You Must Build or Rebuild Your Self-Esteem or You Will Never Be Successful

I know this first hand. I have fought against a low self-esteem my entire life. My birth father left my mother and I when I was 6 months old and I never saw nor heard from him again. My mother remarried my adopted father who loved me and I loved him. We still do. But he suffered from self-esteem issues too, and he took it out on my Mom, my sister and me. We were all called "stupid", "dump" "idiots" for most of my adolescent years. As a big kid, I endured many days on the playground by being called, "fat Matt". Odds are you have had similar unfortunate experiences. Our brains record it all and our self-esteem suffers because of it.

 But you MUST overcome these cut downs and develop a positive self-esteem and self-image or success will always elude you. Positive self-esteem is what lifts us up after a defeat. It's the confidence we rely upon to keep on keepin' on. Unfortunately, many people never really master building or rebuilding their self-esteem. Here are some tips I have used that will help you get yours built back up.

1. It's not a curse... it's a blessing. Use the negative experiences you have faced as fuel to rebuild your self-esteem. Deep down, those negative experiences can drive you to success if you use them properly. Drop the blame, and remember the times when you were beat down as powerful. Prove your doubters wrong, don't allow them to be proven right.

2. Seek Mastery of something. When you are a master of something, it produces confidence. The key is to master something, anything. Learn to hit a golf ball 400 yards. Learn to play Billy Joel songs on the piano. Get in tip top shape via working out. Become a top notch cold caller in your sales career. Anything that proves that you took the time to focus on it, skill up, and therefore master it.

3. Do more of what you fear. Do more of what you fear most... LOTS MORE. Repetition is the mother of all skill and the more reps you can take the more you bury the fear and move closer to mastery the better. The key is MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF REPS. Once or twice is not enough. You need to take lots of swings at bat. If you are terrified of speaking, do more speaking. If you can't make a cold call, do more cold calls. Think of this like my friend Grant Cardone suggests in his book THE 10X RULE. Do everything with a factor of 10X to it.

4. Leverage your mastery. Put yourself in locations and situations for your mastery to shine. If you have mastered hitting a golf ball 400 years, then sign up for the company or industry golf tournament. You know that when you arrive on the first tee box, you will hit the ball farther than anyone, and others will be amazed. Therefore, your mastery will put you in a class to yourself, and people will want to be around you and invite you to be on their team. When you start a new job on the sales floor, be the person who can bang out 100 cold calls without blinking an eye. This will separate you on day one from the competition, and you will be looked at as a master. Sit at the piano when you are having drinks with clients and start playing Piano Man. Your clients will be impressed, and your self-esteem issue will go out the window. Invite your new date to the gym with you and let them see how many pull ups you can do and they too will be impressed. Your mastery must be used as constant fuel for you to continue to build or rebuild your self-esteem. Getting great at something gives you the confidence to get great at other things.

5. Help someone else. It's sad that so many people who are in a position to help whether it's a coach, a co-worker or even a parent, don't take more time to recognize self-esteem issues in others. Be that person, be the person that helps. The topic of self-esteem is vital to your success. For some, the building or rebuilding process can be done quickly. For others, like me, it takes a long time. But either way, nothing is more worth the effort.

Are you up for this challenge? What could be possible if you took this on? let us know.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9525087

The Myth of Limiting Beliefs

So what do you think of this? What if we decided to focus on what does work rather than what doesn't? I'd love to hear what you think so please leave a comment.

How to Eliminate Negative Thought (3 day Challenge)

Will you try Leo's 3 day challenge? Let us know what's on your mind.

What are Limiting Beliefs?

So in the last post we talked about how certain experiences from childhood hold us back from doing and having what we want. It’s important to understand why this happens so that we can break free of these self-imposed limitations.

What are limiting beliefs?

 At the most basic level we need to be able to recognise perilous situations so that we can protect ourselves from danger. If we don’t learn that putting a hand in a fire is dangerous there’s nothing to prevent us from doing it again and suffering the same consequences. So it’s important to learn from our experiences so we can protect ourselves from harm.

