March 27, 2013

How to Better Yourself

I often say that the best way to better your life is to better yourself. With improved knowledge, skills, habits and attitudes, you can visibly enhance how you live and how happy you are (not necessarily in that order).

To do this, it’s key to have a good understanding of how to better yourself as a person. Self-improvement is not something you just do. You must follow certain steps in order to do it right. And the fact many people defy or don’t even know these steps is why they have such a hard time enhancing themselves.

As a coach, I’ve been helping others better themselves since 2006. And I’ve seen them achieve some impressive changes. Based on this experience, I’d like to give you my perspective on how to better yourself and show you 4 important strategies to follow.

1. Define Precise Personal Development Goals

The truth is that “I want to be a better person” is a resonating ideal, but a horrible personal development goal. Because it’s not specific enough. With such a goal, you don’t know where to start from, you’ll randomly jump from one area of self-improvement to another, and you’ll make little progress.

So, once you realize that you want to better yourself, it’s time to set more specific personal development goals. This entails thinking about the specific areas where you want to improve yourself the most and defining precise competencies to develop.

As a rule, try to only work on developing a few competencies at a time, so you don’t overburden yourself. You not only need to have specific goals, but you also need to program when you’ll work on them so you don’t try to work on all of them at once.

2. Get the Best Information Available

Better

In the realm of self-improvement, there is a lot of information. There are tens of thousands of books and the internet is crammed with millions of articles.

Unfortunately, over 90% of the information available is ineffective. It’s general, simplistic, impractical, repetitive, poorly researched or just plain wrong. It’s so easy these days for anybody to write a few articles and post them online or even publish a digital book, that this niche has become flooded with poor quality material.

The implication is that in order to truly better yourself and do so effectively, you need to seek and find the best information available. Do your research, assess the information carefully, and be open-minded but use your critical thinking at the same time.

As a side note, most high-quality personal development information out there is information that you have to pay for. It’s in the form of books, courses, etc. This doesn’t mean that you won’t find quality information for free as well, or that all paid information has quality.

However, usually, the best information will come from real experts, and these people will provide some information for free but they will also charge for a lot of it. After all, they’re experts, they know how valuable what they have to offer is and they do make a living out offering it. So be willing to invest some money in bettering yourself as well.

3. Take Massive Action

In my experience, real self-growth means 20% at most getting information, and at least 80% applying it. This means you’ll have to spend at least 4 times more time practicing information than learning it.

Personally, I’ve met many folks who declare that they are into personal development, but sadly, all this means for them is reading lots of self-help books and applying almost nothing.

That’s not how you better yourself, which is why such people barely make any changes. They acquire an understanding of what and how they need to change, but they don’t actually change.

Wanna know how to better yourself? Equipped with the right info and precise goals, you take massive action. Always keep this in mind and concentrate on taking a lot of action. Be primarily a doer, not a reader.

4. Use a Social Support System

This is optional, but it’s a great way to speed up your personal development progress. As a rule, we make much more progress, much faster, in any area, if we surround ourselves with people who seek similar goals, who offer us positive advice and help us stay motivated and focused.

With respect to self-improvement, it’s ideal to make friends who are also into self-improvement and to support each other on this journey. You can even form some sort of mastermind group with them, meet regularly, discuss your goals and progress, and give each other constructive feedback.

You most certainly wanna stay away from toxic people who constantly criticize you and try to discourage you from thinking you can change. They will only pull your down when you could be going up.

Bettering yourself is a journey. And it’s not only the destination that can be very fulfilling, but the journey in itself to boot. In fact I think the only real way to do personal development is by enjoying the process at least as much as you enjoy the final outcome.

So as you better yourself, always remember to have fun!

Image courtesy of h.koppdelaney

Filed Under: Personal Development, Success Tagged With: , , , 4 Comments
December 19, 2012

Good Comebacks When Someone Makes Fun of You

I write a social confidence newsletter which currently has over 10.000 subscribers. One frequent question I get from subscribers is: “What are some good comebacks to use when someone makes fun of you?”

This question reminds me of my days in middle school and part of high school when me and my peers used to constantly tease each other and we would always try to have really good comebacks to what the other person said. It was a permanent battle of comments and I was pretty lousy at it.

So when I receive this question about good comebacks, I assume it’s from some 13-year old who’s in an environment with a bit too much testosterone, where putting other people down is a way to feel powerful or achieve some form of status.

Many times, this is the case. But equally often, the question comes from a full-grown adult who is dealing with teasing or denigration from others and still doesn’t know how to handle it. I guess some things never change.

So, whether you’re a teen or an adult, I want to address this issue and give you the tools to handle such situations.

Good Comebacks for What? 

I know you think that what you need is some clever comebacks. If someone could give you some very witty lines that you can use in every situation, you’d always come out on top and you’d show those people who make fun of you.

But that’s not what I’m gonna do.

comeback

Because, no matter your age, this game of who-has-the-cleverest-comebacks is silly. It’s a strenuous clash that goes on relentlessly and nobody truly wins. Sure, it can be fun sometimes, but it’s not regularly.

This is why the best advice I can give you is to not engage in these battles of comments. If you engage, you just add fuel to the fire. As a rule, when a person makes fun of you, focus on disarming the situation rather than making fun of them back. It’s much simpler and it yields much better results.

Coming from this perspective, good comebacks are not aggressive or derogatory. Rather, they reflect a disinterest in playing this game, and not because of fear or shyness, but because you don’t find it worth your time.

Today, my most common reaction when someone makes a joke about me is to make some lazy statement in response like: “Yeah man, whatever” or “You don’t say?”

And if they ask me a sarcastic question, I just give a ridiculous answer that shows I’m not taking it seriously. Like, if they ask me: “Why are you so thin?” I might answer something like “I’m going for the world record for slenderness.”

