Self Confidence

It's a funny thing, confidence. Like money, we all feel at times that we could do with more of it and those who have plenty never give it a second thought. It's an elusive feeling, one that evaporates under the spotlight of attention, but when you've got it, you feel you can do anything. What does 'confidence' mean?

By 'self-confidence', people usually mean the feeling of knowing that things will go well. This immediately gives us an idea of why it can be such a problem - we cannot know the future!

Confidence in your own abilities

The essence of self confidence is having faith in your own abilities. Being able to trust that, whatever happens, you'll be able to deal with it. Why is it then, that we spend most of our time imagining what things will be like when they go wrong, and seeing ourselves being embarrassed, humiliated or failing in some crushing way?

Self Preservation

One reason why we do this is to avoid danger to ourselves. Contingency planning is where you imagine what could happen, and make plans to deal with it. This is fine in business, government or project planning, but in many other situations, such as social occasions or presentations, the possibilities of 'what might happen' are far too numerous to deal with in this way.

Confidence, the myth

People often say things like "I can't do that, I just don't feel confident". By this, they seem to mean one of the following. Either "The fact I feel under-confident is some kind of message that I shouldn't be doing it" or "Before attempting anything new, I have to feel confident about it first." Both of these leave us less likely to be able to tackle new situations in a comfortable way. As stated previously, what we need more is a sense of 'whatever happens, it will be OK'.

Self Confidence can be learned

Another common idea about confidence is that you are either born with it, or not. Things you hear are "I'm just not a confident person" or "People who are super-confident are just lucky". This is obviously untrue, as anyone knows who has seen a friend or colleague grow in confidence. Confidence is a way of approaching things, and it can be learned.

Catch 22?

Now obviously, what builds our confidence in the long-term is doing things that we are a bit scared of and surprising ourselves with our abilities. So is this a no-win situation? If we can't do the things that we need to feel confident, how can we grow in confidence? Well, we can learn the strategies, approaches and thinking of confident people and, perhaps most importantly, how to mentally prepare ourselves for new or frightening events. Once we do this, it's like rolling a snowball down a hill. The things that made us under-confident no longer do and we feel more able to tackle bigger things, which in turn raises our confidence levels.

What can I do to be more confident?

If you truly want to be more confident, you can learn how. How long it will take before you are as confident as you want to be depends on what stage you are at now. Very under-confident people are more likely to notice a difference most quickly when they learn how to be more confident. Those who need more confidence for particular situations only may only notice the difference when they go back into that situation.

Above all, to become more confident, we have to do something. It's one thing thinking different, but that's only one part of the picture.

Treatment of a Low Self-Esteem

The best way of overcoming a low self-esteem is to treat both a possible biological angle and psychological angle.

A low self-esteem seldom exists by itself. If you have a biological disorder, of which you may not be aware and which could date back to your childhood, this will affect your self-image, because you may have been bombarded with stress hormones over which you have no conscious control. By far the most common biological disorder is hypoglycemia.

You can test yourself for hypoglycemia at home by completing the Nutrition Behavior Inventory Test (NBI) or The Hypo Quizz. If you score high you are likely to have a metabolic disorder that may have affected your self-image. This can be treated nutritionally under the supervision of a Nutritional Doctor or a Clinical Nutritionist.

Apart from that, I know from clinical experience that a low self-esteem cannot be got rid of with "rational" arguments alone, and well-meaning motherhood statement like "love yourself".

In terms of Transactional Analysis (TA) a negative self-image is derived from a judgmental PARENT EGO STATE, over which we have no conscious control. The PARENT ego contains "habits of thought", mostly irrational on a "good" "bad" spectrum, that can be retrained by means of "behaviouristic techniques". Part of our mind does not respond to rational debates, but are simply TRAINED to think in a particular way.

The PARENT ego is more like an animal thinking like your pet dog. You cannot rationalize with your dog to behave in a certain way. YOU HAVE TO TRAIN IT.

