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

Life Coaches Can Help You Take an Objective Look at Why You Aren'tMoving Forward

Your Life Coach Can Help You with Procrastination

Life sure does seem to be happening faster and faster. Can a life coach help with any of this?

Maybe it's my age but I hear lots of younger people voice the same observation. For whatever reason, no matter how fast-paced your life seems to be, you may still feel like you are spinning your wheels and getting nothing done and getting nowhere.

Whether you procrastinate and put off the important things you need to do or if you constantly seem to come up against a brick wall at every turn, sometimes it takes someone else to help you look at your life situation with an objective eye and see what some of the underlying issues may be. Sometimes it's self doubt and low self esteem. Sometimes it's just a shortage of needed skills. Maybe it's a combination of both.

Fear and self doubt may blind you to what is really happening. Feelings and emotions may be in the way and you may never grow past these issues and become prosperous and self-respecting. If you are working hard and still feel like you are getting nowhere, a life coach could be the key to helping you see what the issues are that are standing in your way and moving forward past them to a whole new future. Make a serious commitment now and deal with the situation before it is too late and you have missed many incredible opportunities. Go pick up the phone.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Why we all don't have what we want

Personal Power For All

I've been involved in the human potential movement or on a personal power path for 40 years. When I started on my path I didn't know I was on a path; I just knew I was in so much angst about my life and my body that I had to do something. What I did was go to a 12-Step program and found a spiritual answer or rather I began to understand how life really works - not what I had learned from my parents who actually didn't have a clue. It's not that at 37 I found all the answers. I found out there were questions. Much more important.

So my journey has wound and wound and found me living in L.A., Sausalito, Mill Valley, Petaluma, Dallas and Las Vegas - in no particular order.

• It took me out of my first marriage of 15 years into single parenthood with 4 children with lots of low self-esteem.

• It took me to other 12-Step programs. It found my second husband of 6 mos. in that 12-Step program and led me out of the marriage and the program again.

• It found me at an obscure workshop called Making Love Work by the then very unknown Barbara deAngeles and John Gray.

• It found me discovering my childhood abuse and back into another 12-Step program.

• It took me back to John Gray and Men Are from Mars . It found me my 3rd husband of 23 years.

• It took me to coaching and writing - and many other places.

My life is a miracle to behold. I have 4 lovely adult children, 6 amazing grandchildren, 2 beautiful daughters-in-law. It gave me a most precious and special relationship with my stepdaughter. It gave me friendly but far-away relationships with my other stepchildren and grandchildren.

Why did a woman who was emotionally and sexually abused as a child, who suffered from very damaged self-esteem, married 3 times(!), who saw herself as a victim etc. etc etc. get such a great current life. THE ANSWER IS SIMPLE. I DO THE WORK I UNDERSTAND MY NEEDS TO HEAL, TO GROW AND I DO IT 100%. Even when I didn't have the emotional tools to move on, I had the personal power.  Whether it's with a coach, without a coach, in a 12-step program or out - NO MATTER WHAT, I do and have done the work.

If you have that kind of personal power and commitment to your path, you have anything you want. I promise.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Who's a Fake Coach?

Life Coach - Real or Fake?

With the growing trend of life coaching, everyone is calling themselves a coach these days. I'm on twitter , a cool social networking site. It's amazing how many people who are in sales and network marketing call themselves "coach".

Elsewhere in this blog you might have read that my personal prejudice is that a life coach does not have to be certified and does not even need formal training necessarily. I learned more from receiving good coaching than I did at my very expensive training school.

That being said, if you want to hire a life coach and you find someone who calls themselves coach but has nothing to offer, it will become apparent to you when you interview the coach - whether in person or on the phone.

An authentic coach will offer you a sample session or will have an in-depth conversation before either of you could possibly consider whether you are right for the coaching relationship with each other. I used to offer a sample session but since I don't know you and don't know enough about you, I find that if we ask a lot of questions of each other, if we are forthright in our communication and I understand what you want from your coaching, I can then tell you what I can offer. I often tend to tell a potential client what I've worked on with other clients and what I've changed in my life in relationship to their needs.

Many who call me have told me that they talked to lots of coaches and they felt "sold". It takes a high level of confidence in ones self, a lot of trust in the Universe to provide the material goods required by the life coach and a strong sense of intuition to not feel fearful of not being hired. I told you in another post recently that I "fired" a client when I realized I was beginning to totally resist our appointments.

Since I usually look forward to each session with anticipation and joy and leave feeling focused, centered and empowered, I knew something was very wrong. I realized that I had been blinded during our initial interview by my ego in agreeing to work with this lawyer because he is my ex-husband's nephew and I thought it was such a "special compliment" to me seeing what our marriage status is and has been for 25 years. Well, that didn't work out. We ended on a positive note but I fell into a very human trap of satisfying my ego but not seeing that we weren't a good match to start out with.

