The way to boost confidence is not just by reading every self-confidence book there is going. The foundation to boosting confidence is laid by enriching the person you are, first from the inside. We do this by first eliminating the stress we feel about not being confident in the first place. You see, if you’re not actively looking to boost confidence, but are concentrating on self-fulfilment instead, this makes you happy with yourself, so you ‘seem’ confident.
Remember that self-confidence doesn’t come from the outside. It’s the way you react to external situation which causes the let-down you feel about yourself. Confident people are those who stay upbeat even in rough times, and positive in times of distress. If good times categorically brought elation – and hard times desperation, then we would all be a bunch of depressed people.
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Confident honk is a bizarre name for a blog post. But hey, stick with me and I’ll show you why I’ve chosen this name. Have you ever noticed how bigger cars have more aggressive sounding honks? Some car horns sound out a confident honk saying, ‘Hey, I’m right behind you. Or, ‘Hi, did you know the traffic lights just turned green?’ Others (usually larger cars) have honks that say, ‘You fool, can’t you see I’m here?’ Get out of my way right now!’ Smaller cars have honks that say, ‘ I hope you’ve seen me.’ Or, ‘I hate to jump in right when you’re examining your teeth, but the lights just turned green and I’m in a bit of a hurry.’
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In my recent BT radio interview for my inspirational memoir, Sunday’s Child, the interviewer, Etienne Gibbs christened me his favourite lemonade maker. Lemonade makers are those who take the bitter things in life and convert them into something positive or beneficial. You know, sometimes life and nature surprise us with thriving flowers in dusty, rocky, dry ground. We can use these lessons to build confidence within our own lives. I want to illustrate the make lemonade with life’s lemons lesson with a story that happen some time ago, involving my 3 children.
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We don’t live in the world on our own. People are always watching you – paying attention to what you do, how you behave and what you say. Whatever you say or do impacts some one or some place, either positively or negatively – which one is your choice. Sometimes we can affect the rest of someone’s life simply by something we did or said to them. What’s your impact going to be? What lasting effect will you leave?
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We all could have bitterness in our lives. Some people choose to hold onto it, others elect to let go. What’s the difference between these two groups of people? Why has one group decided that memories of long gone bad experiences are better left in the past, and the other group still hangs onto the misery poisoning their lives?
The answer to this may well be confidence. The first group has shaken off the barriers holding them from achieving and advancing in their lives. They’ve realised that holding onto bitterness is letting go of personal success. It takes a lot of strength to do this because it leaves you bare – with no ‘wrongdoer’ in your past who you could blame for failure. The second group is scared. Letting go means giving up the excuse which holds you back from achieving your goals. If you keep failing, at least you’ll have your bitterness to keep you going. At the end of the day, you have your ‘wrongdoer’ in your past to blame for what’s going wrong in your life. They were bad to you. They wanted to see you fail, so to pay them back, you gave them their wish.
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we all start out unfinished
It’s easy to say, ‘change your life’, isn’t it? But what does this mammoth task involve? What does someone have to do in order to change their life – grow their life? Do they have to move house? Get divorced? Get married? Quit their dead end job? How can you take something as important as a life and change it or grow it? The answer is simpler than you think.
When we find the answer to changing our life in order to grow into the person we know we are on the inside, what does it take to implement? But not only this, can the weak and imperfect change their lives? Some may say, ‘I’m poor, I have no opportunities’. ‘I’m uneducated, I have no options’. ‘I’m a single parent, I have no time’. ‘I’m from a minority ethnic group, I have no power’. ‘I’m too young, I have no rights’. Is there a common soapbox on which someone can stand and address all these groups with the words, ‘Change your life, grow your life’?
This post is addressing especially those who feel they’re not worthy of achieving great things. You see, we all start out unfinished. It’s up to us to advance and emerge into something great. Like the hellebore flower on the top left, we don’t reach our full potential in the earlier years of our lives (it takes longer for some of us). If we did, what would there be to hope for, right? The truth is, even the badly-formed or the least talented can change their lives and grow into something remarkable.
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How many times have you heard the term, work with what you have? Has it become a cliche, or do you apply it to your life on a regular basis? Intellectually, I know I should work with what I have, but I have to confess that sometimes I let pride get in the way and lose precious energy and time worrying about what I don’t have. The same works for self-confidence. Do you worry about your inability to speak in public or do you work to enhance the inherent talent you have of consoling your friends on a one-to-one basis?
I didn’t plant sunflowers last year. We’d moved house recently so I was busy trying to get the house in order and missed my chance the get the seeds sown in time. However, yesterday I went to a field to play cricket with my family and noticed a tiny yellow weed growing out of the dry, patchy grass.
I took a close-up picture of it on my mobile phone – no fancy cameras, no trick photography – just a phone photo. I noticed that this little weed looked as grand and as beautiful as my previous years’ sunflowers.
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