Some places to find confidence

Confidence is the building block of successful change. It is when I forget to be confident, when I let my doubt and unhappiness gnaw it away to nothing that I fail, and worse than that when I stop trying. So here is a quick list of ways to build confidence.

Look up Changing your posture and can be a big help in building confidence, or at least the appearance of confidence. Standing up strait, looking at people when you talk to them or are walking instead of down at your shoes can have a huge impact on how people perceive you. As I have said before we tend to act like the people around us expect us too and if they expect us to be confident then we will be.

Do small tasks Find little challenging tasks that you know you can do and do well. Each success builds our confidence a bit. As these bricks of confidence come together we can start trying more and more challenging things.

Know your strengths Being aware of what you are good at and taking time to do activities that let you show off a bit is good for building confidence.

Work on your weakness The other side of the coin is that we cannot just hide out in the areas of our lives we are good at. Instead we must turn our attention to the things we don't do well and work on them. This is harder, more dangerous territory to be mining confidence in but the ore is richer here as well. When we start to succeed in a place where we have routinely failed that gives us a huge boost in confidence.

Remember your successes When we are scraping the bottom of the confidence bearlale or we need to prime the motor we can always look back on our past and find the times we have succeeded. These successes are part of who we are now and can be a great source of inspiration and confidence. We are that person who succeeded once and we will succeed again.

What I have learned from my mother

As mother's day fast approaches I want to share a lesson I learned from my mother. Not the only lesson she has taught me over the years just one of them.

I forget what year it was, but I know it was the Fourth of July and I was some were in high school. My mom was administrating a nursing home and was short-staffed in the laundry. Not just short-staffed but had absolutely no one to work that afternoon. The patients needed clean sheet, they needed clean towels and all the other bits of fabric that pass invisibly through the operation of a convalescent home.

There was no one to do the job but her, it was her hospital, it was her responsibility. The job was too big for one person so she asked me to help. We spent a large part of our Fourth of July folding towels and bed sheets in a hot and humid industrial laundry room.

I talk about commitments a lot around here and this is why, this is the lesson my mom taught me that day: If you make something your responsibility you need to do everything you can to make sure it gets done. If this means you suffer in the heat so be it, if it means you get your hands dirty so be it.

Thanks for the lessons mom, happy mother's day.

Spring cleaning of the heart

It is that time of year again, the skies are staying blue, the sun is shining and it just feels like a good time to be happy. We are airing out the house and chasing the dust bunnies from under the bed but there is some were else we need to look. We need to give ourselves an emotional spring cleaning as well. We accumulate dust bunnies of regret and stuffy rooms of unforgiving hurt all throughout the year. Spring is a great time to let that go.

There are those things in our lives we can change and those that we cannot. The interesting thing about what we cannot change is that it all resides in one place, the past. We can change things now and we can plan to change things in the future but the past is set in stone. If we cannot change it why do we insist on worrying about what has happened. Sure there are things from the past that can come back and bite us in the ass but that is not what we are talking about here.

We have all done things we are not proud of and been hurt by those we hold dear to us. These events are over and done with, the damage is done, and the pain is felt. We should let it go. Instead we hold on to the hurt like a serial killers grim collection of trophies. We can pull the hurt out again and torturer ourselves with it. We say "Why did I do that? If only I had not done this." But we did, we suffered and now we must let go.

Open up that trophy cabinet of pain this spring. Forgive those who need forgiving, this includes your self. Then forget about the hurt, fill the trophy cabinet with thoughts and memories of happiness and successes.