There’s a dark side to the self-improvement industry. If you’re into any form of self-improvement (self-help, personal-development, personal-empowerment, etc.), there’s a good chance that you’ve been affected by it.

What is it?

Working on improving yourself can actually affect your self-esteem in a negative way. You see, when you decide that you want to improve something, you can get caught up in focusing on what’s wrong with you.

In order to decide you want to change something, you first need to acknowledge that there’s something in your life that you don’t like. This acknowledgment is important, but it’s easy to end up keeping your focus there. Keeping your focus on your problems is a guaranteed recipe for getting yourself down.

Does this mean you shouldn’t work on improving yourself and your life? Of course not, wanting to improve is a worthy endeavor.

So, how do you endeavor to improve your life without ending up feeling bad about yourself? Remember why you want to improve your life and also acknowledge what is already going well.

Remember Why Do You Want To Improve?

You have the power to choose where you put your focus. If you want to change something, first acknowledge that there’s a problem, then decide how you would like to change it.

Once you know where your want to go, keep your focus there instead of the problem itself.

Remember to Acknowledge What’s Already Going Well

Take some time to look at yourself and your life and acknowledge what’s already good about them. If there are areas of your life that are going well, appreciate yourself for doing such a good job.

Taking time to do this regularly will help you remember that you are a capable person and deserve to congratulate yourself. Really, go ahead and do it now, you deserve it!

Conclusion

Improving yourself is a worthy goal, but don’t get caught up in focusing on the problems in your life. Avoid any potential blows to your self esteem. Keep your focus on your goals and remember to regularly spend time acknowledging what’s already going well.

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If your current results in life aren’t as good as you would like, you need to put yourself on a mental diet.

Brain Input = Physical Output

Most of us are aware of how important it is to eat healthy foods if we want to have a healthy body. There is similar relationship between what you feed your mind and the results you have in your life.

The majority of modern folks tend to have a mental diet that consists of news, television, modern music, gossip, mindless online entertainment, video games, and magazines.

While all of these things have the potential to give your mind a positive message, the sad truth is that most of them do not.

• Video games are often violent.
• The news is often negative and full of fear.
• Many popular magazines offer mindless entertainment and gossip.
• A lot of music contains either mindless or negative messages.
• The vast majority of television, movies, and online media is also mindless, negative, or violent.
• Many social circles are focused around gossip, complaining, or activities that don’t serve to improve your life.

Take a look around you. How successful and happy are the majority of people out there? Debt, stress, mental illness, suicide, and relationship problems are becoming more and more prevalent every year.

If you want your results to be better than average, you need to stop feeding your mind the same things that everyone else does. f you want to have different results than everyone else, you need to do things differently than everyone else.

Focus On A Mental Diet That Will Benefit You

What do you think would happen if you started taking some time every day to read or listen to something that was educational, uplifting, or inspiring? What would learning a new skill or talent do for your career or business? Everything that you invest in your mind today will benefit you as you move forward through life.

• If you regularly feed your mind books and articles on time management, you will tend to become very good at managing your time.
• If you regularly feed your mind books on spirituality, you will tend to become a more spiritual and loving person.
• If you regularly feed your mind with stories and techniques related to success, you will start becoming more successful yourself.
• If you learn a new skill, you become more valuable to your employer or your customers.
• If you hang out with other people who more positive and successful than you currently are, you will start to become more like them over time.

Whatever it is that you want to change in your life, decide what it is that you want instead, then start immersing yourself in it.

• Read books on the subject.
• Hang out with others who have already achieved what you want.
• Take a course on the subject.

Conclusion

By feeding your mind the right mental diet, your life will automatically begin to be influenced by ideas of greatness and excellence.

I think Mark Twain hit the nail on the head when he said:

The man who does not read great books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Put yourself on a healthy mental diet today and watch the results in your life start to change almost automatically.

If you have ever tried to make lifestyle changes using the old school method of willpower, you know how hard it can be. Typically, the long-term success rate is about 5%.

