How to Be More Confident in Yourself

For many people, possessing confidence is that seemingly unobtainable desire, or something very few seem to have and these are considered blessed with charisma and given all the best breaks in life. If ever you walk into a room filled with people, these charismatic individuals are easily spotted almost instantaneously.

That's because they are generally surrounded by other, almost mesmerised admirers who seem to hang onto their every word.

The stark truth is that just about anyone can be more confident at work, at school, in social situations and in a relationship. In fact once it is attained, they can enjoy that state in any situation in their lives.

It really is all a matter of gaining control over your thoughts then directing them to the whatever you decide they should achieve.

This idea may seem almost magical to many people.

But in reality it is far more mundane and easily achieved for anyone who has a mind to try it for themselves. This article looks at how any person can build and raise their own level of confidence to gain and to have greater self esteem and the ability to achieve many more things in life that a lack of confidence previously caused to be held back.

Thinking

The first step in building confidence is in making changes to the direction of that internal conversation that is going on inside your (and indeed everyone's) head. Most people have a constant stream of inner conversation going on with themselves inside their minds that is directed by what is going on or has gone on around them.

In other words, a person's train of thought is generally directed by their environment and they have little say in its course.

Of course you might disagree on that point and state that everyone is in full control of what they think about. In fact, the author Huxley once stated that there is only one corner in all the universe that a man has full control over; and that's his thoughts!

This is absolutely true as you'll realize when you give it some thought, because no one can be forced to think something they don't want to. On the other hand, people can be physically made to do just about anything whether they want to or not if enough pressure is placed upon them.

Do You Control Your Thoughts?

But even though every living human being has this ability to direct and control their thoughts in such a way that no one else may interfere, very few actually exercise that ability. Most allow whatever has gone on during their day to crowd their thoughts. They can be conversations the had with other people, items they read about in the newspaper, or things they watched on TV for instance.

The point is that their resulting train of thought, or inner conversation is influenced by those occurrences.

In that way, you could go so far as to say that most people don't even think for themselves, they just let other people and outside events and circumstances do their thinking for them. Their minds are not actively creating unique thought, they are just busy working through all the external input that hey have received. In other words, what people mistake for thinking is just "busy".

True thought is not influenced by external occurrences or circumstances, but is created in the mind of the person while they are in a relaxed and receptive state to allow fresh ideas and notions to percolate up through their thoughts. This is true thinking and it is the primordial soup that gives birth to new ideas.

Being Positive

Once you have learned to control your thoughts to a greater extent than you do at present, you can begin to turn things around for you from the "how to increase your confidence" angle. Of course, you shouldn't try to master your thoughts totally.

No one has yet managed to do that and in fact total monitoring of your every thought would be an exhausting practice. But you can be aware of what is going on inside your head and keep nudging it in the direction you want it to go in before external influences gat a chance to send it off on a journey under their direction.

Having greater control of your thoughts allows you to determine their overall direction, whether that be positive or negative. Hint: you want to make sure it's positive!

Positive thinking is that thought which brings about positive emotions, so you can literally use how you're feeling to gage whether your thoughts are predominantly positive or negative. A basic rule of thumb is this:

• If your thoughts are making you feel good, then they're positive
• If they're making you feel bad, they're negative

Good feeling are those of happiness, joy, bliss, love, romance, laughter, eagerness, fulfilment etc. Bad feelings are those of anger, resentment, frustration, guilt, sadness, depression, envy, hatred etc. make sure you are experiencing good feeling and you will be on track in your thinking.

Improving Self Esteem

Your self esteem will start to improve all by itself when you start to feel good most of the time and engage in lots of positive thought. But more things start happening and there is much more that you can do to push this situation on to new heights.

In your thinking process, if you ever find yourself criticizing someone or some situation, here is a place to make massive changes to the way you will feel. Instead of criticizing, look for the good in every person or situation.

It will seem difficult to do this at first, because there are doubtless many situations and maybe some people that you feel criticism is fully justified or warranted. But you have to put yourself into a bigger place and that means learning to stop criticizing and start praising the good in everything you encounter.

The Change

When you can do this, you will find that a change starts to happen in you. You naturally start to feel good more of the time and that's exactly what you want to feel, because the more you feel good, the more your confidence and self esteem will increase. What's more the process snowballs, because the better you feel, the more you are going to want to be praising the good that is in your life, which brings you up ever higher and higher.

Becoming confident is a process that can be artificially engineered through tight thinking and doing whatever it takes to feel good. We all want to feel good, so it's not exactly something that you will dislike doing! So make it your motto to feel good every day and bring a little sunshine into everyone's life by passing on that good in the form of praise for the good you see in others and all situations that run through your life.

Note: The introductory paragraph of this article has had to be re-written because it transpires that certain people had copied it and published it elsewhere online. This action caused a duplicate content penalty to be levied on this website by a major search engine, even though this article is the original. Despite repeated unsuccessful attempts to get the perpetrators to remove my content from their pages, I have taken the decision to change my own material in order to placate the search engine and restore this page's inclusion in the search index.

I do not condone plagiarising in any form as it is content theft. However, I also realise that when it is not possible to overcome an obstacle, one should go around it and continue on in their journey unscathed and stronger for the experience. I chose to go around this particular obstacle.