Our society is in some ways becoming increasingly isolated and individualised, leading to less worthwhile personal connectivity between us humans. In some cases this is not always a bad thing; however the decreased amount of human interaction could be a potential problem over time. It is my opinion that we are already seeing the effects of this in the west. With a decrease in interaction with other humans from many different back grounds we run the treat of losing some of our most valuable communication skills and in a lot of cases, don’t even build the experiences to acquire them in the first place.

So, what happens if we lose out on life experiences and building the skills that they can help up to attain? Well with a reduced amount of human interaction and lack of constructive communication we can feel self conscious when we are put into certain situations when we are older. As a hypnotherapist I help a large amount of people with things such as social confidence or social phobia. Nearly always it is presented to me by the client that they feel that they just don’t fit in, that their opinion just doesn’t count and that they wish just to remain in the background – well at least until we have successfully treated them. This is quite a common situation and something that I help clients with on a daily basis.

So, a lack of communication and human connectivity or interaction can lead to confidence and self esteem problems. If this is the case for you, what can you do about it? You can boost your confidence in many ways; however it is always best to consider the most effective root, so that you can resolve the issue as soon as possible. Think about where you notice your lack of confidence, as it almost certainly will not affect you all of the time. There may be some friends that you feel fine with and it may be just meeting new people. You might experience confidence issues at work or while playing sports. Once you know where a lack of confidence or low self esteem is going to rear its ugly head you are better placed to deal with it successfully.

Once I have helped a client to do this I generally use hypnosis and self hypnosis to tackle these areas specifically, and assist the client to gain confidence just where they know that it will be needed. This works as with hypnosis you can simply reprogram the part of the brain that we refer to as your sub-conscious mind and have it generate confidence in the areas that you want and need it in.

Richard MacKenzie
http://www.articlesbase.com/self-help-articles/confidence-dealing-with-and-creating-self-confidence-136395.html

So many people are looking for that “big breakthrough” in their life-one big event that will push them right over edge from where they are, to where they want to be. The irony is, the more someone focuses on making a huge (often overnight) change in their life, the less progress they usually make.

Building real confidence is a process, not an event. It is true that people sometimes have a major shift at some point in their life (I’ve had a few of these myself), but most change happens gradually, in a very up-and-down fashion.

Think about the stock market: it is much, much higher today than 20 years ago. But the path has not been a straight upward curve-there were ups, downs, twists and turns all along the way. But overall, there was tremendous progress.

Developing confidence works the same way. The path is seldom a straight 45 degree line moving ever upward. It looks more like a graph of stock market results. Up, down and occasionally all over the place. But overall, you will see tremendous progress, as long as you don’t give up.

None of this is meant to discourage you, or make you feel that you cannot progress quickly, because you most certainly can. I only point out that persistence is necessary, because even when your overall direction is upward, you will still have days where the trend is downward. Everybody does. The key is to not define yourself by your worst days.

A mistake I must have made a million times was assuming that I was only as confident as my worst days. Today I see this as complete rubbish! We are NOT our worst days, and associating “who we are” with our lowest moments is a huge mistake. It blocks progress and reinforces the same old limiting beliefs we’re trying to eliminate in the first place.

So how should we view those “off days” we can all have from time to time? Easy–as just “off days,” and nothing more. It is not only unnecessary to attach a meaning to them, it is downright counterproductive. An off day is an off day-that’s all.

So why is it so tempting to attach some kind of meaning to every low-point in our lives? I suspect it has to do with the over-analytical mind and a desire to ‘control” our circumstances as much as possible. Assigning a meaning to our bad days is just another way of trying to control our situation, when what we really need is to begin “letting go.”

Learning to let go can seem scary at first, but all real change involves letting go of something-old habits, behaviors or even beliefs. And when we let go of the obsessive need to “control” outcomes, real change comes remarkably fast.

Jon Mercer
http://www.articlesbase.com/advice-articles/building-confidence-by-letting-go-108042.html

You see, according to my friends, I seem to have a self-esteem issue that doesnt give me the confidence to go out and enjoy my life. I would like to go out and date once in awhile, but i never seem to have enough confidence in myself.

Does anyone have any good suggestions/ways I can boost my self-image?

What you need to do is to pretend….go out and pretend….that you are having a great time, that you are freindly, outgoing, etc. just like playing a part in a movie….you may be shy or even scared, but the good thing is that no one will know, because you are pretending to be all of these other things….only you will know….and the really neat thing about this all is….eventually while you are doing this, you actually are developing your self-esteem and self-confidence…the more you practice this, and the more you do this, the easier it gets….and one day, you will realize…..I am not even acting anymore…it just happens naturally…..good luck hon…it really does work….I used to be shy too, and now, I can go anywhere and be comfortable and talk to anyone….(((((HUGS)))))…Linda