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"Did you ever feel like an alien who somehow became stranded on a planet called Earth where nothing seemed to make any sense?" A quote from "Ming The Merciless"

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The Condition Of Our ConditionArticles on the Human condition and how we might improve it.

The Origins Of Self Confidence

If it is true that self confidence is a state of mind, then why do some people have it and some don't? Why don't we just think it and make it so? The answers to these questions have to do partly with chance and mostly with personal creative power. We can be fortunate enough to grow up in a positive environment with intelligent parents and more or less inherit self confidence, or we must make the effort to develop what is known as personal creative power and use that to explore, identify and replace negative and self defeating thinking habits with those that will build self esteem and self confidence. Though this is not an easy objective, it is well worth the effort because that same personal creative power is the answer to any and all problems we may encounter in our lives.

The basic reason why some people have self confidence and some don't, is usually the result of the fortunes of birth. If a person grows up in a positive success oriented environment, then the chances that he or she will develop a strong healthy self image and high self esteem that will lead to having confidence in themselves is high. But the opposite is also true. One who grows up in a negative and failure oriented environment is likely to develop an unhealthy self image and therefore have low self esteem and little confidence in themselves. This also explains why we can't just think it and make it so. However, that is not quite true. In a strange twist of reality we will discover that we can actually think our way out of one condition and into another. But this calls for the development of some mental management skills.

Managing The Mind

The first things we discover when we set out on any journey of self awareness is how important our thoughts are to who and what we believe ourselves to be. And once we start thinking about that, we begin to realize how little control we have over the activities of our own mind. Some meditation techniques are notorious for revealing such things. Especially the Vipassana technique, an ancient Buddhist meditation practice that focuses the attention on the breath and simply watches the mind without getting captured by the thoughts. This is not as easy as it may sound, try it, you will not be focused on the breath for long.

Since who and what we believe we are comes from our basic perception of ourselves and the world we live in, which determines our perspectives on just about everything in our personal world which includes our self image, and since perceptions are usually created from our conceptual mind and the thoughts it creates rather than direct experience, then developing the ability to be aware of our thoughts as well as manage them becomes critical to having the personal power and control necessary to implement changes in our lives such as building self confidence.

Personal Creative Power

So, if your brain just locked up at the very idea of developing the ability to be aware of your own thoughts, not to mention learning how to manage them rather than being managed by them, don't feel like the Lone Ranger, it is a high goal to shoot for, but not impossible and very necessary if you want to change unwanted behaviors and live a more satisfying and rewarding life. Personal creative power is achieved by first realizing that we have it by birth but then lost it through fear and the ignorance, that results from the fear of knowing the truth about ourselves and the world we live in.

One of those truths is that we don't live in the actual real world most of the time. We live in a conceptualized version of the world, a world built of thoughts produced by our abstract mind. We are rarely in the actual reality where we directly experience the radiation of the star upon the surface of our bodies, conceptually known as skin. Personal creative power comes about when we begin to develop the consciousness that is able to recognize the line between thoughts and direct experience because that consciousness is able to monitor and manage our thoughts and when that happens we are able to recognize the negative and self defeating thoughts of low self esteem and lack of confidence and replace them with positive and supportive thoughts.

Personal creative power is when we determine and control the quality and character of our lives by developing a high degree of personal awareness that includes the knowledge of where our attention is at any given moment in time. Are we here, now, in the present moment, or have we become captured by some negative thinking habits that can and have always produced a negative self image and will not allow us to have confidence in ourselves?

Get this great free e-book that explores NLP hypnosis and self confidence here.