MORE CONFIDENCE IN 3 STEPS
Taken from the Video: More confidence, by doing 3 simple things! @psychologyunleashed
New Year, new me — we all know this term. However, only 8% of New year’s resolutions will be carried out and almost 25% fail after just one week. But if you take care of the three elements of your strong will, you may add some stability to your situation in entirety.
What are these three things and how can we use them to build up our strong will?
Today, I will be taking the ideas from the book “Emotional Success” by psychology professor David DeSteno — he provides information about three reinforcements of our strong will. They are inseparable from our emotions. The challenge is:
Why is it that focusing on a goal, striving hard to achieve it, causes many negative aspects for your health and mental resilience?
Forcing yourself, tension your will, using your energy harms your memory, literally causes your body to age and illnesses associated with intense stress. holding back your emotions, locking them in a box in the back of your mind and trying to ignore them — acting against yourself — all of this creates chaos. So let’s get your emotions in line!
Number one: Gratitude.
Being thankful to other people and to the world allows you to experience the here and now, and allows you to do it in peace. Take a look at it this way; if you don’t feel pressured by time, you don’t focus on the present — you focus on the near future. If you are expecting a reward in the near future — you will spend time focusing on that rather than experiencing and enjoying the moment at present. But if the reward is ‘here and now; then there is no need to improve the immediate future and you have an opportunity to experience the present moment to its full potential.
Because the feeling of gratitude is permanently connected with peace. It counteracts stress, and improves our concentration. And that’s not all — thankful people are less susceptible to addictions and maintain better social connections.
Focusing on gratitude will not make you more restrained. Instead, it will make you appreciate the current moment more, and make future plans more worthwhile. This will be followed by lowering the tension in you: choosing between a quick reward or a deferred achievement of the main goal will be easier. The value that your mind will give at this point in time to your future achievement will be much higher.
Gratitude stimulates us to share with others. Even our language leads us here: a person expressing gratitude repays itself. But that is not all — thankfulness drives thankfulness. People who are more likely to consciously stimulate their thankfulness remember the moments for which they are grateful more easily, but also experience them more strongly. All the benefits of being thankful are more accessible to them.
This seems to be an ordinary feeling, yet it turns out to have such great power.
Second; a feeling that changes our mind and supports us energetically is: Sympathy.
Sympathy inspires us to do more. To help others, even if they have done nothing for us. We do what we can because we see their needs. And it is this energy and discipline that can be applied to the “future self”.
It turns out that the motivation to work harder and persevere to repair a failure if we approach our mistakes with sympathetic forgiveness increase about 30%. After all, sympathy is not only about other people and their failures. If you have failed, you can set about understanding yourself and with sympathy mobilize to repair the situation. Then you help yourself.
Sympathy kills your inner perfectionist! The perfectionist says: if it is not perfect, it better not be present! And your sympathy says: It’s okay if it is not perfect. Thanks to the sympathy the task is done , and you are therefore helping yourself.
The third feeling that builds your strength is: Pride
Not pride, not self-confidence, but healthy pride in your achievements. For example saying; I succeeded because I earned it and am therefore proud of that.
First of all, pride supports our sense of causality. It allows us to believe that it is worth trying. It allows us to assess our abilities in the right light.
Additionally, it turns out that proud people, people aware of their value act as a magnet for company. When people were examined, asking how much they like other people in their groups, proud people always led the way. Not only that, proud people tried to solve difficult problems more, but they did it in a way that attracted admiration and encouraged others to work with them. In addition, inner self-confidence prompts others to accept their advice and, most importantly, to do it again. Pride and self-esteem, self-confidence proved to be a magnet, not a deterrent.
When it comes to additional support for our willpower, people who care about a sense of earned pride feel more responsible for their condition towards their future. It is as if they then feel the need to explain themselves to their future self for the choices they have made now. Therefore, their power to hold back increases, as does their appreciation of the reward that lies behind it. Importantly, the opposite of pride is shame.
The conclusion is that pride builds our sense of value, and our sense of value helps to regulate our desires.
How to distinguish arrogance from pride? The difference lies in your humility. The awareness of the hard work and support which you have received from external factors as opposed to feeling important on your own accord. That is the difference between arrogance and pride.
Professor DeSteno writes:
”For pride to work, it must be paired with humility — a humility to know that no matter our skill set, each of us depends on what others have to offer. When we’re admired for our expertise, it’s usually because we’re willing to share it, not because we lord it over those around us. And since none of us can be an expert in all areas, we must be humble enough to recognize that we cannot be great at everything; there will be times when we need to rely on others.”
To conclude, in order to reinforcement inner strength will we need three feelings present:
1. Gratitude
2. Sympathy
3. Pride
It will help you build an emotional basis for your confidence. And that automatically gives you a support system for your decisions and strong will. So:
- Be grateful for what you have, try to remember that here and now it’s usually not that bad, and there are certainly a lot of things you don’t think about regularly — it’s worth reminding yourself of what you already have.
- Help yourself, just as we sympathize with others in their failures and support each other — so show that support to yourself.
- be proud of what you’ve already achieved, even if it were to survive a massive crisis in your life. Take care of that feeling.
I hope you will use these tools to your advantage and I invite you to leave us a comment and tell us what you think.
