Are You a Highly Confident Person?
- At April 21, 2014
- By Roxanne Snopek
- In Life, Roxanne Writes On
- 0
Highly confident people believe in their ability to achieve. If you don’t believe in yourself, why should anyone else put their faith in you? To walk with swagger and improve your self-confidence, watch out for these fifteen things highly confident people don’t do. Now, I’ve come a long way, baby, but this shines light on several (okay, many)
troublesome areas for me. How about you?
- They don’t make excuses.
Highly confident people take ownership of their thoughts and actions. They don’t blame the traffic for being tardy at work; they were late. They don’t excuse their short-comings with excuses like “I don’t have the time” or “I’m just not good enough”; they make the time and they keep on improving until they are good enough.
- They don’t avoid doing the scary thing.
Highly confident people don’t let fear dominate their lives. They know that the things they are afraid of doing are often the very same things that they need to do in order to evolve into the person they are meant to be.
- They don’t live in a bubble of comfort.
Highly confident people avoid the comfort zone, because they know this is a place where dreams die. They actively pursue a feeling of discomfort, because they know stretching themselves is mandatory for their success.
- They don’t put things off until next week.
Highly confident people know that a good plan executed today is better than a great plan executed someday. They don’t wait for the “right time” or the “right circumstances”, because they know these reactions are based on a fear of change. They take action here, now, today – because that’s where progress happens.
- They don’t obsess over the opinions of others.
Highly confident people don’t get caught up in negative feedback. While they do care about the well-being of others and aim to make a positive impact in the world, they don’t get caught up in negative opinions that they can’t do anything about. They know that their true friends will accept them as they are, and they don’t concern themselves with the rest.
- They don’t judge people.
Highly confident people have no tolerance for unnecessary, self-inflicted drama. They don’t feel the need to insult friends behind their backs, participate in gossip about fellow co-workers or lash out at folks with different opinions. They are so comfortable in who they are that they feel no need to look down on other people.
- They don’t let lack of resources stop them.
Highly confident people can make use of whatever resources they have, no matter how big or small. They know that all things are possible with creativity and a refusal to quit. They don’t agonize over setbacks, but rather focus on finding a solution.
- They don’t make comparisons.
Highly confident people know that they are not competing with any other person. They compete with no other individual except the person they were yesterday. They know that every person is living a story so unique that drawing comparisons would be an absurd and simplistic exercise in futility.
- They don’t find joy in people-pleasing.
Highly confident people have no interest in pleasing every person they meet. They are aware that not all people get along, and that’s just how life works. They focus on the quality of their relationships, instead of the quantity of them.
- They don’t need constant reassurance.
Highly confident people aren’t in need of hand-holding. They know that life isn’t fair and things won’t always go their way. While they can’t control every event in their life, they focus on their power to react in a positive way that moves them forward.
- They don’t avoid life’s inconvenient truths.
Highly confident people confront life’s issues at the root before the disease can spread any farther. They know that problems left unaddressed have a way of multiplying as the days, weeks and months go by. They would rather have an uncomfortable conversation with their partner today than sweep an inconvenient truth under the rug, putting trust at risk.
- They don’t quit because of minor set-backs.
Highly confident people get back up every time they fall down. They know that failure is an unavoidable part of the growth process. They are like a detective, searching for clues that reveal why this approach didn’t work. After modifying their plan, they try again (but better this time).
- They don’t require anyone’s permission to act.
Highly confident people take action without hesitation. Every day, they remind themselves, “If not me, who?”
- They don’t limit themselves to a small toolbox.
Highly confident people don’t limit themselves to Plan A. They make use of any and all weapons that are at their disposal, relentlessly testing the effectiveness of every approach, until they identify the strategies that offer the most results for the least cost in time and effort.
Okay, I’m no Dale Carnegie, but I’m not walking into the Fraser River with rocks in my pockets, either. But here’s what I’m going to watch for: I tend to need a lot of reassurance (feel free to give it, anytime now. Really.) and I hate inconvenient truths. They’re so darn… inconvenient.
How about you? What are your trouble spots?
Author & article source: Daniel Wallen | Lifehack
And huge thanks to the wise and confident Paula Altenburg for sending this my way!
“Luke. I am your dark side. Hug me.”
Tomorrow is the start of another NaNoWriMo. During National Novel Writing Month people from around the globe commit to writing 50,000 words in a brand-new project, in 30 days.
They don’t have to be 50,000 good words. The idea is to just pull the cork and see what spills out.
I wasn’t going to participate this year. I’ve been burnt out, exhausted and very near the dreaded writer’s block that I’ve always claimed doesn’t exist. However, this year’s NaNoWriMo event falls during a Mercury retrograde – in Scorpio. Which means that this year, there might be some pretty powerful stuff pouring onto the page.
Here are a few tidbits from Maria Desimone. Read the full essay here.
What are we hiding from our own consciousness? What are we afraid to admit to ourselves? This Mercury retrograde phase promises to ferret it out of us and deliver a chance to reconcile with darkness in our lives that we either truly don’t see or have tried desperately to sweep under the rug.
I’m a classic rug-sweeper, a deny-er, a smoother-over-of-conflict. And dang it all, there’s no great, nail-biting, stay-up-all-night books without it. You see my problem.
So, what if I use the next few weeks to explore that pulsating darkness within, lance that poisonous mass in a dramatic Alien meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest gesture of literary defiance? (FYI: we in the biz call that previous sentence Purple Prose. Don’t do it.)
Karmically, the universe is screaming at us to open wide and swallow the nasty medicine that will give us a new perspective. The nasty medicine is the uglier part of your life … the part that you might take great pains to hide from others. From yourself.
To up the ante, I’m also at that stage of life where my developmental tasks include taking stock, reviewing and adjusting goals, facing the fact that even coconut oil and psyllium husks can’t turn back time and that yes, that is my ass now. Naturally, I’ve been avoiding this inventory-taking.
Once you call yourself out on it something powerful will happen. You will be unrestricted from the grip that this darkness holds over you in your life.
Best case, I emerge better, stronger, faster. Worse case, I’ve got another lavender-hued pile of schlock on my hard drive.
What the hay. Where do I sign?
Riding the Wave
- At October 28, 2013
- By Roxanne Snopek
- In Roxanne Writes On
- 0
Yesterday afternoon, I returned home from my 15th consecutive year at the Surrey International Writers’ Conference. A few of those years, including this one, I was there as a presenter, which also meant providing critique services to other writers in the Blue Pencil Cafe appointments.
During these 15 minutes slots, writers bring 3-5 pages of a work-in-progress to an author for an opportunity to get feedback, ask specific questions or simply practice the pitch they’ll be lobbing at an editor later on. Much sweating occurs.
This may have been one of the best years for me yet, and the honor of seeing such excellent work from up-and-coming writers was truly a highlight. (You know who you are. I expect a mention in your awards speech.) I’ll post more about the conference later, once I’ve met my current deadline. But I just had to share the message that popped into my in-box this morning from the Daily OM:
You may feel that you are winning in everything you do today, which could be due to your successes at work or at play. This feeling of being able to accomplish anything might be the result of an increased confidence in your ability to reach your goals. Today would be a good time to use this momentum to continue to set realistic objectives for yourself. You might want to think about what targets you can create for your life that you can easily attain.
So. I’ll be riding that wave for as long as I can. I’ve got my realistic reasonable possibly-remotely-attainable goals in front of me and now it’s time to work.
What secret goals do you have? Is there an important, scary, outrageous task that scares you, but that might just be possible if you try? Why not see if you can catch a bit of this energy and see where it takes you, too? Let me know what happens!