Building Self Confidence Is a Tricky Business

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I began building self confidence as a result of three really important experiences.

When I. . .

1. Healed the negative emotions I held from the scary people and scary events of my early life - and

2. When I stopped denying the truth of who I am by pushing myself to do everything – even things that caused me daily pain - and

3. When I learned what real self confidence is. . . that's when I became ready to help others in increasing their self confidence – their trust in themselves.

To Mow Through Fear or Not to Mow Through Fear?

When I started in sales, I thought mowing over my natural shyness and "pushing myself though the fear" was how to gain self confidence. These days I don't agree with that. I say it depends on the situation.

There are fear-inducing situations I've pushed through that do seem to undo my fear rather than increase it. For example, I'm not crazy about telling people what I know they don't want to hear and yet, no one can live a functional life much yet live a functional marriage and not have that experience. My husband and I have been together over 20 years and certainly there are many times when I am telling him what he I know he doesn't want to hear. As those experiences have piled up over the years, I have found that keeping any important feelings to myself just doesn't work to keep a relationship functional. And I made the right choice of partner so although he might not want to hear what I have to say, he also doesn't want me to change myself to please him. So even though he is resistant to my feelings in the moment, in the bigger picture, he's a receptive audience.

On the other hand, I have a freeway phobia. It seems to have descended upon me from nowhere over the last 10 years or so. I've tried to make myself do it and push through the fear. As a matter of fact, I made myself drive from Las Vegas to north of San Francisco. It was the worst experience of my life. I felt intense fear almost the whole two days and I think it set me back years in this phobia thing. Recently I've been using a different kind of process which has included frequent short, local trips, getting off the freeway when I'm too uncomfortable and a spiritual process I learned from Robert Sheinfeld in Busting Loose from the Money Game which has me taking back my power. It's slow going but it seems to be working and I am gaining my self confidence back.

I've discovered that I am a sort of shy extrovert. Didn't know there was such a thing. I figured that it was just my low self esteem that made me afraid to "bother" people (which is definitely how I experience cold calling and personal prospecting - two key ingredients to commission sales.) Then I gained self esteem and still found those behaviors extremely scary.

That's why putting myself on the internet on a self help website and letting you find me and find out about me and decide whether you want to contact me is perfect. I tried some networking groups but found them really kind of scary and not good for me.

What Is Real Self Confidence?

REAL SELF CONFIDENCE COMES FROM KNOWING, LOVING AND
ACCEPTING YOUR REAL, AUTHENTIC SELF.

I don't think I'll ever write a book called How to Gain Self Confidence because I don't think it's a formulaic kind of thing. But by offering many of the tools on this site and in my coaching work, I can definitely provide self confidence help for those needing a little more of that very precious commodity.

Another thing about gaining self confidence is that people go to the web and find self help web sites. The truth about self help from my over 30 years experience in personal and spiritual self help is, as they say in 12-Step programs, "It works if you work it."

And I've learned to trust my intuition. If someone is promising immediate transformation, it might be too good to be true.

It's not that what is offered is necessarily not good but just that us humans have so many deep neuro-psychic grooves and change can take effort, repetition and commitment. I think that's why life coaching has had such an increase in popularity recently.

Hiring a Coach is like having a manager for your personal growth activities. Most Coaches are quite familiar with a lot of what's "out there" and so are good sounding boards for anything that might strike your fancy.