Growing Your Confidence

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. - Eleanor Roosevelt 

Confidence is the sense of self-reliance or boldness a person possesses.

Believe in your abilities: Knowing your abilities is not enough because if you lack the necessary believe in it, you cripple your ability to exploit it to its fullest capacity. This has nothing to do with the extent you have exploited it in the past. The fact that your last trial to exploit your gifts turned up little in return has nothing to do with further trials.

Step up to the challenge: Many people know their abilities, believe in those abilities but simply do not step up to the challenge to do something because of;

- Fear

- Pain from past experiences

- Family Upbringing

- Laziness:

Break away from popular opinions: people always have an opinion. There are some people who always think they know how you should run your life. They always think they know your abilities sometimes even more than you do. You hear it expressed in statements like, “I know what you can do”, “you are not that type of person”, “you can’t do that”, and many more. We are all guilty of such sins at one time or the other. I just recently learned not to say such things to people no matter how strongly true I think they are. Nobody really knows who you are and what you can do completely. The degree of knowledge they have of you is the exact degree you let them know.

Timing - Your Key to Success

He (God) has made everything beautiful in it's own time. - Solomon (the king)

          It is easy to feel insufficient and dissatisfied with our states at every phase. It is common among many young folks to consider where they are in their success chart and feel they are far from attainment.

         This is more so because we are not familiar with the path of our success journey. This way we will not be able to know how much of our peculiar success-journey we have covered.  

         In addition many of us easily compare ourselves with others. When we compare ourselves with people we place ourselves upon uneven scales and we never become all that we can be. Rather, we are left with a sense of inner insufficiency. Making matters worse is the fact that many young people compare themselves with people that are much more advanced in age and advancement than they. This will simply make you less than you should be.

          It is important we note that there are some platforms of success we may never experience irrespective of how we desire to because of one basic thing - Timing. Some things will not come to us simply because it isn't yet time for them to. It is God that grants us the things we desire and just the way no reasonable father will give his car keys to his ten year old, God does not grant desires to immature children.

Every father knows that keeping a child from the car keys isn't denial. In time, the child will grow mature enough to drive. All that matters is time. Joseph Onilede once noted that, “The difference between a ripe fruit and an unripe one is time.” Indeed with time all things fall in place.

         Wait for the right time. The things you desire are not impossible. It may just not be the right time to attain them has not yet come. When the time does come – and it will – the beauty that comes with attainment brightens it and makes it an envious thing in the eyes of many. Discover and wait for the right time to attain every aspect of your goal. 

Who Do You Think You Are?

As a man thinks so is he... - A Proverb of Solomon

Whenever the question, "Who do you think you are?" is asked it is often connected with a bid to bring down or look down on someone. I have not seen several instances where the question is answered directly. Rather, it is given a sharp response of “Who then do you too think you are?” Of a truth this question can easily be described as rude but then let us really analyze it.

Who do you think you are? Your answer, howbeit nonverbal, is very important to how and when you succeed. This is so because what you think of you will define your life. A person is what he or she thinks about most of the time.

So, who do you think you are?

The answer to that is in as many variants as there are people on earth. Some think they are ugly others think they are beautiful. Some think their lives are not worth living others think there can’t be a better time to live. Some think they are meant to live poor, sick and sorry lives others think they should be rich, healthy and hyper-excited.

It is interesting that people produce the very results they think often about. I sometimes point this out to my students by bringing out the top three in the class and ask them if they ever think they may drop below the first five positions in class and in all occasions the answer is the same – “never!” They remain tops because they, first of all, think they should be tops.

You must change your thoughts to fit where you claim you will attain. Without changing our thoughts we cannot change anything else. Santosh Kalwar (a poet) once said, “We are addicted to our thoughts, we cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking.” 

Enthousiasmos

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great achievements in any area of life are reserved for enthusiastic people; people that are excited by the prospects of every action they take. People ready to roar like hungry lions at the sight of a prey- the challenges facing them.

High achievers understand that enthusiasm alone can give a person all he has planned for in any endeavor. You see it in the very being of enthusiastic people - their walk is with confidence, their eyes carry fire, indeed they are possessed and every part of their body joins in the excitement. Doors open for them. When the doors don’t, their enthusiasm pushes it open. People make way for them. They go about life thinking things will go well for them- and things usually do. Enthusiastic people in trying to achieve a goal try all options. They leave no option blank and with all options shaded, the answer must be gotten.

Do what you love: can you smile, whistle, sing, hum or dance all through the time you spend doing what you do? One major problem with poor achievers is that they make a habit of doing things they have no ounce of love for. I love to write so I do it every day!

Take a look around you: one of the things that characterize our environments is people like us. If you have a poorly developed personality, you will resent people that are either better than you or those that seem to be catching up really fast at you. On the other hand if you are on the path to success, the presence of these people will serve as a source of blessing. You will use them as a motivation to make yourself better. They will be for you a source of the necessary enthusiasm and not competition for progress. In the journey of life, there really is no competition. Everyone is on a separate path.

Learn to be expectant: what are your expectations? Be hopeful that things will go well for you. Expect that as you progress, you will find doors open. Being expectant begins with you opening your mind to the thoughts of success. Permit them to flood your mind like water from a river that has broken its banks after a heavy downpour. Let them have control over every area of your thinking, permeating through your very being until expression of enthusiasm is found on the outside. Once your thinking is aligned with expectation, you will begin to be expectant. It is that easy.

The Persuasive Achiever

Only the deepest love will persuade me into matrimony which is why i shall end up an old maid. - Pride and Prejudice

Our success journey is wreaked with people in every phase. this means that we will need to persuade people everyday in order to succeed. Persuasion is a skill that must be learned for you to practice effectively. 

Seek symbiosis: What does the second party stand to gain if he submits to your suggestions? People are naturally self-protective and will subconsciously become defensive the moment they sense any foul play. After all, there should be no foul play in anything you do… right? People will notice when you are trying to cheat them. Seek a symbiotic relationship instead. Let people know what they stand to gain and make sure they gain it. There are two steps to help you achieve this.

First, what is your internal perspective about the person you seek to persuade? Do you look at the person like an opponent standing against you rather or a partner working with you for a common goal? This does not in any way mean you have to like everything about the second party but you will have to break away from your dislikes over him and work with him if you want to persuade him. 

Second, you need to acknowledge ideas contrary to yours without rejecting them. Our first inclination when a person states a position we do not agree with is to say, “No”. This works against the partnership you are trying to develop by pushing your potential partner into the offensive in order to defend his ideas. Eventually you will end with an “I” versus “you” confrontation. These two words are the master killers of cooperation.

Consider “No” as a reaction: If while cooking you mistakenly get a slight burn, you will jerk your hand back and say “ouch.” Your reaction is caused by what is called autonomic response. This is a response generated by internal stimuli and describes a reaction that occurs without full control. Whenever we experience something that can cause us danger or harm we react that way. The word “programming” will be most appropriate to explain what I am saying if we were computers. That is how the word “no” is. Social exchanges that seem to have some form of fear or uncertainty attached to them get such reactions from us. When people say no they may not necessarily mean never especially when they are experiencing some form of fear or uncertainty over your suggestion.