Without getting overly technical, here’s why:

• Your conscious mind is where you make decisions and where your willpower resides. It makes up about 3% of your brain-power.
• Your subconscious mind is where your habits and beliefs reside. It makes up about 97% of your brain power.

Imagine having a tug of war between two people. One side represented by your conscious mind, and the other side represented by your subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is going to by 32 times stronger than your conscious mind. When these two minds start pulling against each other, who do you think is going to win?

Your habits (subconscious mind) will almost always win out over your willpower (conscious mind).

Thankfully, it is possible to use the power of your subconscious mind to make changes almost effortlessly.

Create New Habits By Retraining Your Subconscious Mind

The easiest way to make positive lifestyle changes is stop trying to fight against your subconscious mind and start retraining it instead.

The subconscious brain learns through repetition. That’s how you developed your bad habits in the first place. You do something a few times and it starts to feel normal and familiar. You keep doing it for a while and it starts to become second nature. Keep it up for long, and you’ll develop a habit that’s hard to break.

The good news is that you can also create habits with mental repetition. With enough mental repetition, your subconscious brain will begin to absorb and hold on to these new habits that you’ve imagined yourself having. When that happens, your outer life will automatically begin to mirror the changes you’ve been imagining for yourself.

The only willpower you will need for this is the self-discipline to take 20 to 30 minutes a day to apply some mental techniques. The key thing to remember is that you will need to do them for at least 30 days straight before you start noticing any outward changes. If you miss a day, you need to start your count over again.

To begin, you first need to be clear about what new habit you would like to create. Be as detailed as possible. Once you’re clear on what you want to create in your life, start using one or more of the following three methods on a daily basis for the next thirty days.

1. Visualization

Visualization is fancy way of saying “use your imagination”.

To use visualization to effect change in your life, imagine with as much detail as you can, the new reality you would like to create.

So, if you want to change your eating habits. Imagine yourself being healthy and lean. Imagine yourself making healthy food and portion choices.

Always imagine it from the first person perspective. What would all this look like if you were seeing it through your own eyes. What would it feel like to eat and be healthy?

Give it as much detail and emotion as you can.

2. Affirmations

Affirmations are positive statements that you repeat to yourself over and over again.

Affirmations should:

• be specific.
• be written in the present tense.
• be phrased positively.
• include an emotional element.

Example of a bad affirmation:

“I will no longer be overweight by May of next year”

Example of a good affirmation:

“I am so happy and excited that I now weigh 140 pounds”

You probably shouldn’t repeat your affirmation for 20 minutes straight each day. It’s better to split up your time into several five minute sessions.

You can either close your eyes and repeat your affirmation over and over, or even better, use a mirror and look yourself in the eyes and repeat them.

3. Hypnosis

Hypnosis is a technique that can be used to bypass the conscious mind and directly communicate with the subconscious mind. A good hypnotherapist should be able to help you. Or you can use audio self-hypnosis programs. The Hypnosis Network has some excellent hypnosis CD’s that are all developed by highly acclaimed experts in the field of psychology and hypnosis.

Conclusion

Stop trying to use willpower to make changes in your life. Instead, harness the power of your subconscious mind and use it to your advantage. Imagine your new, positive habits into reality.

You’ve probably heard the saying; “Nothing ventured, nothing lost”. It’s true. If you never do anything risky, there’s little chance that you’ll fail or get hurt.

The problem is, the opposite is also true; “Nothing ventured, nothing gained”. If you never dare to take any risks in life, you aren’t going to achieve much either.

Human beings are both very resilient, and very resourceful creatures. We are very adept at recovering from tragedy and failure. Take advantage of this and start taking more risks in life. If you never dare to fail, you will never have the opportunity to succeed, learn, and grow as a human being either.

Here are few things to consider when you’re facing a fear of failure:

1. Staying In Your Comfort Zone Can Be Painful

When you hold yourself back from taking full advantage of everything that life has to offer, you are staying within your comfort zone. This might seem like the best way to minimize the amount of pain in your life, but there is a dark side to playing life safe.

The dark side of staying in your comfort zone is that you are also giving up on your goals and dreams. This can be a painful experience, both now and in the future. When you’re on your deathbed, do you think you’ll be glad that you played life safe, or will you regret that you didn’t live your life to the fullest?

