I want you to ask yourself something: Are you genuinely happy? Take a moment to honestly think about that. Have you genuinely found happiness in life?
If your answer is no, or even maybe, let’s talk about the reasons why you aren’t happy, and the mistakes you might be making unknowingly that are costing you happiness.
Learn to Activate The Law of Attraction, Achieve All of Your Goals, and Find Happiness.
1) You Haven’t Transformed Your Inner Critic into Your Inner Coach
The first mistake you might be making that is costing you your happiness is that you haven’t successfully transformed your inner critic into your inner coach.
Research indicates that, on average, people talk to themselves about 50,000 times a day. Unfortunately, most of that self-talk is about yourself, and according to the psychological researchers, it is about 80% negative.
Some examples of this might be:
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
“I don’t like the way my hair looks today.”
“I’ll never lose weight.”
“I can never seem to get organized.”
… and the list goes on.
We know from this research that these thoughts have a powerful effect on us. Our negative thoughts actually control our behavior.
The first thing you have to do if you want to find happiness in life, is put a muzzle on that inner critic and transform it into an encouraging, loving, and positive inner coach.
One of the most powerful exercises for retraining your inner critic is to teach it to tell you the total truth. Just like your parents disciplined you for your own good, your inner critic really has your best interests in mind when it is criticizing you. It wants you to get the benefit of the better behavior. The problem is that it tells you only part of the truth.
Whenever you hear a part of you judging yourself, simply reply,
“Thank you for caring. What is your fear? What specifically do you want me to do? How will this serve me? and Thank you.”
Do not let the seeming simplicity of this technique fool you. It is very powerful if you use it.
2) You’re Letting Your Limiting Beliefs Control You
Another mistake you might unknowingly be making and therefore sabotaging your own happiness is allowing yourself to be controlled by your limiting beliefs.
Many of us have beliefs that limit our success — whether they are beliefs about our own capabilities, beliefs about what it takes to succeed, or even beliefs about how we should relate with other people.
Moving beyond your limiting beliefs is a critical step toward becoming happier and more successful.
Learn How to Find Happiness in Life in 4 Steps
To do this, you must first believe that you are capable of accomplishing your goals and that you are capable of being happy.
Here is a simple but powerful four-step process you can use to transform any limiting belief into an empowering belief:
Step 1: Identify a limiting belief that you want to change.
Step 2: Determine how that belief limits you.
Step 3: Decide how you would rather be, act, or feel. And…
Step 4: Create a turnaround statement that affirms or gives you permission to be, act, or feel this new way.
For example, a negative belief might be: “If I express my true feelings, people will think I’m weak and take advantage of me.”
The turnaround belief would then be:
“The more I express my true feelings, the more people love, respect, and support me.”
Once you have created a new belief, you will need to implant it into your subconscious mind through constant repetition for 2 or 3 minutes several times a day for a minimum of 30 days.
In conclusion, keeping these 2 possible mistakes in mind (listening to your inner critic without retraining it to be your inner coach and letting yourself be controlled by your unconscious limiting beliefs). Make a list of any beliefs that might be limiting you and follow the steps outlined above.
Activate The Law of Attraction & Achieve All of Your Goals
Jack Canfield, America’s #1 Success Coach, is founder of the billion-dollar book brand Chicken Soup for the Soul® and a leading authority on Peak Performance and Life Success. If you’re ready to jump-start your life, make more money, and have more fun and joy in all that you do, get FREE success tips from Jack Canfield now at: www.FreeSuccessStrategies.com
If you are going to be successful in creating the life of your dreams, you have to believe that you are capable of making it happen.
How do you develop self-confidence like this?
You have to believe you have the right stuff, and that you are able to pull it off. Self-confidence is a deep-seated belief that you have whatever it takes. You have the abilities, inner resources, talents, and skills to create your desired results.
Here are 5 tips that can help you develop maximum self-confidence.
1. Make the Choice to Believe in Yourself
That’s right, believing in yourself is a choice.
It is an attitude you develop over time. Although it helps if you had positive and supportive parents, the fact is that most of us had run-of-the-mill parents who inadvertently passed on to us the same limiting beliefs and negative conditioning they grew up with.
To be successful, you have to remember, the past is the past and there is no payoff for blaming your parents for your current level of self-confidence. It’s your responsibility to take charge of your own self-concept and your beliefs.
