Self Confidence And Responsiblity

When something goes wrong in your life what do you do? If you are like most people you look for someone or something to blame, because by doing so you somehow feel better for your misfortune.

When it comes to building up your self confidence passing the blame is something you definitely want to avoid.

Because when you blame someone or something for circumstances in your life, you are essentially shifting personal control of your life onto other people or other things.

What this means is that you then allow those people or things to control your life, rather than you controlling it yourself. When you don’t control your life, you are then powerless to change to it.

Being Self Confident Is Your Responsibility

Being self confident means taking full responsibility for your actions, and this includes the things that go right and the things that go wrong.

It is only when you are able to accept the fact that you are responsible for the way your life turns out, will you then be able to take responsibility for developing your self confidence.

If you can’t take responsibility for your actions whenever something bad happens to you, you will tend to sulk or feel sorry for yourself, rather than trying to figure out a way to get what you want or make something right.

Obviously this will not help you to build your self confidence, but instead will lower it because you will feel as though the direction of your life is being steered by others rather than yourself.

This is an important point to remember because the degree to which a person feels happy with their life, is directly proportional to the amount of control they feel they have over it.

Friendships And The “Blamer Mindset”

Another reason to avoid having a blamer mindset is the effect it has on others. Blamers are seen as whiners, people who are always complaining why this happened to them or why that happened to them.

If you want to have and be around positive people in your life, complaining all the time isn’t going to attract them to you.

Instead it will attract more blamers, more complainers, and what do all these people have in common? They all feel sorry for themselves and have a negative attitude towards life. In other words, they have low self esteem and low self confidence.

Do not discount the importance of the people you associate with on a daily basis, because it is well known that people become like the people they hang around the most.

So if you have a blamer mindset and are attracting blamers into your life, then this is going to keep you locked into the blamer mindset and locked into a lifetime of low self confidence.

Life Experiences And Self Confidence

The experiences you have in life slowly shape the type of person you become, therefore the person you are today comes as a direct result of your past experiences. In general there are two types of experiences you can have.

Positive Experiences

Positive experiences are the times in your life when you achieve what you set out to do, and as a result they make you feel good and help to build up your level of self confidence.

Negative Experiences

Negative experiences are the things in your life that don’t go according to plan, and can be very painful to deal with. These experiences lower your self confidence (although they also have the potential to raise it).

Building Confidence From Negative Life Experiences

Although nobody likes to have negative experiences, they can actually be much more valuable to your personal development and self confidence than having good experiences all the time.

However because they are unpleasant to deal with, most people try to forget about them or blame other people or other things for them.

If you want to start building up your self confidence you need to embrace these negative experiences. This includes those which have occurred to you in the past, and those that will occur to you in the future.

Embracing negative experiences means accepting them, accepting that in some cases you were responsible for the way something turned out.

When you are able to accept the bad things in your life, only then will you be able to learn from them and then use those experiences to make you a stronger person.

Once you adopt this mentality of learning from your mistakes, bad experiences don’t seem so bad anymore, as you will now no longer look at them as misfortunes, but as events which have an overall positive impact on your life rather than a negative one.

Dealing With Tough Life Experiences

There will be some life experiences which will be more painful and therefore more difficult to accept than others, and these, whilst being the hardest to overcome, will be the experiences that offer you the greatest potential to develop a high level of self confidence.

For example, if a relationship with a person you loved has ended, you are bound to feel a lot of pain and find it difficult to deal with. This is perfectly natural, as painful experiences are painful for a reason, they cause us pain.

But for everything bad that happens to you, something good will happen as a result. Why is this? I don’t know, but perhaps it’s the universe’s way of balancing things out.

Take me for example. When a relationship I was in ended, I was extremely hurt and nothing anyone said to me made me feel any better about the situation.

It was only when I was able to accept what happened, realise that I was responsible for it and then move on from that experience, did I start to feel better about myself and get on with my life.

From that experience I developed much greater self reliance, self confidence and inner strength, and also became motivated to learn about relationships so I wouldn’t make the same mistakes again.

So even though at the time I saw it as a bad experience in my life, I now see it as a good experience because it has made me the person I am today.

What you should take away from this example, is that everything that happens to you in your life has the potential to raise your level of self confidence or destroy it.

Most low self confidence comes as a result of the bad things that happen to you in your life, and unless you resolve those unresolved issues, they will continue to eat away at your confidence.

In the next article, we shall look at how you can raise your self confidence by resolving those issues from your past which have caused your confidence to fall.

Part 2