2. There’s No Shame In Trying

Most people aren’t going to judge you negatively for trying to achieve something in your life. If they do, they really aren’t the kind of people you want in your life anyways.

I personally have a lot of respect for people who are willing to put themselves out there and go after what they want. It really doesn’t matter if they’ve succeeded yet or not. The fact that they’re trying shows that they have character traits worth admiring.

3. There Is An Opportunity Cost To Not Taking Action

If the fear of failure is causing you to pass up on great opportunities, how much is it costing you? The stories of history are made up of men and women who took risks, big risks. If you want to leave your mark on the world, start taking some risks of your own.

If you fail to act on your goals and dreams. If you fail to take advantage of the opportunities that life puts in front you. You are doomed to a life of mediocrity.

4. Face Your Fear Head On

Remember the first time you tried doing something new? It was probably scary at first because you don’t know what you were doing. There was also a likely chance that you could get hurt if you screwed up. But the more often you did it, the better you became at doing it. After a while, it was no longer scary.

A good example of this is learning to ride a bike. When you first looked at that bike, it seemed really intimidating. If you didn’t get it right, you could get hurt. But after you got on that bike and rode it a few times, your confidence went up and it got easier and easier to do. Maybe you even fell and got hurt a few times, but those wounds healed, and as long as you had the courage to get on that bike again, you kept getting better and better at it. Eventually you were riding your bike with ease and enjoying all the benefits that your new found skill offered.

Face your fear of failure and just start moving toward what you desire. You might fall and get hurt a few times, but as long as you dust yourself of, and keep moving, the wounds will heal and you will get better and better. Eventually you’ll be a pro, and as you look back, you’ll see that you really had nothing to be scared of.

5. What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

If you’re wondering whether or not you should take a risk, try to determine what is the worst possible thing that could happen if you proceed. The first thing you’ll notice is that it usually isn’t nearly as bad as you first thought.

After you’ve figured this out, see if you can come up with a contingency plan to help deal with this problem should it arise. Having a good plan to deal with a potential problem will make you feel much more secure when you decide to take action.

If you can’t come up with a contingency plan, try to determine how long it would take you to recover from this “worst case scenario”. In most cases you could probably recover in a few days to a few months. If failure isn’t permanent, why not give it a try? You might just end up succeeding if you do.

6. Failure Is A Learning Opportunity

Failure is not a negative if you understand that it is one of the most valuable teachers you could ever have.

Failure can teach you what doesn’t work, as long as you are willing to learn the lesson. When you fail, take some time to step back and evaluate what might have caused the failure. Once you understand why your last attempt didn’t work, apply that lesson to your next attempt.

Each time you fail, you have the opportunity to become better. When you are able to look at failure as a teacher instead of something unpleasant, it loses its’ ability to cause you fear.

Thomas Edison, one of the greatest inventors in history, understood this concept very well when he said:

“I never failed once. It just happened to be a 2000-step process.”

7. Failure Is Nothing Personal

Failure is about results and nothing more. It isn’t a personality trait.

If you tried something and you failed, it doesn’t mean that you are failure. All it means is that the approach you tried failed.

Don’t take failure personally. Instead, use it as a measuring tool to determine how effective your last attempt was. As long as you don’t give up, you haven’t failed, you are simply learning and growing.

Get Moving

Don’t let the fear of failure hold you back any longer. Start using these tips today and start enjoying a life lived to your fullest potential.

How Your Self-Esteem Affects Your Life

Self-esteem is simply how you judge your own ability to deal with the challenges of your life.

When you have low self-esteem, you are always worried that you won’t be able to succeed. You worry about what others might think of you. You worry that you lack the skills and abilities to deal with the problems and challenges that life might throw your way. In short, you are scared of life and other people and this fear holds you back from living life to the fullest.

Conversely,when you feel confident in yourself and your abilities, you are willing to take more risks in life. You believe in your ability to handle any challenges that life might throw your way and you rarely worry about what others think of you. This fearlessness allows you to take full advantage of everything that life has to offer.

Here are some specific examples to help illustrate…

10 Benefits of Having High Self Esteem

1. You are more resilient to life’s difficulties because you are less likely to give in to despair or defeat.
2. You are more confident in your abilities, so you are more willing to risk being creative. Higher creativity leads to more success and higher pay.
3. You are more ambitious in all areas of life because you believe you can achieve your goals.
4. You will enjoy more nurturing and supportive relationships. We usually hang out with people who are like us. If you are confident in yourself, you will also attract confident, healthy, successful people into your life.
5. You will treat others with more respect and love because you do not perceive them as threats that could hurt you. When you treat others with respect, they will treat you in the same manner.
6. You will feel better in general. You will wake up feeling confident and expectant of good things for the new day.
7. You will worry less since you are confident in your ability to deal with adversity. This will allow you to use your time and energy for constructive purposes instead.
8. Fortune favors the bold. When you feel confident in yourself, you are willing to take more risks because you know that you can deal with whatever comes your way. People who are willing to take more risks end up being more successful in life.
9. You will enjoy a fuller social life. When you feel good about yourself, you don’t hesitate to talk to new people. Each new person you talk to is a potential new friend, business partner, customer, or romantic interest.
10. You will be better at using criticism to improve yourself. Because your self-image is strong, being criticized is no longer an emotionally crippling event. You can objectively listen to the criticism and decide if there is any truth to it or not. If there is, you can use that truth to improve yourself.

Conclusion

Too many people are struggling with the debilitating effects of low self-esteem. If you are one of them, don’t despair. It is possible to feel better about yourself!

By following a few simple exercises, you can start enjoying the benefits of high self-esteem. Don’t hold yourself back any longer. Get started today!

Well, you can, and it really isn’t difficult when you know how.

However, before we talk about how to boost your self-esteem, it would be helpful if you first understand why you have low self-esteem in the first place.

Why You Have Low Self-Esteem

Low self-esteem develops as a result of long-term negative reinforcement. Constant, ongoing reminders of our failures and dissapointments from both others and ourselves.

As a child, If you were being good, you heard very little from your parents. But if you were being bad, you were punished. This type of parenting tends to leave a child with an unbalanced impression of themselves since they only ever heard bad things about themselves.

Unfortunately, children usually pick this habit up and they end up ignoring their own successes and berating themselves for their failures as they grow up.

If you’ve just spent your whole life hearing and saying mostly negative things about yourself. It’s no wonder your self-esteem is suffering!

If you want to boost your self-esteem, you need to start balancing your perspective. Start acknowledging your achievements and successes in life. Here are 3 ways you can get started today.

3 Easy Ways To Boost Your Self-Esteem

1. List Your Past Successes

Start by remembering and acknowledging your past successes. We all tend to remember more of our failures and forget about our achievements as we go through life.

To correct this, take some time and write down a list of at least 50 things you’ve accomplished in your life.

Think of things like hitting a home run in little league, getting an A in a difficult class, graduating from school, saving up enough money to buy your first car. All of these of things are accomplishments that you deserve to be acknowledged for.

Once you have your list completed, keep it and review it any time you feel your self-esteem lagging.

2. Keep A Victory Journal

Focusing on the past isn’t enough, you need to start acknowledging the success of your present life as well.

Keep a daily victory journal where you write down all the successes of your day. You can use old fashioned pen and paper, or you can keep an electronic journal on your computer.

Keep track of everything that you are proud of yourself for accomplishing that day. Nothing is to small. If you took the time to eat a healthy meal that day, feel free to recognize yourself for it. You deserve it!

By writing down your successes, you will tend to remember them better. A mind that is full of images of your achievements will go a long way to boosting your self-esteem. And just like the successes of your past, you can also refer to this journal any time your self-esteem needs another boost.

3. Surround Yourself With Reminders Of Your Success

Another great way to remind yourself of your accomplishments is to surround yourself with visual reminders of them. You should put your trophies on display and frame that newspaper clipping about yourself. Hang your diplomas and certificates in a prominent spot. If you have pictures from award cermonies or other events where you were being recognized at, hang those up as well.

