Is Self Confidence Elusive For You?

Boost Your Self Confidence

Self confidence is all about how you feel towards yourself and how confident you are in your life and the situations you encounter. High self esteem means you truly love yourself and who you are inside.

For example,

• I know I am a truly good person.
• I know I wish everyone well. I also know I am an authentic person.
• I know there is no big gap between what I think and feel about something or someone and how I act.

I love those qualities within myself. I very much like who I am as a person.

Self confidence may change on a regular basis depending on the things that are happening in your life on a daily basis. The change could even be linked to not enough sleep or having a very stressful few days or even hours. Everyone has good days and bad days but if most of your days tend to be bad and you feel stuck where you are and not willing to try new things, you probably have low self confidence and, my guess is, you most likely know it. I suffered from low self confidence for years and I certainly knew it.

The good news is that you can build your self confidence but it will likely take time. With some work and a serious commitment there are techniques that you can use to build your own self confidence. You will find many of them on this site.

First you must commit to remaining positive. A positive attitude is crucial to the success of building your self confidence. Then you must stop listening to anything negative that you or anyone else says. And since this is mostly an inside job, the voices you have floating around in your head, are the most damaging or most beneficial. Good self messages sound positive. Low self esteem inner messages are negative, critical and have lots of shoulds in them.

1.   Don't allow yourself to compare yourself to other people. You are your own unique person with your own purpose for being here and it doesn’t matter what others do, say or accomplish. It has nothing to do with you – except as far as you let it run your life.
2.    Associate with positive people.
3.    Spend your time doing work and activities that you truly love.
4.    Do not go over your past mistakes in your head. Forgive yourself and move on.

Start small and celebrate all of your successes. As time goes on, your small successes will become larger successes and you will be on the road to much higher self confidence and many more opportunities to be happy.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

How to Determine If You Have Authentic Self Esteem

Ego or Self Esteem?

Self esteem is all about how you see yourself and how you feel about yourself as a person. Increasing your self esteem is normally considered a good thing but keep in mind that like with everything else there is an up side and a down side.

If you have a low self esteem and you raise it to a point where you feel good about who you are, this is a good thing. But if you raise your self esteem too high and you become too full of yourself, you can be hurtful to people you love. This is not such a good thing.

Many years ago on my own personal journey of finding authentic self esteem I got a very hard job selling financial products to school teachers. I worked extremely hard and succeeded mightily (at least according to those who measure success by how much money you make). My authentic self esteem, my sense of being able to accomplish a hard thing daily, did increase. But so did my need to let everyone I knew know how much money I was making. I blush to think how full of myself I was. (And I apologize to all my friends for my obnoxiousness.)

This is all about ego - that sneaking little aspect of your mind that tells you that you are either not good enough or too good. It compares you to someone else to make you wrong or it compares you to someone else to make you superior. Neither of these states constitutes authentic self esteem.

Ego feelings come from your head. Authentic self esteem comes from your heart or gut or spirit. They are in line with your essential Whoever-Created-You-Given sense of worthiness.

Examine your levels of self esteem as honestly as you can. Listen to your heart and your gut instincts to lead you to be honest with yourself. When you have an honest picture of where you may be lacking in the self esteem area, then you can proceed with specific techniques to assist you in bringing your self esteem to the level of authentic good feelings about yourself - from the inside out.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

The Beginning of Taking Responsibility

I've been dealing with food addiction for over 40 years. It used to be  so tied in with my low self esteem and poor self image that it could only allow me to look some version of me being perfect to  even be OK. When that was true, all I wanted to do was think I looked OK and then everything would be fine. And since I never could really look OK, the distraction of the addiction served my crazy purpose - to feel badly about myself.

Now I have quite good self esteem and self image. My self questioning and self judgment about how I look or what I think and do is very rare. That is not to say I think everything I do is perfect. It is to say that everything I do is just OK with me. I trust that I have a lot to offer and I trust that I will not always do what is popular or what works. So what? Before, all I needed to do was be perfect. Now all I need to do is be myself.

I've been maintaining around a 40-50 pound weight loss for several years. I got rid of all clothes that I can trick myself into thinking I haven't gain with; the slightly bigger ones that would then allow weight gain to surprise me. That was an old subconscious trick of mine. Now my clothes keep fitting and I'm bored with them. Isn't that lovely?

Now all my clothes fit; my scale is correct and now I have to self coach. I have to self talk. I have to provide the support for myself that I provide my clients; the support that ultimately they will have to offer themselves. I have to find the part of me that loves myself enough to get over it - whatever it might be in the moment.

I'm like the man in Beautiful Mind who just decided that he would live with the delusions that his mental illness gave him and not medicate himself with the less-than-satisfactory drugs he was prescribed. I accept that sometimes this food addiction will walk along with me. I just need to acknowledge it, not resist it, and act in my best interests - not its. Ultimately we all coach ourselves - even the life coaches.

You University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

How do I know I have low self esteem? How to fix it?

I’m guessing if you are looking around the internet for information on low self esteem, trying to decide if you have it, you are experiencing some of the following:

• You discount yourself and don’t think you have much going for you.


• You’re pretty sure everyone else feels pretty good about themselves but you just don’t.


• You treat yourself poorly.


• You think others have all the answers for you. You don’t trust yourself.


• You let people take advantage of you.


• You have an inkling that you are not living up to your potential and you would if you actually knew what that is or what it means.


• You have poor relationships.


• You feel lousy a good deal of the time (lousy might include: fear, guilt, sadness, emotional pain, anger, hurt, blame, etc.)

Having been a person who had low self esteem for many years, I know what you feel like – and it isn’t good. And it isn’t that you are defective somehow. It’s that the people and situations that were supposed to keep your automatically-there-when-born self esteem all shiny, did not do the job that you would have wanted them to do. In other words, your childhood caretakers were less then perfect and probably suffered from similar low self esteem feelings themselves.

But you live at a time when there is help for such a thing – lots of help really. If you found this article, you’ve likely found others. Some may promise you something like “7 Secrets to Good Self Esteem”.

I am sure that articles like that have some kernels of truth and help in them but mostly they don’t go deep enough and so even though you try to make use of those secrets, you still feel most of what you always felt – lousy and lousy about yourself.

So what is the answer? How does one fix it? Well, first let me tell you that there is no Arrival Building at Good Self Esteem. Building good self esteem takes work and time. It’s a journey of sorts. The journey can sometimes be painful but it is always worthwhile.

Here’s what I’ve done for the past 30+ years which has worked so well that I now have a business training coaches who suffer from the same issues themselves and want help themselves and want to then be able to help others. So what do we do?

Well, first we insist on a certain attitude. That attitude is one of “I created everything” and it means that I have chosen to believe that I created the emotionally abusive mother I had and the sexually abusive father. Now did I really do that? Who knows ? Even some scientists today are beginning to believe that we actually do create our lives. But truly, that doesn’t matter. What matters is the attitude of self-empowerment as opposed to feeling like a victim.

When I felt like a victim, not only did I have low self esteem, I also attracted people and situations who would convince me further of my being a lousy person.

Next we require you to deal with their past experiences in a way that allows the old unexpressed feelings and emotions to be brought into the light and turned into something positive.

With a toolbox full of highly useful and reusable tools for continuing the process, you go off into the world to continue growing and finding the beautiful person who you really are.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching