People who achieve a lot in life have a great deal of personal confidence. In addition to setting high goals, they need to believe in themselves. They have to convince themselves that they can indeed realise what they seek to achieve.
Basically, they need a lot of self- confidence. But what drives personal confidence? How can you ensure that you believe in yourself, track your personal goals and realise your dream?
Behind all this lies self-esteem. You can afford to lose many things; money, car, cellphone, computer but never allow anyone to steal one thing from you— self-esteem! Once you have self-esteem, you can gain the rest of things you need in life. Once you have self-esteem, you can achieve anything you aspire to acquire.
How do you ensure that you boost your self-esteem? Some of the practical ways of maintaining self-esteem include; thinking positively, embarking on achievable tasks which gradually increase in level of challenge, and fending off external forces that can kill your self-esteem.
When you see a bottle that contains liquid that only fills half of the capacity of the bottle, do you see the bottle as half full or half empty? If you see the bottle as half full then great! But if you see the bottle as half empty, then you need to start changing your attitude. Positive thinking can move mountains. Every problem has the brighter side.
Look less on the negative side and focus more on the positive elements. This technique is particularly handy when faced with big frustrations or disappointments. That is the moment when you need to spend more thinking time on past achievements, your strengths and things that excite you.
Every human being loses their self-esteem when they go through repeated failures. You can maintain your self-esteem by reducing your failure rate and increasing your success rate. This means that you should only target goals that give you a reasonably big chance of achieving. However, this does not go on to say that you should be ruling yourself out or that you should not aim high. Rather, start low and gradually increase your targets.
Focus on actions at hand and only look at higher and bigger issues later, after achieving the lower-ranking targets.
The third technique you should use in safeguarding your self-esteem is to ensure that external forces do not discourage you or frustrate your personal confidence. Make sure that you protect your belief in yourself. If people tell you that you cannot do it, challenge them that you can do it. Go on to plan for it, work hard on it and deliver the success.
The more you are told that you cannot do it, the harder you should work to prove the doubters wrong. Again draw your strengths from past achievements and successes. Remember that if you achieved something similar in the past, you can do the same with similar or even slightly bigger matters.
At times what you seek to achieve will not succeed. And occasionally, you can have the misfortune where a series of trials end in vain. This is normal and happens to even the biggest of achievers. But remember that those are the moments when you really risk losing all the esteem. In order to avoid this, step back a bit, conduct a serious review of performance to date and draw an action plan that will address the weak points.
In order to be successful, you need self-confidence. The major driver of self-confidence is self-esteem. People who work hard at protecting their self-confidence usually go very far with career and other things they seek to explore.
