A social phobia is a fear of interacting with others on a social level. Examples would be imagining others are looking at you while waiting in line at a checkout, talking in front of other people, or even fear of talking on the phone.
Self-confidence is a posture, which allows people to have decisive, yet realistic views of themselves and their situations. Self-confident people trust their own capability, have a general sense of control over their lives, and believe that, within reason, they will be able to do what they want and need to do.
Confidence is a posture that is garnered through experiences. When a person experiences success, that person will tend to expect to be successful at his/her endeavors. And that very expectation will cause a feeling of confidence.
For example: A man wants to be an extreme fighter, so he takes lessons, and gets a manager. His manager will not setup a bout for him until he has acquired enough proficient fighting skills. And even then, the manager will only put him up against a contender that he knows his fighter can overcome. When his fighter beats the competitor, he is successful, and starts to gain confidence in his capabilities.
With each encounter, the manager puts his fighter up against an adversary who is only a slightly better adversary then the last, but not good enough to beat his gladiator. By the end of the third fight, the young champion begins to expect to win his fourth, and so his confidence continues to improve. This scenario continues to repeat itself. And as long as the fighter is victorious, his expectations of success, and his feelings of self-confidence will continue to accrue.
As another example: A young lady who is afraid of high places wants to learn to dive into a swimming pool from a very high diving board. So she finds a diving coach and he asks her to jump into the pool from the first step of the ladder up to the high diving board. The first rung of the ladder isn’t especially high, so the young lady is totally confident, and she dives from that step, and lands in the water unharmed.
Next, the teacher has her dive from the second rung of the ladder, and so forth. I guess that you get the idea here. With each further step she takes as she climbs up the ladder, since the girl was able to jump without fear, and this next step is only slightly higher then the last, the fear factor is negligible, and the girl expects to be successful. When she dives in and is unhurt, the girl’s self-confidence increases, and her expectation of success on the next step up the ladder increases.
If a person who has a long history of success and feelings of self-esteem does fail, they still tend to expect success the next time out. Conversely, when a person who is weak in the self-confidence arena fails, they tend to lose confidence, and create expectations of failure, which usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Having true self-confidence doesn’t mean that individuals will be able to do everything. People, who have true self-confidence, usually have expectations that are based on common sense. Even when some of their expectations are not met, they continue to be positive and to accept themselves.
People, who are not self-confident, tend to rely highly on the agreement of others in order to feel self-esteem. They avoid risks because of the fear of failure. They put themselves down and tend to discount or ignore compliments that are made about them.
On the other side of the coin, secure people will risk the disapproval of other people because they generally have confidence in their own talent. They accept themselves; and they don’t believe that they have to conform in order to be admired.
Just because a person feels self-esteem in one or more areas of their life, doesn’t mean that they will feel overconfident in every part of their life. For example, a person might feel secure about their athletic talents, but not feel confident where members of the opposite sex are involved, such as in a dating situation, or social relationships.
How Is Self-Esteem Developed Initially?
Many powerful phenomena bear on the development of self-esteem. Parents’ attitudes are critical to the way children view themselves, particularly in their early years. When parents provide acceptance, children receive a great basis for self-esteem. If one or both parents are highly critical or demanding, or if they are overprotective and discourage moves toward independence, children may be found to believe they are incapable, inadequate, or inferior.
However, if parents encourage a child’s moves toward self-reliance, and they are not overly critical when the child makes mistakes, the child will learn to accept herself, and will be on the way to developing self-confidence.
Just because a person does not have confidence, it does not mean that he/she doesn’t have abilities. A lack of self-esteem is often the result of focusing completely on the unrealistic expectancy of others mainly friends and parents. The control of peers can be more powerful than that of parents in shaping the feelings about one’s self.
Beliefs That Continue to Affect Self-confidence
In response to external influences, people create assumptions. Some of these are good and some are not so good. Several assumptions that can interfere with confidence and positive ways of thinking are:
ASSUMPTION: It’s important that I am successful at everything. This assumption is unrealistic. In reality each person has her strengths and her weaknesses. While it’s important to always do your best, it’s more important to learn to accept yourself as being human, and deficient. You should feel good about what you are good at, and accept the fact that you don’t know everything and you don’t need to be an expert at everything.
ASSUMPTION: I must be perfect, and loved by everyone, and satisfy everyone. Again, this is unrealistic. All human beings are not perfect. It’s preferable to develop standards that are not quite so dependent on the approval of others.
ASSUMPTION: Everything that happened to me in the past remains in control of my feelings and behaviors in the present.
ALTERNATIVE: While it is true that your confidence was especially controlled by external influences during your childhood as you grow into adulthood consciousness and point of view on what those influences have been. In doing so, you can choose which influences you will continue to allow to have an effect on your life. You don’t have to be helpless because of past events
HERE ARE SOME STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPING CONFIDENCE
Emphasize Your Strengths. Grant yourself credit for everything that you can do. And give yourself recognition for every new experience you are willing to undertake.
Take risks. Adopt the frame of mind of: I never fail, because there are NO failures. However, sometimes I learn what does not work and once I’ve learned what doesn’t work in a given situation, I can attempt some other action.
Use Self-Talk: Use self-talk as a tool to counter harmful assumptions. Then, tell yourself to stop. Substitute more reasonable assumptions. For example, when you catch yourself expecting yourself to be perfect, remind yourself that it is impossible to do everything perfectly, and that it is only possible to do things to the best of your ability. This allows you to accept yourself as you are working towards improvement.
Make mental movies: Visualize yourself in the various scenarios that you currently have inadequate levels of self-confidence in. But see yourself behaving in the way that a person who has tremendous self-confidence would. There are many effective Ericksonian hypnosis techniques that can be used to instill a monster amount of confidence from within your subconscious mind. There are even NLP techniques that will let you take confidence that you do have in areas of your life, and then transplant that confidence to areas of your life that require more self-confidence!
Self-Evaluate: Learn to assess yourself as an individual human being. Circumvent the endless sense of disturbance that comes from relying on what others think.
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