Every time you see these things, they will serve to remind you of just how successful you really are.

Conclusion

Doing these three things on a regular basis will reinforce your mind with positive thoughts and images of yourself. As the positive thoughts grow, the negative ones will be crowded out and will slowly disappear. While this process is happening, your self-esteem will see a steady improvement. The longer you keep it up, the better you will feel about yourself.

Don’t waste any more time. Take action now to boost your self-esteem and start enjoying a happier, more successful life.

PS – Join us for our next post where we will be discussing the benefits of high self-esteem.

The story begins when I decided to visit a local Buddhist center where I live. Twice a week this center offers teachings and guided meditations which anyone can attend. I had never been before so I decided to check it out.

The evening started out with a guided meditation. After the meditation, the monk began a lecture on how to be happy. The lecture lasted about half an hour and I walked away some really interesting information.

What We Mistakenly Think Will Make Us Happy

If I asked you, “What would make you happy”, what would you say?

Would you tell me that you will be happy when:

• You get a pay raise.
• When you marry your soul mate.
• When you’re a millionaire.
• When you’re healthier.
• Once you’ve had a vacation.
• When you buy a new home.
• When your jerk of a neighbor moves away.

The common denominator to all of these answers are that they are all things outside of ourselves. This is what advertising and social proof teach us about how to be happy.

We’re bombarded with information everyday that tells us that in order to be happy you need the types of things we listed earlier. The problem with this type of thinking is that it gives your power away.

When you start looking to other people, places or things to make you happy, you’ve given your power to be happy away to everything around you. You end up spending all your time and energy trying to manipulate everything around yourself in order to make yourself happy.

This approach often doesn’t work because you have very little control over the world outside of yourself. And the odd time it does work, the happiness rarely lasts for any extended period of time.

Happiness Comes From Within

So if happiness doesn’t come from things outside of ourselves, where does it come from? It comes from within us. You have the power to decide whether or not you are happy.

We all seem to have an innate need to decide if something is good or bad. We pass judgment on things outside of ourselves. If the car breaks down, we judge that as a problem. If the noisy neighbor moves away, we judge that as a good thing.

The thing is, nothing is inherently good or bad on it’s own. We are the ones who make a decision on what is good and what isn’t.

How To Be Happy

The key to lasting happiness is to become a master of your mind. Learn to control your thoughts and stop placing judgment on things around as being good or bad. When you can do that, you attain an inner peace that nothing can disrupt.

So how do you do that? Two key things are needed:

1. Become conscious of your thoughts and learn to question them

You don’t need to monitor every thought that crosses your mind. That’s a nearly impossible task. However, you can use your emotions as a guide to show you which thoughts you need to examine.

If you are feeling any negative emotions, you can be sure that your thoughts are negative. Ask yourself; “why am I feeling this way?”. Then remind yourself that you don’t need to depend on anything outside of yourself for your own happiness. That person, place, or thing holds no power over you. You have the power to choose to be happy.

2. Meditate

Meditation is a tool that will greatly assist you in mastering your thoughts. It actually develops new neural pathways in your brain that will help bring a more balanced and holistic perspective to your thinking.

As these new neural pathways develop, more of the brain becomes active in your thinking processes.

As you begin to see things from new and different perspectives, the old preconceived ideas of them being good or bad begin to drop away and you begin to see things as they really are. These things are no longer good or bad, they just are.

When this happens, you begin to feel an inner peace and happiness that comes from within. This inside happiness cannot be shaken by anything outside of you.

Conclusion

If you want to know how to be happy, you must understand that happiness is an inside job. Stop trying to control everything around you. Learn to control your thoughts instead.

Question your negative thoughts and remind yourself that you decide whether or not you are happy. No one, or no thing, has the power to decide that for you.

Begin a meditation program. Meditation will help you to stop judging things as good or bad. Instead, you will begin to feel an inner peace and happiness developing that nothing outside of you can change.

If you master these two things, you have become a master of your own happiness.

The benefits of a positive attitude are worth the effort. A positive attitude will generally make people like you more, bring you more success in all areas of life, and will make you a happier person.

