How much can you hold out of bad streaks in life? Some falls back to the security of their loved ones who offers support, some to the chemicals that made us euphoric and some just broke down that leads to suicidal thoughts or even action. What is exactly the factor of our whole being? Well, base on my own understanding of human psychology and from my reading of other famous motivational gurus' books, here goes.
We have our own beliefs system that supports our being. Imagine pillars. Each pillar represents a reason to our beliefs. For example, if a student thinks that he's smart, talented and well-liked, his pillars will be like this:
Pillar 1: I'm always top 10 in my school academically
Pillar 2: I was told by my parents and teachers that I'm talented
Pillar 3: Everybody likes to hang-out with me
These pillars can be anything which reinforce our being. It can be a blatant lie that the person created himself/herself or something that he/she perceived to be true but in actual fact it's not, or it can be from real life experiences.
So, what happens when tragedy befell him/her? A tragedy can be something like eg:
Tragedy 1: I'm no longer top 10 in school
Tragedy 2 : There is somebody who can sing better than me or was told by a judge in competition
Tragedy 3: I started hearing bad rumours about me from my friends's friend
These will lead to the breaking of the pillars that support our whole self being. Then our mind will naturally puts up a counter-measure to fall back to the closest pillar that makes us comfortable. It also can be an existing or a totally new pillar created during that incident of breaking. For instance using the example above:
Counter-measure 1: But I'm more mature in thinking then most
Counter-measure 2: But I'm still more talented because I know how to play musical instruments
Counter-measure 3: Nah, that guy who bad-mouth me always bad-mouthing someone else.
See, in our life our mind will be constantly creating and accumulating new pillars to replace broken ones. So, when all these counter-measure pillars are broken till the mind can no longer create new lies or accumulate experiences as a pillar, then the person's whole self-being is being challenged, and he/she will break down.
Now, why do I share this is because that's exactly how God break us, and after we're down to our lowest point and accepted the reality, then he can mould us and nuture us back to an even better person. Of course you can use this method negatively but beware because with knowledge, comes power and responsibility. (Spiderman)
Here's a person who is very good with psychology. I personally have not read Personal Power but have read his Awaken The Giant Within. So whatever I'm sharing here is from the understanding of a few other authors and my own life experiences. If you find this topic interesting, you might wanna give it a click.
We all know that self confidence is very important in doing things. The opposite of self confidence is low self-esteem.
In this post let's explore the reason for a person's self confidence. From my observation I can't help but notice people get their confidence from many things. To list a few,
- working in a big MNC (Multi National Company),
- positions in workplace,
- good reputation among peers,
- car,
- house,
- money/networth,
- good-looking partner (sexy, beautiful, gorgeous, popular),
- branded stuffs (phone, designer's wear, expensive perfumes, handbags),
- recognition from bosses,
- nice body (six packs, slim model-like curves)
and the list goes on..
Now, what do you see in these trend in our world nowadays? All are external and material! No wonder people go through feats to achieve such things.
What about people who has low self-esteem till the point of depression? You notice the reason is identical, only opposite.
Why not look into oneself and find that self-confidence? Remember we were all once babies. We were born with no knowledge about anything. We learned step by step for everything from eating to talking to walking. So you see, self-confidence is in us all since birth. The problem is that we rely on the external factor to give us that confidence till we forgot to look inside ourselves. How about kind-hearted, faithful, peaceful, loving, sincere, humble, honest and many more.
Easier said than done. How? I've learned some things from Tony about NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming). He says that if we continue to reinforce something positive, we'll eventually believe it even if it's not true. This theory is mentioned by Napolean Hill as well. I'm sure many more motivational speakers/writers have some sort of relevant theory, all you need is just one most suitable method for yourself. Of course it can be used for the negative as well, but why would anyone want to do that?
So, my conclusion is that stop imitating or looking-up to the rich to get your self-confidence. If the rich do not care for the poor and keep getting more for themselves, why should the poor lookup to them? But if the rich who're helping and contributing to the poor, then learn those characteristics for they are more precious than diamond or gold. And this is the intrinsic value we should build our confidence upon. Hope it helps.