Thus there is a systematic approach in treating a "low self-esteem" taking into account both the biological and psychological factors. Training is mostly in the hands of the client's work with himself, once he knows and understand the technique. Ignoring biological factors is responsible for most of the failures in "psychological" counselling.

How to Improve One's Self-Image

The first consideration in the treatment of any ‘psychological’ problem is the person underlying health. Many physical problems contribute to a low self-esteem. The next step looks at a person’s self-image, which is at the base of most if not all psychological problems.

The basis of any human relationship is very closely related to one’s self image. A negative self-image, sets up all sorts of defences that may in fact create a negative image of you in another person. This is called a self-fulfilling prophesy. It is not going to help you to believe that your upbringing, your relationship with your own parents is the cause of your negative self-image. You need to take control of your own self-image and change it by mental practice.

A self-image is fundamentally a self generated statement that floats around in your head such as “ I am ......(adjective)”. Let us suppose you are by yourself in a room and ask yourself “Who am I?”
You will hear something like “I am.....(adjective)” and that adjective is either positive, negative or neutral. I am interested in the negative adjectives that you conjure up. The most common negative self image is “I am stupid” “I am unlovable”, I am a jerk” “I am a failure”. I will take these as an examples of a negative self image or hang-up.
Before we can get rid of a negative self image we must own it, that is recognized that it is you and nobody else that is putting you down.

For instance one way of getting hold of your hangups is to go on what I call a PARANOID TRIPS. Start off with strangers.
You sit in a bus or anywhere and then imagine that you have the power to read people’s mind about you.
Say to yourself: “He/she/they really think that I am ......... and that is awful”.
Fill up the sentence. You probably finish up with he thinks that ”I am stupid”. You know that strangers really don’t think of you. You have created the self image yourself.

There are a lot of other techniques to find your hang-ups.
For example: Say to yourself: “He/She treats me as if I am ..... and that is awful”.
“He/she looks at me as if I am................”
Imagine two people talking and suddenly you say to yourself “They are saying that I am .......”
If you come up with negative adjectives, than you have generated your own negative self image. Your imagination used other people to reveal your negative self image or hang ups.

Another way is even more interesting: I call them proving trips.

“I am trying to prove to him/her/them that I am.....”

Now you probably thought of something positive like “intelligent” or “smart”, “clever” “lovable, “gentle”.
Take the opposite of these adjective and presto you have hold of your negative self-image.

Say: “He/she is trying to prove to me.....trying to impress me that he/she is...........”

Fill up the sentences and take the opposite and you probably can figure out the hang-up of the other person.
If I have a need to impress you that “I am clever”, I must have a hang-up that says “I am stupid”, or you might think that “I am stupid” and how awful would that be!!!

People with a positive self image, don’t have a need to prove anything to anybody. Take or leave them as they are!!!!

The wooden leg argument

Some pernicious hang-ups are in the form of a physical descriptive put-down such as “I am ugly”, “I am fat”, or “I have a wooden leg”.
If you add “and therefore.....” and then complete the sentence the true nature of the negative self image comes to the surface. For example:

“I have a wooden leg and therefore women/men don’t like me”

The unstated belief - the major premise in the logical syllogism - is shown in the first premise in the following argument:

“People with wooden legs are unlovable”.
"I have a wooden leg",
therefore “I am unlovable”.

Although perfectly logical, the problem is that the major premise is false. Not all people with wooden legs are unlovable.
It is very difficult to get rid of the wooden leg which adds punch to the hang-up.

People who bemoan that they are fat, thin, tall, ugly, small, or have too many freckles may use these features to put themselves down; they use the wooden leg argument.

This obsession with physical features may lead to anorexia and/or bulimia among young girls and the use of anabolic steroids among boys who want to look like TARZAN.

It is not surprising that changing one's physical appearance in anorexia through starvation, does not alter one's underlying self-image one iota. It only reinforces the idea that the wooden leg is the cause of our battered self-esteem.