The simplest way to decide which things you should avoid, and which things you should seek more of, is determining what type of messages they are feeding your mind with. If you keep feeding your mind with negative messages, then it becomes difficult to be a positive person.

The subconscious brain learns through repetition so whatever you repeatedly expose your mind to will eventually become your habitual way of thinking. Changing a habit can be difficult so it’s best if you try to minimize the negative stuff, and increase the amount of positive stuff you feed your mind with.

So, in order to help you determine the types of things you should be trying to avoid, here is my list of …

5 Things You Should Avoid If You Want To Be More Positive

1. Negative Media

(By media, I mean things like; television, movies, websites, and books.)

We’re inundated with messages all day long by advertisements, television, magazines, books, the internet, and more. It’s easy to get caught up in what we’re reading or watching and not really consciously think about exactly what messages these things are giving us.

I personally gave up watching television years ago. I found it to be both a waste of time and a source of negative influence in my life. I haven’t missed it yet.

I’m not saying you have to give it up yourself, but take some time to examine what your watching and reading. Is it making you feel good? Or is it making you feel worried or angry? If it’s making you worried, or angry, your best bet is to change the channel or flip the page.

2. Negative Music

Some time ago I was digging through some of my old CD’s from my teenage years. Back then I was really into heavy rock music. Being somewhat excited by this find, I decided to listen to some of those CD’s over the course for a couple of days.

After just two days, I started catching myself singing some really horrible lyrics to myself. After I caught myself doing this, I was surprised by how quickly music and lyrics can penetrate into our thoughts. It didn’t take me long after that to get rid of those old CD’s. Now I rarely turn on the radio except to listen to classical music when I’m on a long drive.

When you listen to music, become conscious of the message that it’s driving into your mind. If it’s not something you would like to be thinking about. Change the song to something with a more uplifting message.

3. Mainstream News

I’ve found that most mainstream news networks seem to publish almost all bad news. I’m not sure why bad news is considered worthy of publication, while good news is not? (If you know why, please let me know).

At any rate, if you feel the need to be informed, you can pretty much find out what you might need to know by taking a few minutes just to scan the headlines on major news websites. If you find something really important, go ahead and read it. Otherwise, stick with the headlines. This is much better than exposing your mind to a full hour of bad news on your television each night.

You might also want to take some time to expose yourself to some good news as well. It will help balance your perspective of what’s going on in the world.

4. Negative People

If you want to get a good idea of what you’re like, just look at the 5 people you spend the most time with in your life.

Chances are that your income is within about a 10% range of what they make, you talk about a lot of the same things, and you do many of the same things. This is normal. You’ve probably heard the sayings; “Like attracts like” or, “Birds of a feather flock together”. Most of us like to hang out with people who have similar hobbies and interests.

The problem is, if these people are negative, chances are that you’re negative too. Try to start spending some time with some people who have more positive personalities. Their positive attitudes will start rubbing off on you.

5. Negative Thoughts

It’s easier to catch yourself thinking negative thoughts than you might think. Just take a second to examine how you’re feeling.

Thoughts always proceed emotion. If you’re feeling positive emotions, you can be sure that you’re thoughts are positive as well. If you’re feeling negative emotions, you are definitely having negative thoughts.

So what can you do if you find yourself feeling negative? Stop whatever you’re doing, close your eyes, and spend at least 30 seconds thinking about something that makes you feel good. Maybe it’s a loved one, maybe it’s a recent vacation you took, or even your family pet. The key is to find something that makes you feel better.

Usually just 30 seconds is long enough to get your thoughts onto a new track of something more positive. But don’t be shy either. If you want, or need, to hold on to that thought longer, do it.

Conclusion

Avoiding these things will certainly help keep your mind free of negative influence. But you should also take some time everyday to feed your mind with some positive things as well:

• Read an uplifting story
• Write out a list of things you’re grateful for
• Spend time reading a personal development book
• Spend some time reading through this blog

Hopefully you’ve found this post to be helpful. I invite you to share what you’re trying to do to help yourself be more positive?