Self Confidence And Bad Life Experiences

Very often people hold onto their bad experiences and don’t let go of them. This not only prolongs the pain of that experience, but also keeps them locked in the past preventing them from learning from that experience and moving on.

For example, if you had a bad childhood growing up either because of the way your parents treated you or the way your schoolmates treated you, then unless you are able to accept what happened to you and then let it go, that experience will haunt you for the rest of your life constantly eating away at your self esteem and your self confidence.

If you want to develop your self confidence, you need to do what I talked about in the last article. Overcome the bad experiences you have had in your life, and then use them to make you a stronger person.

Creating New Life Experiences

Since our life experiences shape the type of person we become, you won’t be able to change who you are and the way you feel until you are able to resolve those past unresolved issues by creating new life experiences for yourself.

The reason for this is that every experience you have in life creates a belief in your mind. These beliefs are like computer programmes, in the sense that they cause you to act in one way or another by influencing the type of thoughts you have.

So if you have a bad experience, in your mind a belief related to that experience will be created, which will continue to influence you throughout your entire life.

The key is to replace that bad experience with a similar good experience, so that you can erase that bad belief and replace it with a good one.

For example, if you were bullied at school and never stood up for yourself, that will create a bad belief in your mind that will continue to eat away at your self confidence as you grow older.

However if you are able to do something to erase that belief, such as by learning how to defend yourself or becoming physically strong, then you will remove the negative influence of that past belief and your self confidence will grow.

This particular example is very common amongst boxers, such as Lennox Lewis. Lennox was bullied as a child and had very low self confidence.

But once he learnt to box and stand up for himself, his self confidence quickly increased allowing him to become very successful later in life.

What Lennox did was to remove his negative belief, and replace it with a good belief. If Lennox had kept hold of his old belief, his confidence would have remained at a low level.

So if we break this down further, what this means is that the majority of the self confidence you have now, comes from the past experiences you have had in your life.

Unless you create new future experiences to override those bad past experiences, your level of confidence will continue to be set by them.

Using Future Life Experiences To Raise Self Confidence

Take some time to sit down and make a list of all the bad things that have happened to you in your life. After you have created this list, focus on the ones that are the most painful for you to think about now.

The experiences that you find the most painful to think about, will most likely be the experiences you have not yet fully resolved in your life, which means they are still negatively affecting you today.

This is because people have a natural tendency to repress things which are painful or pleasant, which means that they don’t fully deal with them and so they continue to affect that persons life at an unconscious level.

With the painful experiences that you have chosen, think about what you have learnt from them and how that knowledge benefits you today. Now decide how you will use that knowledge to create new experiences in your life.

Note : This last step is the most important one, because until you can find a suitable new experience, you won’t receive the full benefit from this exercise.

What this process does is to help you to not only resolve past unresolved issues, but also remove the negative influence they are currently having on your life. In other words, it helps you to reprogram your mind at the subconscious level.

Your Past Does Affect Your Future

The idea that past experiences can still be affecting your life many years after they happened to you is a difficult one to accept. Since most people believe that simply forgetting about something means it no longer exists.

However if that was the case, then thinking about that bad experience should not affect you at all. But since it does, this shows that the emotional memory which was associated with that life event is still stored within you, and therefore is still affecting the way you feel and the things you do in life.

When you resolve an issue from your past, it becomes much easier for you to confront it and remember it.

This is because by resolving that issue, you also release the emotional tension it was creating in your body. As a result, the pain of that experience disappears or is greatly diminished, which then causes your self confidence to rise.

Personal Development & Self Confidence

The process I have just described will help more than just your level of self confidence. It will help you with every area of your life, and allow you to focus on your life in the future rather than being held back by your past.

This is what personal development really is. Learning from bad experiences and using that knowledge to create good experiences.

Because if you don’t overcome those bad experiences, then they will continue to define the type of person you are.

In conclusion, just remember that all the unresolved issues you have in your life are like having chains strapped to your feet.

The more chains you have the harder you will find it to move forward in life and become the person you want to become.

It is only when you are able to break free from those chains, will you be able to reach a state of high self esteem and self confidence.

This article ended up much longer than I expected, so I will recap the main points below.

• Your past life experiences are largely responsible for your present level of self confidence.

• Your past life experiences create belief systems, which affect the way you think, feel and act.

• Unless you create new positive life experiences to override your past bad life experiences, your level of self confidence will continue to be set by those bad experiences.

• The life experiences which you find most painful and the most difficult to confront, are likely to be the ones which are having the biggest negative impact on your current level of self confidence.

• Resolving the most painful experiences in your life, will therefore have the biggest positive impact on your level of self confidence.

• Resolving past bad experiences is the only way to permanently improve your level of confidence, because it addresses the root cause of your low self confidence which stems from your subconscious mind.

Part 1