If everyone in the world had a healthy dose of confidence and self esteem I think our world would be a much better place. Unfortunately, as conscious creatures, our egos are not only the source of confidence — they are also the source of crippling self doubt and lack of confidence when surrounded by so many other people who always seem to have more happiness, love, beauty, success, and everything else your ego can think of.
But with each new year that arrives, we often make a set of resolutions to break free from this negative underworld of debilitating non-confidence in order to start fresh and anew. But the only way to make a resolution come true is to have resolve in the first place; and resolve is found in confidence. Yesterday the team at Harvard Business Review compiled their list of the Top 8 Barriers To Confidence And How To Overcome Them, and one of my favorites is the following:
“SELF-DEFEATING ASSUMPTIONS: You think you can’t, so you don’t. A British Olympic runner is so rattled by a misstep that cost her a contest that she dropped out of the next. A company team decides that a popular world leader is so far out of their league that they don’t issue an invitation to speak at their customer event. Talented women sometimes ‘leave before they leave,; as Sheryl Sandberg puts it, assuming that they won’t be promoted (or succeed when they have children) so they start behaving like they’re departing years before departure, thus foreclosing their options. It’s one thing to be realistic, it’s another to behave like a loser before entering the game.”
You can read Harvard’s entire Top 8 Barriers To Confidence And How To Overcome Them by visiting Harvard Business Review. And no lesson in confidence would be complete without watching the following two TED Talks. One from Amy Cuddy on the power of body language, and another from Dr. Brene Brown on “The Price of Invulnerability”.
SEE ALSO: Harvard Business Review Explains What To Do When Good News Makes You Anxious
SEE ALSO: How To Build A Happier Brain: A Neuropsychologist’s Bag Of Tricks To Rebuilding Your Cerebrum
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