HOW TO GET RID OF HANG-UPS

We are creatures of habits and once we have learned to believe that we are stupid, it is activated automatically. But what we have learned we can unlearn by practice and sheer repetition. That part of the mind, that Freud calls the super-ego, and Eric Berne calls the “Parent Ego” or the critical parent within us, is an automatic thinker.

You do most of your mind training at night or when you are by yourself. You think of a scene when you got upset, because the boss talked to you or treated as if you are stupid.

You now have to learn a new lesson:

“Isn’t stupid to think I am stupid”.

Many clients started off by training themselves to believe “I am smart, I am intelligent” etc. This seems to be the opposite of the hang-ups. But unfortunately, when you do that you may finish up being very arrogant and self-opinionated. In other words you finish up in the “I am right” position. People in that position are usually authoritarian, arrogant, critical of other people, knockers and they are usually difficult to handle. But there are ways of handling them.

Let us stick to getting rid of our negative self image.

What ever negative you are saying about yourself, try to use the formula:

“Negative” + “negative = neutral.

“Isn’t stupid to think I am stupid”
“Isn’t silly to think I am silly”
“Isn’t unlovable that I am unlovable.”
“You did it again by thinking you are a failure”
“I will watch out next time I think this silly thing about me”
“Stop it, you did it again”

In other words you are neutralizing you negative self-image, without falling into the trap of the “I am right” position.

Simply don’t allow yourself to think negatively about yourself whenever you catch yourself doing so. This is done through private meditation and may take some time. Go through the paranoid trips of the day, neutralize the negatives and be prepared for the next put down you might encounter the following day.

This program takes between one and two month of mind-training. Some client learned it in two weeks. Think as though you are training a little poodle in your head to behave the way you want. It takes some time, but very soon you get the hang of it. Once you become automatically positive, you will experience a sense of relief, as if a load falls from your shoulder.

Next time a guy/girl rejects you you might hear yourself say” Gee that is awful, but it is not a disaster. That guy/girl misses out on a beautiful person like me. I am worth more than that. And the next time I have a look at a possible partner he/she HAS TO BETTER and WILL BE BETTER than the previous one, because I am worth more than that!!!!” “In the end I am going to be better off”.

Get to know your self talk, and when you start to laugh at what you hear and how you can put yourself down, you are cured!!

The Internal Debate Approach

Sometimes we need a more powerful approach to get rid of hang-ups. This is done by having internal mental debates between the PARENT and the ADULT within us.

Gestalt therapy has left us with the concept of 'two chair work'. What happens in 'two chair' work is that a person hops from one chair to the other, playing the role of his opponent and himself. The aim is to get an agreement between the person and his opponent.

You can apply this technique to yourself by imagining that your opponent is the PARENT within you and is putting you down. You can do this in the privacy of your imagination. By learning by heart the strategies of Assertiveness Training Program - in the next chapter - you learn to defend yourself against any possible negative remark that the PARENT figure is throwing at you. Your opponent could be any person in real life who is upsetting you by his put-downs.

By learning to be assertive by means of the Assertiveness Training Program, you learn how to make your ADULT ego the dominant ego in your personality. By mental exercises and repeated mental practice session your become assertive automatically, and this is an other powerful technique to get rid of internal hang-ups.

When you start to feel confident, you can now face real life situations

Once you can improve your self image the world will open up to you, you won’t put up with nonsense anymore. You are now ready to do a assertiveness training program and this is another matter.

Put it into action.

ACTION!

Hi Roninex, I think you have given the good points there and that's good, but I believe that it's easier to be said than done. I mean you have all the theories, but when you really encountered the problem that makes you really down, you wouldn't remember all that you've posted here.
I also think the same, reading all your posts, that those can be done. But I remembered my bad past experience when life has bring me down to the lowest point, where all those theories were nonsense, and building self image would only make you feel lower than ever, you only need time until you realize that there's something should be done to make a chance. And people around you, love you and support you are the ones who can help you
I hope I have added some points here