Being Confident Without Being Arrogant

We naturally assume that when someone has problems with confidence, it’s that they don’t have enough of it. But this isn’t always true.

Confidence, like most other traits, is a spectrum. You can have too little, which results in a low self esteem, or you can have too much which results in arrogance.
You can say hubris if you want to sound polite and fancy.

The key is to have a healthy confidence. Like the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears you shouldn’t have too much or too little, but just enough.

Having a low self esteem can make you hate yourself, but being arrogant can make everyone else hate you.

Having a low self esteem can lead to:
Self sabotage, poor relationship and social skills, lack of assertiveness, neediness or dependence, and when it gets really bad it can lead to things like eating disorders and self harm.

But on the other end of the spectrum, arrogance can lead to:
An inability to handle criticism, a lack of empathy, having unreasonable expectations of favourable treatment and delusions of grandeur.

Which are all pretty undesirable personality traits.

Maintaining a healthy confidence is a fine line to walk and you need a lot of qualities. It’s accepting yourself even if you aren’t perfect. It’s having a healthy self-esteem, and it’s having the ability to go through life knowing deep down that for better or worse, you are who you are and that is okay.

So what are the three main qualities you need in order to walk that fine line between self deprecation and delusions of grandeur?

Humility

It can be hard to walk that fine line when you are really good at something. When you are winning your first reaction might be jumping up in the air screaming “Yes! Who’s the best!? I’m the best!”

But that is a sure fire way to look arrogant.

When you win, use humility to make others around you feel good. When you lose, use humility to know that you can always improve next time.

Respect

If you respect yourself and the people around you a healthy self-confidence is sure to follow.

Don’t put yourself in situations you don’t feel comfortable in and try not to put yourself down too often. Respect yourself in this way, as well as the people around you.

It might take time to develop this trait, but start by catching yourself whenever you aren’t showing respect to yourself or the people around you.

Generosity

We tend to have negative self-talk constantly. We spend so much time beating ourselves up that it’s no wonder we don’t have a healthy confidence.

Be generous in giving yourself compliments and pats on the back. And while you’re at it, be generous with others in this way.

A few kind words can go a long way to making your day—or someone else’s—a thousand times brighter.

With these three tips, we can feel good about ourselves without becoming arrogant in the process. We often tend live in one extreme or the other, but true happiness and lasting confidence comes from balance.

So exercise humility, show yourself some respect and be generous with kind words—you’ll build a foundation of self-confidence that will carry you throughout life.

Meditation Will Save Your Life

A friend recently told me he had coughed up blood due to stress. He discovered the harmful effects that can be caused by holding on to stress, anger, frustration and other negative emotions.

The best way to solve this problem is meditation.

I could write about the scientifically studied effects of meditation: reducing stress, pain, anxiety, aging, depression, feelings of loneliness and inflammation at the cellular level.

Or how it increases your immune function, positive emotions, emotional intelligence, compassion, ability to regulate emotions, ability to introspect, grey matter in key areas of your brain, focus, multitasking, memory and creativity.

But instead, I would like to write about the most important benefit that meditation gives us.

The Ability To Let Go.

We are always our own worst critics. I label almost everything I do as “not good enough” no matter how many people tell me otherwise.

We all judge our bodies, habits, careers, intelligence, and lifestyles more than anyone else ever could. We beat ourselves up so much and the worst part is that we think it is normal.

When we aren’t holding grudges against ourselves, we are holding on to all the negativity the world gives us.

Something makes us angry in the morning and it ruins our day, or something stresses us out and we can’t let go of it. We hold on to anger, sadness, envy, stress, regret and so much more.

Our mental well-being is one of the most important building blocks to a happy and fulfilled life. If we don’t have a healthy mind we can never get near our full potential.

We are robbing the world of the beautiful gifts we could be sharing, just because we can’t seem to let go of any of the things that do us no good.

When We Meditate.

We focus on the breath. It might not seem like much, but it is hard.

Thoughts will come up and we will get trapped in them for minutes at a time before snapping back and re-focusing on the breath.

We will have thoughts about the things that have angered us recently, the things we dislike about ourselves and the world; all the automatic and vindictive thoughts that circle in our brain on a daily basis.

When we practice snapping out of these thought patterns and focusing back on our breath we are constantly exercising our ability to let go of the thoughts that only hurt us.

Over time we get quicker and quicker at this until our negative knee-jerk reactions can no longer drag us down the rabbit hole.

When We Are In The Real World.

After practicing meditation and letting go, we become experts in daily life.

When we see someone more popular, richer and better looking than us, we get jealous. But we’ve practiced for this, and so we immediately let go and go about our day without a second thought.

