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 the circumstances in your life, you are essentially shifting your own personal control on to other people or other things.

What this means is that rather than controlling your own life, you allow other people or things to control it for you. This of course, then leaves you powerless to change things for the better, as how can a person ever hope to improve something which they have no personal control over?

You Are Responsible For Your Life

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 to a higher level.

A person who is unable to take responsibility for their actions when something bad happens to them, will sulk, feel sorry for themselves or look for someone to blame rather than trying to figure out how to make things better. They feel that they are a victim, and because they feel like a victim, they also feel powerless to improve their life or steer it in the direction they want it to go.

As you might imagine, having such a mentality is not going to help a person to build their level of self-confidence or self-esteem, because without accepting responsiblity, these are things which they feel are beyond their own control.

So it is important to remember, that the degree to which anyone is able to feel happy with their life, will be directly proportional to the amount of control that they feel they have over it. The less control you have, the worse you will feel. The more control you have, the better you will feel.

Friendships And The “Blamer Mindset”

A blamer is a person who is unable to accept personal responsiblity for the way things are. They are viewed by others as someone who likes to complain, make excuses and generally has a negative outlook on life. Ask yourself, would you like to hang out or be friends with such a person? Of course you wouldn’t and neither would anyone else, which is why blamers tend to only attract negative people into their life rather than positive people.

The effect of this can be disastrous on one’s level of self esteem and self confidence, because people tend to become like the people who they spend the most time with. So if all a person does is hang around with negative people, they are likely to spend the rest of their life locked in a mindset of blame and victimhood rather than trying to find a way to make things better for themselves.

If you want to have and be around positive people, then complaining all the time isn’t going to attract them to you. Instead, it will attract exactly the wrong type of people in your life, the people who will make it harder, not easier, for you to turn things around.

Remember, the vast majority of experiences which you have in your life will involve other people in some way or another, and since those very same experiences will determine the type of person you become, you need to be very careful about who you associate with if you want to maximize your chances of achieving success and minimize your chances of achieving failure.

Life Experiences

The experiences which 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, and the person you will become, will come as a result of your future 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 sometimes, can be very painful to deal with. These experiences will lower your self-confidence, although with the right mindset, they also hold the potential to raise it.

Building Self Confidence From Negative Life Experiences

Although nobody likes to have negative experiences, they can actually be much more valuable to your personal development than if you just have 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 level of self-confidence, you therefore need to embrace 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. If you can adopt this mentality of learning from your mistakes, you will find negative experiences much easier to deal with and so gain much more control over your life as a result.

Dealing With Tough Difficult 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 who 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, realize 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 that I wouldn’t make the same mistakes again.

As a result, even though at the time I saw it as a bad experience, I now see it as a good experience and one that I am thankful for because it made me the person I am today. So remember, bad experiences are painful and uncomfortable to deal with, but more often than not, you will look back on that period of your life as a valuable learning experience which enabled you to grow and develop as a person.

This however, can only be achieved by accepting a situation for what it is and taking full responsiblity for it. If you are unable to do this, you will never learn from anything that happens to you and will never have the power to effect a meaningful and positive change into your life. Success as they say, comes from failing many times.

So even though you may not feel like a confident person today, if you are able to use your past life experiences to empower you rather than allowing them restrict your life, slowly you will find yourself growing into a much more confident person with each passing day.

Do You Believe You Can Be Confident?

You will often find that people who lack self-confidence usually hold on to their bad experiences and don’t let go of them. They are filled with feelings of regret, anger, jealousy, embarrassment and resentment. Such feelings not only prolong the pain of their experience, but also keep them locked in the past thereby 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 let it go, that experience will haunt you for the rest of your life and constantly eat away at your self-esteem and confidence.

You let go of your bad experiences by first accepting them and then learning from them. Once you have done this, you should then shift your focus on to creating new and better future life experiences.

Creating New Life Experiences

Since our life experiences shape the type of person we become, if you only experience the same or similar things in your life, then you won’t change very much as a person. By experiencing new things however, you give yourself the best chance of becoming a new and better person.

The reason for this is that every experience you have in life creates a belief in your mind. These beliefs are like computer programs 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, a belief related to that experience will be created which will then 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, fit and healthy, then you will remove the negative influence of that past belief and your self-confidence will grow as a result.

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 grew and allowed him to become very successful later in life. What Lennox did was to remove his negative belief and replace it with a positive belief. If Lennox had kept hold of his old belief, his confidence would have remained at a low level.

So to summarize these points, this means that the majority of the self-confidence which you currently have, 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 which are the most painful for you to think about. The experiences that you find the most painful to think about, will most likely be the experiences which you have not yet fully resolved in your life. This means that they are still negatively affecting you today.

The reason for this occurs because people have a natural tendency to repress things which are painful or unpleasant, but by doing so, they leave that issue unresolved where it continues to affect them at an unconscious level. So even though they gain short-term comfort by repressing something, ultimately, it only ends up causing them more pain in the long run.

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 that 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.

But 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.

Focus On Your Personal Development

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 attached to you, the harder you will find it to move forward and reach the destination you want to get to. But if you can break free from those chains, you will soon find yourself speeding towards a better you and a better life.

Summary

Below you will find a summary of the main points that have been discussed in this article on self-confidence and responsiblity.

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

• Your past experiences create beliefs 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 the 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.