The problem arises when the beliefs that we form get in the way of our personal growth or hold us back from achieving something we want. We begin to create stories that become distorted over time (check out this short story from a previous blog and you’ll see what I mean!).  We begin to apply labels to ourselves like I’m too old, I’m too young, I’m a woman, I’m not clever enough, I’m not white, I’m too short etc. We use these beliefs (excuses) to keep us in our comfort zone where it feels safe. These are called limiting, or negative beliefs.

How do we develop limiting beliefs?

Our parents most often have the biggest influence on our belief systems. There’s an old saying about turning into your parents even if it’s the last thing you want to happen.  Over-protective parents may have given us too many warnings about taking risks while some of us may have been at risk from their parents from neglect to abuse.  Those extremes and everything in between will give a child a perspective on what to believe in order to stay safe. Just watching her parents gives a child a perspective on what’s safe and what isn’t. There are all kinds of other influences such as peer pressure from other kids, teachers, the environment, media, social structure; even DNA!

We may not always be able to break free of every limiting belief but we can shed some of them and update our thinking on others. We’ll start looking at how to do that in the next few posts. What limiting beliefs do you have that are holding you back? If you’d like to ask a question or share an experience please leave a comment.

Are you Suffering the Effects of a Difficult Childhood?

by fatima-abdelghani      emaze

Are you one of the millions of people in the western world that would consider their childhood to have been particularly tough? Maybe you were abused physically or emotionally when you were very young and feel that this has been holding you back from living a “normal” life.

Well that’s my story. If you’re like me, on the surface you may feel that there are children in war zones or starving around the world that would have willingly swapped what we went through for a few slices of bread and a jug of clean water. Consciously we may understand that we live in a privileged society but it doesn’t seem to help does it? At some level we feel wounded; even emotionally disabled in some way!

 About 10 years ago (in my mid 40’s) I decided that I’d had enough of that feeling and that I wanted to explore the anger and fear that I had carried around with me for so many years. I started to read self-help books (again) that I hoped might help me and eventually came across the number one best selling book ‘The Dark Side of the Light Chasers’ by the late Debbie Ford (RIP my friend and mentor).

That book was to change my life… well that’s not strictly true; I changed my life but that book was the catalyst for change. It helped me take responsibility for my present feelings and actions and which gave me the power to finally make a few changes. That may not be what you want to hear but until we accept responsibility for the choices that we’re making in the present we have no power to alter the way things are. No one else can do it for you. This ultimately led me to become a certified life coach. I wanted to help people overcome the debilitating effects of low self-esteem. That was my mission and at first I failed miserably.

Just like a recovering alcoholic that lack of self-esteem is always likely to be with me at some level. That’s the bad news. The good news is that lack of self-esteem will always be with me at some level. An over inflated ego can be just as damaging as one that’s under inflated so looking to strike a healthy balance should take some of the pressure off. A recovering alcoholic will always admit to being one even though he may never touch another drop. Even the most seemingly confident people lack self-esteem at times.

If you feel like you’re failing miserably don’t give up. You can find another perspective. I know that’s true because I did. How we can embrace a difficult past and use it to our advantage is the subject of  my next topic starting in a few days time, so do sign up and we can explore it together. Why not ask a question or leave a comment and return here to find some tips and tricks that just may help.

What's holding you back?

This is a rather well known story worth retelling.

In Thailand, they have a simple way to keep an elephant docile and under control.

When the elephant is a baby, the keeper ties the baby elephant with a strong rope to a tree. Of course, the free spirited, uninhibited baby elephant tries to escape but is held back by the rope. The baby elephant will try to break free, time and again, tugging hard at the rope that would not break.

After a while, the baby elephant is exhausted by its futile efforts. Its once free spirit is broken. It believes that there is no hope. It yields and just accepts its assigned position and situation.

The hopelessness and learned helplessness stays in the elephant’s unconscious mind even when it grows into an adult. Even when the adult elephant can snap the rope with just a casual tug, it will make no such attempt. So strong is this limiting belief that has been etched in the unconscious mind of the elephant.

Are there any limiting beliefs holding us back like the elephant? Are there setbacks in our childhood that still have a hold on us like the baby elephant’s rope?

Whenever you baulk at a challenge, ask yourself if you are being held back by a limiting belief or assumption, carried over from a bad experience from your childhood or just one unfortunate episode from long ago.

Isn’t it time to break free of the imaginary bond of that limiting belief? What do you reckon? Do leave a comment.

Posted by itrustican