When someone cuts us off in traffic, instead of letting the anger build and ruin our day, we let it go. When we have thoughts that put down and hurt us, we let them go.

We let go of everything that does no good for us and we never look back.

That is what meditation gives us, a second chance after every negative thought, every unhealthy emotion, and every harmful event.

In practicing meditation, we practice letting go. And when you let go of the bad, you make a lot more room for the good.

 

3 Ways Your Brain Damages Your Self-Esteem

Your brain wasn’t made for the modern era. 

For most of human history we were hunter gatherers surviving in tribes. We didn’t have the stimulation of technology, the safety net of modern medicine or the vastly interconnected social system that we have now.

Because of this fact, our brains and bodies have some left over mechanisms and responses that aren’t exactly suited for our time. Today we are going to be talking about one of the mechanisms and responses that we have left over from a distant past: cognitive biases.

Cognitive biases are tendencies to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgment.

Specifically we’ll explore how these cognitive biases can help cause one of the most rampant mental well-being problems that we all have in common, a low self-esteem.

While you think every decision and thought you hold is completely voluntary, I’m here to show you that the shortcuts your brain takes deeply impact how you view yourself and the world around you. Once we are aware of the tricks our brain can play on us, we can control them a little more.

Negative Bias

Negative Bias refers to the notion that, even when of equal intensity, things of a more negative nature (e.g. unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or social interactions; harmful/traumatic events) have a greater effect on one’s psychological state and processes than do neutral or positive things.

In other words, something we consider very positive could have less of an affect on our mental state and behaviour than something we find to be less intensely negative. It could take 5 positive experiences to outweigh one negative.

If you go outside and five people compliment you, but one person insults you, the insult might affect you more than all of the compliments combined. With this in mind it’s easy to see how our self esteem can be skewed from what it could be if we weighed the positive and negative equally.

Attentional Bias

Attentional Bias is the tendency of our perception to be affected by our recurring thoughts. For example, people who frequently think about the clothes they wear pay more attention to the clothes of others.

Put in the context of self esteem it is easy to see how this could become a problem. If we already think negative thoughts about ourselves often, this bias will send us into a spiral. We will believe that other people are thinking negative things about us and it will become a point of focus for us.

This bias will affect our behaviours and mood based on reoccurring thoughts. If those thoughts are negative (which the negative bias can cause) then we are fighting an uphill battle.

Spotlight Effect

The Spotlight Effect is the phenomenon in which people tend to believe they are noticed more than they really are. Being that one is constantly in the center of one’s own world, an accurate evaluation of how much one is noticed by others has shown to be uncommon.

This can easily damage an already bruised self esteem in that we may believe that everyone around us notices all of the flaws that we see in ourselves. We believe that everyone sees our pimples, or our nervousness in conversations, or our clothes, or height, or whatever else already makes us feel self conscious.

These biases in combination can be detrimental to our mental well-being if we are not aware of them. It’s hard to fight against millions of years of evolution and a brain that we don’t have complete control over. But we have to try to be aware so that the next time some bad happens, we can try to truthfully balance it against the good. Or that we can catch ourselves the next time we are in a spiral of negative thoughts. Or that we can realize that the people around us don’t actually pay as much attention to our flaws as we believe.

If we can keep these biases in mind and try to mitigate their affects whenever possible, we can help lessen the damage they have on our self esteem and live a better quality, happier life.

Shia LaBeouf Says “Stop Giving Up!”

We love motivational videos with a passion. They are a guilty pleasure.

That is why we were ecstatic when we saw that Shia Labeouf had put out a motivational video.

It is to the point and we love it. One of the lines is a classic.

“If you are tired of starting over, stop giving up.”

So, we’re here to explore all the reasons that we might give up, and stop it from happening.

We Expect Results Too Fast

When we first start on a new venture we want everything to work out perfectly. In our mind’s eye we see the stars aligning and all of our dreams coming true overnight, but it never works that way.

The thing is, anything that comes fast, will go just as quickly. Even then, it isn’t what we are getting that is important, it is who we are becoming. And becoming something takes time.

If you aren’t where you want to be yet, it’s because you don’t deserve to be there yet. You haven’t put in the time, the effort, the persistence, or the blood, sweat and tears required. When you deserve the thing you are after, you’ll get it.

So don’t give up.

We Fear The Future

We are terrible predictors of the future.

Think of all the doomsday scenarios that have played out in your head throughout the past. How many of them ended in your life being ruined forever? Probably a lot of them. But right now look around, has your life actually been ruined forever, even once? Probably not.

If you are reading this right now that means that you have internet and probably food and shelter, so it’s safe to say that your doomsday scenarios never came true.