You must choose to believe that you can do anything you set your mind to, because the reality is, you can.
2. Use Positive Self-Talk and Positive Visualizations to Persuade Yourself
The latest brain research indicates that with enough positive self-talk and positive visualization combined with proper training, coaching and practice, anyone can learn to do almost anything.
If you choose to believe in yourself and act as if anything is possible, then you will do the things that are necessary to bring about the result.
On the other hand, if you believe that it is impossible, you will not do what is necessary, and you will not produce the result. Either way, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
3. Give Up the Words “I Can’t”
If you are going to develop maximum levels of self-confidence and success, you need to give up the phrase “I can’t” and all of its cousins, such as “I wish I were able to.”
The words “I can’t” disempower you.
They actually make you physically weaker when you say them. Your brain is designed to solve any problem and reach any goal that you give it, and the words you think and say affect your brain and body.
Let me give you an example:
When you were a toddler, there was no stopping you. You thought you could climb up on anything. No barrier was too big for you to attempt to overcome.
But little by little, your sense of invincibility was conditioned out of you by the feedback you received from your family, friends, and teachers, and by the decisions you made in response to that, until you no longer believed you could.
To undo your past conditioning and move towards a future of confidence and success, you must take responsibility for removing the words “I can’t” from your vocabulary, and replacing them with the words “I can” and “I will.”
4. Ignore What Others Think of You
If having others believing in you and your dream were a requirement for success, most of us would never accomplish anything.
You need to base your decisions about what you want to do on YOUR goals and desires–not the goals, desires, opinions, and judgments of your parents, friends, spouse, children, or co-workers.
Quit worrying about what other people think about you and follow your heart.
In fact, most of the time, nobody’s thinking about you at all! They are too busy worrying about their own lives, and if they are thinking about you, they are wondering what you are thinking about them.
Meanwhile, all that time you’re wasting worrying about what other people think about your ideas, your goals, your clothes, your hair, and your home, could be better spent focusing on doing the things that will actually get your closer to achieving your goals.
5. Constantly Acknowledge Your Positive Past
Most people in our culture remember their failures more than their successes.
One reason for this is the “leave ‘em alone — pounce” approach to parenting, teaching, and management that is so prevalent in our culture.
When you were a young child, your parents left you alone when you were playing and being cooperative, and then pounced on you when you made too much noise, were a nuisance, or got into trouble.
There was almost always more emotional intensity around your errors, mistakes, and failures than there was around your successes.
And because the brain more easily remembers events that were accompanied by strong emotions, most people underestimate and underappreciate the number of successes they’ve had, compared to the number of failures they’ve had.
The best way to counteract this phenomenon is to consciously focus on and celebrate your successes. Research has shown over and over again that the more you acknowledge your past successes, the more confident you become in taking on and successfully accomplishing new ones.
Remembering and acknowledging that you have had successes in the past, will give you the self-confidence that you can have more successes in the future.
Create a Victory Log for Yourself
Keeping these 5 strategies in mind, I want you to create a victory log.
A victory log is a list of all your daily successes. You can keep your list in a notebook, your iPad, your smartphone, or on your computer, but the point is to keep a running list that you can add to each day.
Begin by writing down your successes from yesterday and those from today, and keep the list going in order to log these victories into your long-term memory. As simple as this exercise is, it is extremely powerful in building your maximum confidence.
To hold yourself accountable, leave a comment below with the first 5 items in your victory log. I’ll follow up with you in the comments to make sure you’re staying on track.
Develop Maximum Self-Confidence
Imagine exuding self-confidence in any situation, asking for what you want, believing anything is possible… and, taking more risks. Now imagine you have already achieved any goal you desire. What would it feel like? How would you be thinking?
This simple imagination exercise is something you can do right now to take you faster to the actual manifestation of that experience.
That’s because when you feel good about yourself, you begin to attract the people and events that empower you to achieve the exact success you imagined.
Jack Canfield, America’s #1 Success Coach, is founder of the billion-dollar book brand Chicken Soup for the Soul® and a leading authority on Peak Performance and Life Success. If you’re ready to jump-start your life, make more money, and have more fun and joy in all that you do, get FREE success tips from Jack Canfield now at: www.FreeSuccessStrategies.com