According to the research, confidence motivates us to take action in the face of uncertainty. The more confident we are, the more likely we are to fight for the resources we need to survive.

The truth is life is filled with uncertainty. We never really know how the future is going to turn out. And sometimes due to this uncertainty we fear rejection or failure.

We might be deathly afraid of being rejected by at a girl at a bar. So instead of taking the risk and starting a conversation, we just hang with our friends and never approach her.

Or maybe we are afraid of starting a new career because we don’t think we will be any good at it. So instead we stick with our old job, even though we hate it and get paid half the salary.

Lack of confidence can cause us to sabotage ourselves in all sorts of ways.

Let me ask you a question. Do you think guys like Michael Jordan, Bruce Lee, and Tiger Woods got to where they are without believing in themselves? Of course not! They believed they were capable of great things, and that belief motivated them to work hard and make it happen.

In the same way confidence can directly impact your life in a positive way.

However — sometimes due to years and years of being down on ourselves, it’s hard to find confidence. So here are some tips to help build more of it in your life:

• Reflect on your strengths.
• View obstacles as learning experiences.
• Find a supportive social circle.
• Repeat positive affirmations about yourself.
• Exercise and stay healthy.

Most of these are commonsense. But if you actually practice them, you will see more confidence in your life.

I’ve been studying psychology for 5 years now. Throughout those years I’ve discovered that there is nothing more important to our success than what we think about ourselves.

This is because confidence can be like a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we have positive beliefs, that causes us to act in ways that bring us the results we want.

Evolutionarily, this is probably why confidence became a desirable trait.

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The problem with negative emotions is that we sometimes become addicted to them, like a drug. We become so conditioned and attached to our frustrations, our anger, our sadness, and our guilt, and we begin to depend on these feelings in order to feel alive.

Instead of recognizing our emotions as only passing expressions of our current situation in life, we begin to identify ourselves with these feelings. We can’t imagine a day going by without them. We wake up every morning and we begin to anticipate their arrival…and sure enough, they usually come.

In many ways, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. We expect to feel like shit and those expectations cause us to act in ways that reinforce that fact. This is how many people get caught in having “pity parties.”

A pity party is an excessive and unproductive way of experiencing grief, in which you spend all your time feeling sorry for yourself and whining endlessly about how crappy your life is, without ever doing anything about it.

Often we have these pity parties all by ourselves. For weeks, months, or even years at a time we may come home from work or school, then run up to our room, lock ourselves in it, crash on our beds, curl up in a ball, munch on Doritos, and then try to sleep for the rest of the day. Maybe we don’t even go to school or work anymore.

Common symptoms of a “pity party” include:

• Persistent low self-esteem.
• Constant feelings of frustration, sadness, or anger toward life.
• Excessive negative self-talk (such as “I’m no good.” or “Nobody likes me.”) and complaining.
• Lots of ruminating on past events.
• Not motivated to go to school, work, or fulfill other obligations.
• Poor diet, excessive eating, and/or substance abuse.
• Indulging in too much TV, movies, music, or videogames.
• Feeling lethargic and lazy for most of the day.
• Lots of day-time sleeping.
• No real plans, hopes, or dreams for the future.
• Identifying oneself as “the victim” in most situations.
• Indifference to others or wanting others to feel bad for you.

The most unhealthy thing about any pity party is that we do everything but actually confront our problems. Instead, we run away from responsibility by feeling sorry for how pathetic we are as human beings.

Perhaps even worse, we carry this attitude with us wherever we go and it begins to pollute our relationships. Our negative attitude and gloomy demeanor become an emotional contagion. This means that the people who are surrounded by you begin to pick up on your negative vibes and feel down themselves.

Most people don’t want to hang around others who make them feel like crap unless they themselves already feel like crap. Due to this, we begin to attract toxic individuals which only help to refuel our own toxicity. Our social circle becomes a feedback loop of toxic emotions – and the pity party continues to grow.

Cancel Your RSVP to the Pity Party

As you can tell by now, pity parties are a very unhealthy expression of emotion. They often grow like a cancer; and also like a cancer, they eat away at our lives. What we need to do is cut out the cancer as soon as possible before it grows into something that we can no longer manage.

There are many factors that can reinforce low self-esteem. They include (but aren’t limited to):

A. Our thoughts, beliefs, and views on ourselves and our world.
B. Our personal habits (taking lots of nap, playing too many video games).
C. Our relationships.
D. Our health (diet, exercise, hygiene, etc.)
E. Our job and career.
F. Our history.
G. Our genes.

We aren’t in control of everything that contributes to our self-esteem (clearly, we can’t change our genes and we can’t change the past), but we do have some control, and that is where there is room for growth.

Changing your thoughts and perspective.

For starters, one way we can end the pity party is to begin to become more aware of the thoughts and beliefs that underlie our mood and behavior. Often when we notice some of the critical things we say about ourselves inside our heads, we find just how much of an effect these voices have on how we think and feel about reality. Once we become more aware, we can the begin to adjust these beliefs and self-talk so that they are more positive and optimistic.

One example is by reframing obstacles in our life as opportunities for growth and learning. For example, maybe you’re a guy who has never been on a date before but has been rejected hundreds of times by other girls. You may look back on this track record and believe that this means you’ll never have a girlfriend. But someone else can look back on this and try to see opportunities to learn from their mistakes and improve their approach to women.

Example of “failure as learning” refame:

“If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”

Thomas A. Edison

By reframing failure in this way we often become more motivated to learn from and overcome these obstacles rather than seeing them as inhibitors to living the life we want.

The difference is obstacles and failures aren’t seen as road blocks on the path of personal development, but road signs that help guide our journey forward.