We Dwell On Mistakes

A mistake won’t become a regret unless we fail to learn from it.

That is what mistakes are for. We need to make mistakes so that we can learn and become better. Another word for a collection of mistakes is experience.

We Overwork Ourselves

The religion of hustle and bustle tells us that we have to work 24/7/365 if we want anything in life, but if we don’t have balance we will eventually give up. 

Always remember that there is no finish line. If we want to get in shape and we do all these crazy diets—never eating anything we enjoy and put ourselves through hell—what will happen once we reach our goal?

We will go off the crazy diets, lose all our progress and start again. There is no finish line, once we reach a goal it isn’t “happy ever after,” we have to maintain it. If we reach our goals through means that are not sustainable then we won’t be able to keep what we get.

We Fear Change

If I told you that in fifteen years, you, and your life, would be exactly the same as it is right now how would you feel? Probably pretty crappy. That sounds a little like a nightmare right?

So if that is the case then why are we so afraid of change!?

The fear of change is an immediate fear that we have to confront to conquer, but the fear of staying the same is gradual. The only difference is, when we realize that we are afraid of changing, we can do something about it. But by the time we realize that we’ve stayed the same, we can’t go back.

We Never Visualize What Is Possible

We don’t believe in ourselves, and the reason we don’t believe in ourselves is that we never visualize ourselves conquering our goals.

People say daydreaming is useless but all of the world’s greatest people daydreamed about greatness before they ever made it there. They imagined exactly how it would feel. They saw themselves accomplishing great feats and changing the world.

If we never visualize and put ourselves in that category, that caliber, then we will never believe in ourselves enough to make it. We will doubt ourselves and eventually give up.

Visualize yourself in your greatest state. Visualize the possibilities and don’t worry about the process. Most of the time you figure out the process as you go, but you have to believe that you can reach your goals if you are ever going to start.

So those are the most common reasons why people quit, and why we should never listen to them. Don’t let these fears and anxieties take over your life. If you quit before giving it your best shot, you’ll always regret it.

The 3 Mindsets You Need To Be Happy

When I was younger I had a blood disorder that affected my serotonin levels and caused me to be depressed.

At seven years old I would watch cartoons and break out into tears. I felt like I was losing the battle against my emotions.

I thought a lot about what it means to be happy, and how I could be happier despite this chemical imbalance.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever really won this battle of emotions. I still have ups and downs, good days and bad days.

But I’ve realized that when it comes to being happy, the circumstances don’t matter that much. It’s all about your perspective and your mindsets.

So here are the 3 mindsets that we need to be happy.

1) Our Present Does NOT Dictate Our Future

No matter where we are, how we feel, or what we are doing—that doesn’t decide what will happen in our future.

When everything is going wrong in our lives, we’ll have a hard time imagining a hopeful future.

And you aren’t the only person that gets trapped in this feeling of doom and gloom. Impact bias is the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of future feeling states.

When we are depressed we can only assume that we will be depressed forever. We are twenty feet deep in a hole with only a shovel—we feel we can only go further down.

But if we have this mindset instilled within us, we’ll be able to get out eventually.

2) The Past Is A Story, The Future Is An Imagination

If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
But, if you are at peace, you are living in the present.
-Lao Tzu

We spend a lot of time regretting the past, or worrying about the future. But we don’t realize that these things are not exactly what they seem.

Humans are naturally pretty terrible at remember the past. Every time we recall a past memory we are actually remembering the last time we remembered it. In this process we alter the memory.

After years and years, the past is just a collection of completely inaccurate stories we tell ourselves. Some of us tell happy stories, some tell sad stories, but they are all stories.

Don’t base your emotions on the past.

The rest of the time we spend worrying about the future.

We stress about deadlines, awkward conversations, whether we will find love, get the job, and even whether or not we will be happy.

Think about that. We ruin our happiness in the present because we are worrying about whether or not we will be happy in the future.

Humans are bad at correctly recalling the past, and we are also terrible at predicting the future. Every doomsday scenario that plays out in our heads fail to come to pass.

The solution is to not regret the past, but move on, and not worry about the future, but live in the moment.

3) We Don’t NEED A Reason To Be Happy

This is the most important mindset for happiness. If you need a reason to be happy, your happiness can always be taken away.

Happiness is something we should try to cultivate within us. We need to learn to be happy for the sake of being happy.

Material possessions, promotions, friends, relationships, respect—these are all great and should make us happy, but we should never rely on them to be happy.

If we learn to be happy for no reason at all, we’ll be able to keep our happiness no matter what happens around us.

And that’s what we all want right, to be happy?