Personal & Social Confidence

Lack of confidence and low self esteem are behaviours that we have learned and adopted into our belief systems. When we are confident in ourselves, we have a strong positive sense of our own abilities and we believe that we are able to get on and do things. Our self esteem is our opinion of ourselves. If we like ourselves and consider ourselves to be worthy and deserving of respect, love and abundance, then we have high self esteem.

As babies, we come into this world feeling really good about ourselves, expecting that all our needs will be met as we openly express them. We are totally egocentric – the whole world revolves around us. We freely express ourselves without hesitation. Then through the eyes of a child, we discover that the world can be at times a cruel and uncaring place and, in our journey to adulthood, many of us feel ambivalent and insecure, we learn to doubt our abilities, we might even wonder if we really matter at all, if we are really good enough to accomplish what we want to achieve, to give love and be loved in return.

As we lose this sense of self belief, we learn to accept low self esteem or lack of confidence as part of who we are. We live in quiet frustration inside a ‘comfort zone’ but at the same time can’t help questioning if really we are getting the most out of ourselves and the most fun out of our lives. In the longer term, anxiety and depression can result in our feeling this way.

If we have low self esteem or low confidence, we tend to adopt a ‘glass half empty’ approach to life. This pessimistic focus to events and circumstances in our lives, validates our need to stay within our comfort zone – and so the cycle continues. But someone with confidence and good self-esteem is far more likely to see things in perspective and not dwell on any blip that inevitably crops up from time to time.

If you feel you are not getting as much out of life as you would like, it is entirely possible to change. All behaviour is learned behaviour, therefore it can be ‘unlearned’. We can learn to like ourselves again with all our imperfections. We can let go of old outdated ways of thinking which get in our way. We can find and use resources within ourselves to make things better for us. As we change in our attitudes and beliefs, how we perceive our world changes for the better too.

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