This kind of reframing is one of the key tools used in The Shyness and Social Anxiety System, which lays out a very clear formula for how we can patch up holes in our self-esteem and gain greater confidence in our lives (these tools can work even if you’ve never really accomplished anything in your life and you normally see yourself as “below average.”)

Experiment with different habits.

While we develop a belief system to enable greater self-esteem, we should also explore different habits that may improve our physical and mental well-being. Often thoughts ↔ action have an interconnected relationship. By changing our thoughts we can change our actions, but also by changing our actions we can change our thoughts.

Some key habits that can indirectly lead to greater self-esteem include:

• Eating more healthy.
• Exercising a few times every week.
• Working on your body posture.
• Going out to social get-togethers and expanding your social sphere.
• Engaging in creative hobbies: like writing, playing an instrument, or photography.
• Having a job where you feel you provide real value.
• Cutting down on detrimental habits like substance abuse or too much TV.
• Pursuing other meaningful hobbies and interests.

Try integrating one new habit into your routine and see if it leads to a boost in self-esteem.

Work on that habit until it becomes second-nature (like going to the gym a few times every week), and then shift your focus to another habit you want to learn. If you do this gradually, on a step-by-step basis, you can eventually replace most of your bad habits with more productive alternatives.

The best part is once you start making a single positive change, you start building momentum to continue evolving into the future. For example, when you first start going to the gym or learning how to play guitar, you begin to develop a stronger sense of self-esteem, and that self-esteem often spills over into other areas of your life.

The Shyness and Social Anxiety System goes over many similar habit-changing techniques and how these techniques can change your life as a whole – so you don’t just settle for what you’ve always had or what is most comfortable and familiar.

“When you want something you’ve never had, you have to do something you’ve never done.”
Anonymous

Of course, there’s always some resistance throughout any process of self-change, but the benefits of changing are often worth it.

Taking the initiative to make positive and productive changes in your life today is one of the best ways to avoid a pity party in the future. By the end of the day, you need to take more responsibility for where your life is heading and not just think your misery is something predetermined and outside of your control. Often you are not the victim unless you choose to be the victim.

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Image Credit

In this post, I set out to describe what I feel are the greatest benefits of exercising creativity. How do they appeal to our interests and how do they build character? In the second half of this post I will describe different ways we can be artistic, even when we have limited skills in the artistic domain. By the end of this post I want readers, both artists and non-artists, to walk away with an affirmed belief that creativity is something inherent in all of man; similarly, it is something that we must all integrate into our lifestyles.

I can’t answer Maslow’s question because I find it hard to fathom why an individual would intentionally avoid pursuing an art. However, some people may feel that they are just not creative, maybe they believe you have to be born with it so – because of this – they ignore opportunities to express themselves creatively.

But the benefits of being creative far outweigh a life without expression. In fact, being creative can also benefit our lives in ways we may not have initially thought, by helping us deal with conflicts and build self-worth.

Expressing your ideas

One of the most obvious advantages of being creative is that it gives us a chance to express our ideas. Through our production of art, we literally turn our feelings and ideas into reality. Upon completing a creative work we feel more understood, perhaps even as if a weight has been lifted off of our shoulders. There are some things that go beyond words and art gives us a modality to express those facets of reality.

Resolving deep conflicts

Sometimes we go through events in life that can cause conflict that never seems to go away. Maybe its a past relationship you can’t seem to get over or a traumatic event that still haunts you. Art gives us a way to let go of these experiences. It allows us to fulfill a hunger that can no longer be satisfied by external conditions, so we must transform ourselves from the inside. Creativity is the alchemy that guides us toward reconciliation with our past. I have looked into this in such articles as, “Art Therapy And Mental Illness,” where I report on how art therapy is used to treat those with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and other psychological impairments.

Facing fears of failure

Of all the things that hold us back from doing the things we want, fear of failure is one of the most detrimental obstacles to overcome. We learn from our mistakes, yet we are deathly afraid to make any. Maybe we are worried that we will find out something about ourselves that we don’t want to know? Whatever the reason, creative endeavors give us an opportunity to achieve something. And even if our first song or first painting isn’t as spectacular as we first dreamed it to be, the accomplishment itself often gives us a sense of pride and motivation. It tells us to push ourselves forward in other aspects of life. And at the same time it gives us a memory, a mental resource, to draw upon when we face other fears in the future.

Building self-worth

When we face our fears, and we accomplish something that we set out to do, even if we don’t do it all that well because it is something new to us, we begin to feel better about ourselves. We produced something; we have added value to the world, and this fact reflects the value we perceive in our own self. This is the same principle I have touched upon in articles like, “From Self To World Improvement.”

Seeing the world differently

What is creativity? How do we know when something is creative? Often we may say something is creative when it gets us to perceive or think about something in a way we never have before. Sometimes these new ways of seeing can disturb us. Other times they inspire us. Being able to see things from a different perspective requires flexibility. It is a skill that can be developed through mediums of art, and even business, engineering, and science. If we can step out of our normal way of seeing things we can obtain a greater depth of understanding regarding a particular theme or subject. With practice, this flexibility can translate into better decision making and problem solving – abilities that can make rippling changes throughout any area of our life.

Creativity that give us immediate gratification

When I use the term “immediate gratification,” I do not mean that one can just pick up a SLR camera and become a professional photographer overnight. Absolutely not. All creative endeavors take work and dedication in order to reach a certain level of proficiency. However, some mediums we can enjoy more quickly than others. Not everyone can pick up an acoustic guitar and write a riff they are happy with, but many people can spend an afternoon shooting pictures and walk away with a couple to “feel good” about.

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