Building Confidence and Self Esteem – What Gets In The Way?

By Margi Matters

What gets in the way of building confidence and self esteem?

There are a few core areas and the initial focus when you are building confidence and self esteem must include the following:

Block: Not having sufficient self awareness or knowledge and understanding of yourself.

The solution: Building confidence and self esteem begins with getting to know yourself, increasing your self awareness and connecting some of the dots about why you behave the way you do, and understanding the underlying “programming” and filters.

Block: Fears.

Solution: An essential focus for self awareness is identifying and understanding your fears and all the ways these play out in your life then learning empowered ways to manage or remove these fears.

Block: Not being clear about, understanding or satisfactorily meeting your needs.

Solution: Identifying and understanding your needs and the best or most effective and healthy ways to get these needs met is central to building confidence and self esteem.

Block: Not having clear goals.

Solution: It is essential to set some clear goals about exactly how you want it to be. Just saying you want greater self confidence or higher self esteem is like saying you want to go travelling. It is too general and vague. You first need to pick an exact location or destination. “I want to feel…….”for example “I want to feel confident when I go to a social event” Or “I want to be able to……..” for example “I want to be able to say no when I want to without feeling guilty” or “I want to believe…..”.For example “I want to believe in myself.”

To start with goals  can be fairly broad – like choosing Italy. Within that broader goal you can then get more specific. Sometimes you are not sure about the specifics until you arrive at the first goal and gather more information. The more you know – the greater your self awareness – the more accurate and specific your goals can be. The more you know, the better you can match your goals with what you actually want to experience. If you want to see Venice you don’t buy tickets for Pompeii!  If you have a particular area of desire – for instance to see great sculpture –  you find out the best locations  like Florence or Rome and that becomes your specific destination. Then within that goal there will be even more specific goals like exactly what galleries and museums to go to.

Building confidence and self esteem is a similar process of identifying more and more specific goals and targets for change in your thoughts, feelings, skills and behaviours.

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Related posts:

1. Building Confidence and Self Esteem – the Key Skill of Assertiveness
2. Building Confidence and Self Esteem – The Initial Assessment
3. Building Confidence and Self Esteem – Blocks and Barriers
4. Interpersonal Skills – The KEY Skills
5. Building Confidence and Self Esteem – Having a “Right Relationship” With Yourself