So, again, hopefully you will know immediately if you have the right person or not to hire as a life coach. But certainly you will figure it out quickly and that's why I advise - keep interviewing until you are sure.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Are the "noes" of childhood in charge of your life? How can you beemotionally healthy?

Remember when you were a kid and you wanted some things that your parents said NO to? I'm guessing it would not have been OK for you to express anger at your disappointment. Most parents are not so OK with that but where did those feelings go? They most likely never got expressed which means they are somewhere "in" you which means most likely they need some work - some healing.

In my work as an Emotion-Based Coach, I meet both women who've had horrendous backgrounds and women whose childhood was pretty good. It's the one whose childhood was pretty good who have the most difficulty in believing that their past might be the reason their relationships don't work out or they can't seem to do the work that makes them happy or anything else that isn't working in their lives.

Here's an example from a conversation I had this week with a really quite healthy woman who is considering going through YOU University with me as her coach. When she was a kid, her dad wanted her to become a golf pro and apparently put a fair amount of pressure on her to do so. She did not become a golf pro and knows intellectually that her dad wanted the best for her but I believe that the kid in her still needs to express her feelings around being pushed into something she didn't really want to do and the somewhat powerless experience that kids often have even with the best of parents.

We all have situations like the one above in our past. Some of us, unfortunately, have much harsher ones but usually, those women hurt so much, that they try to get relief by going to therapy or being involved in spiritual and/or personal growth programs and reading self-help blogs, books and ebooks. It's the ones with the easier past who have a hard time believing that their "great" childhood could leave any negative impact on them.

It occurs to me that taking this self-assessment might help you get some insight into yourself and how the now is linked with the past.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

What to Do if You Were Taught Not to Take Care of Yourself

Selfish or Self-Care?

It seems when I was a child I was never taught about self-care or to want things. Whenever I wanted something, I was accused of being selfish.  It didn't matter if I was tired or just not wanting to do chores. I heard it so much and so often and didn't want to think I was anything bad like that, I stopped taking care of myself in many different ways. If taking care of me was selfish, than taking care of and pleasing others was unselfish . And I'd much rather be unselfish. I suspect many people and maybe more women are taught this self-defeating, unloving attitude by other women - mostly their mothers who had learned the same thing in their early lives.

If you experienced something like that dynamic somewhere in your past, you might find it difficult to rest enough, difficult to eat well, difficult to take care of your body in other ways. You might find it difficult to take care of yourself in relationships. You might judge your emotions as unworthy of a good (unselfish) person. You might also find it difficult to have healthy boundaries and difficult to stand up for what you know is right.

How do I know all of this? I know it because I have lived it in one way or another. So what do you do if you see yourself in these words?

• Start paying attention to how you treat yourself. Take a little notebook and write down the ways you see you not taking good physical care of yourself. Then get support to change those old habits. Find someone or someones who will help you understand that you are infected with wrong thinking. Funny. My mother also said, "God helps those who help themselves." I'll buy that one. So I help myself.
  

• Start paying attention to how others treat you. Are you taken advantage of in relationships? Are you expected to give more than your partner? Are you underpaid? Do you do work that is unsatisfying? Talk to someone who loves you enough to be an honest mirror and listen to what they are saying. It is most likely the truth and you most likely know it is deep down inside yourself.

Find support to learn to love yourself from the inside out.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Are You Building Healthy Relationships?

Expectations of Building Healthy Relationships

I have a friend for many years. When I first, formally started my coaching practice, she was one of my first clients. I wasn’t able yet to observe myself in the coaching process enough to be able to see if the calls were building healthy relationships between my client and myself. A couple of weeks ago she called and said I need your help. She said, "I’m overwhelmed and confused about creating my business so I either watch TV or eat to avoid the whole thing."  I agreed immediately but we didn’t really lay out what she expected from me and from the coaching itself.  One of the best tactics in building healthy relationships is to outline expectations upfront. The lack of having done that immediately showed up as a problem. She missed an appointment, then had a gas company guy come at the time of the next appt. and was heavy into negativity when we finally spoke on the delayed appointment.

I don’t perceive my job as talking a client out of their negativity. I perceive my job as working with it to change it. Subtle difference but a big difference in results for the client – and results for me. Which leads me to what I experienced that day.

When I hung up from our call I was tired and drained. I thought it was because I didn’t have enough sleep. But several hours later I had my next client appt. and although later in the day, I felt exhilarated and stoked which is how I most often feel after coaching – which I’ve used as an indicator that coaching is a gift of mine. Also, I remember learning from John Gray about a zillion years ago that if a relationship is giving you energy, it’s a good relationship and if it’s taking away energy, there are problems. He was referring to intimate relationships but what’s more intimate than a relationship between a coach and a client?

So back to my question: to coach a friend or not to coach a friend? I still don’t know if it’ll work in this case but I have begun to remedy the situation by requesting my friend to please write down her expectations of me and of our coaching. We will speak about it next week and we’ll see where we end up.

Lesson learned: When building healthy relationships you must request and layout expectations and boundaries.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching