to put a little distance between yourself and your thoughts and will help you to not take them so seriously.  Once you are able to do that, you can take a moment to consciously think of more positive ways to look at whatever situation you find yourself in.  I’ll go over a fun way to come up with more positive thoughts in the next step. 

Second Step: What Would Your Best Friend Say?

When you really think about it, don’t you find it strange how negative and mean we can be to ourselves with our thoughts?  Whenever we’re feeling less confident or feeling any negative emotion for that matter, we are subjecting ourselves to a barrage of self-criticism, predictions of bad outcomes, and negative opinions of all kinds.  Most of us would never be so mean to anyone but ourselves.  And we wouldn’t tolerate that kind of treatment from a friend.  So, once you recognize that you are having a negative thought, the next step is to come up with a more positive way of thinking about the situation.  This will really help you build your feelings of self esteem and confidence right away.  To get there, as yourself: 

What would my best friend tell me about myself and this situation? 

This is a great technique to use to come up with more positive ways to think about yourself and your life and using it regularly will result in feelings of greater confidence and well-being.  You know your best friend would be supportive, encouraging, and would believe in your ability to solve any problem that came up.  You can give that same gift of support to yourself. 

Here’s another related approach to generating more confident, positive thoughts.  Ask yourself:

What would I say to my best friend if they were having this problem?

Chances are, you would be much more positive and constructive with a friend than you are with yourself.  Imagine your friend experiencing insecurity, self-doubt, or whatever negative emotion you’re feeling.  What would you tell them to help them feel better? 

Be Your Own Best Friend

Take all these positive perspectives you’ve come up with and give them back to yourself.  Write down whatever you come up with and read it out loud a few times to yourself.  Even if you don’t fully believe these positive statements to begin with, you’ll find that you start to feel better when you say them to yourself over and over.  Once you do, you will have discovered the power of shifting your thoughts from negative to positive.

All it takes after that is practice.  Pay attention to how you are feeling and when you feel bad, use these two simple, fun, and easy steps to get your thinking back on track.  If you use these techniques regularly, it won’t take long before you find your habits of thinking shifting more automatically to the positive.  And when you do, you’ll be on your way to experiencing confidence and well-being in every area of your life.

Laura Lawson Boatman is a licensed therapist and writer.  She is the author of The Creating Confidence and Success Program, an innovative program that uses a powerful new technique to  help people quickly and easily transform negative habits of thinking and experience their natural state of confidence, well-being, and inspiration.  For her free guide that will help you use this technique to quickly increase your self confidence, please visit http://www.CreatingConfidenceandSuccess.com.  You can also try her free confidence recording online and experience the transformative power of her program for yourself.