Interestingly enough, if a person makes fun of me once, they usually never do it again. Or they then do it rarely, and in a gracious manner.

One thing I’ve learned quickly is that trying to find slick comeback lines and using them robotically is the wrong approach. What is the right approach?

The right approach is to gauge your social confidence level in situations where others make fun of you. Because if you have confidence and a good self-image, I promise you that you will create just the right effect.

You’ll naturally come up with good comebacks, you’ll always have something effective to say and you’ll deliver your lines with such poise that others will not want to mess with you.

The fact of the matter is that most people who wonder about good comebacks they can use are pretty insecure and they approach social situations in a weak, defensive way. And this is the real problem.

If this is you, the best thing you can do is work on building your social confidence. The rest will take care of itself.

Now, since this is a different topic altogether, I address is separately in this special presentation. Make sure to watch it, and you’ll learn not only what makes you lack social confidence, but also how to develop it.

I’ve gone from being very insecure to feeling at ease in social situations myself. And now, the very idea of trying to find good comebacks and memorize them for future use makes me laugh.

But I understand where you’re coming from. It’s just that a couple of clever lines will only give you a temporary fix, and even that one will only work occasionally. The real solution lies in building real social confidence. Make this your priority.

Image courtesy of World Series Boxing

Filed Under: Inspirational, Personal Development Tagged With: , , , , 3 Comments
November 4, 2012

What Do Women Want In a Man?

Any straight man, at one point or another in his life, will ask himself: “what do women want in a man?” And when he realizes he doesn’t truly have the answer, he’ll go searching for it.

One of the most common ways for guys to find out what do women want in a man is by asking his lady friends what they want in a man. Supposing they have a big enough sample of female friends to ask this, it may provide some value for them in understanding women’s desires.

However, this method is highly flawed because of two reasons:

1. Many women will simply not be completely honest. They’ll tell the guy what he wants to hear or what will make them look good rather than the naked truth; many times without even realizing.

For instance, a woman may not disclose to a guy that she wants a man who can dominate her physically in bed, because she is afraid that she’ll seem like a slut, but deep down she does have this craving.

2. Women often don’t know themselves what they want in a man. So they’ll talk about what they think they want in a guy, but it’s frequently not what they truly want and what generates emotional attraction towards a guy. And this phenomenon often applies for men as well.

Considering this, what is the best way to know: what do women want in a man?

I believe the best way is to study women’s behavior towards men.  And, if the sample of women is big enough, you’ll reach the most reliable conclusions.

If a women says she wants s guy who is sensitive, but she constantly dates ice-cold guys despite a generous availability of sensitive guys around her, then she obviously wants ice-cold guys rather than sensitive ones.

If she says she wants a guy who is tall and dark, but then falls madly in love with and desperately pursues a guy who is short and blonde, it’s likely that her desire for tall, blonde guys is only at a superficial level.

Working as a communication and confidence coach, having built for myself a pretty rich and active social life, and being a keen observer of human nature, I have noticed a few highly consistent patterns in numerous women’s behavior towards men, which indicate convincingly what women want in a man.

Of course, every woman is different, but there is definitely on overarching theme in women’s desires regarding men.

So, if you’re asking yourself “what do women want in a man?” I’d like to share with you my conclusions. I believe that above all, women truly want and react emotionally strongly to these traits:

1. Confidence

Yes, it’s true. Confidence is, by far, one of the most attractive traits you can have. The men that I know who are very successful with women are very different, but the one quality they noticeably have in common is a high dose of confidence.

They are comfortable in their own skin and they like themselves as they are. Consequently, they are sociable, they are genuine in social interactions, they are persistent and they don’t take crap from anybody. And women quickly pick up on this and it involuntarily generates attraction.

Fortunately, confidence is a psychological trait that you can develop through deliberate action. Trust me; I help people develop it for a living.

If you want to learn the steps you need to take in order to build confidence effectively and quickly, then make sure to watch this unique presentation I have created, in which I’ll reveal them to you.

2. Masculine Energy

Ultimately, a woman desires a man, not a girlfriend with a penis. There are certain traits that come off as (primarily) masculine, just as there are certain traits that come off as (primarily) feminine.

A masculine energy is what you convey when you manifest such masculine traits.

There is a wide range of characteristics that are generally masculine: decisiveness, dominance (not the same as aggressiveness), firm voice tone, strong eye contact, seeking challenge, having clear goals and ambitions in life, perseverance, practical thinking, being protective, achieving status, and so on.

The lesson here is two-folded:

1) Don’t be afraid to convey the masculine traits you have (yes, you have lots of them, even if you may have lost touch with some). Put them out there and be proud to be a man.

2) Develop your masculine traits. Pick just one or two of them at a time, and work on improving them.

3. Good Social Skills

If you look during social interactions at the guys women react very well to (they flirt with them, they seek their attention, they ‘eye-fuck’ them) these guys will demonstrate some class of sharp social skills.

Maybe they are funny or they are very fluent verbally. Maybe they are charismatic or they know how to make a girl feel special. Maybe they are good listeners or mesmerizing story tellers. Or maybe they have a mix of these qualities.

Any way you cut it, they have a range of good social skills. The bigger the range and the higher each skill in it, the more attractive they are.

We live in a social world; we always have. And this is why social skills make all the difference in the world, and they are worth enhancing. Again, this presentation will prove very useful here.

4. An Interesting Lifestyle

The key is to not be just another guy who goes to a boring 9 to 5 job, then watches TV and plays computer games all day long. Too many guys are like that, and they all lack an edge.

You don’t need to have a James Bond lifestyle either, but it does prove tremendously helpful if there are just a few elements in your life that make it unordinary, above average and exciting. They make it interesting and then women feel the natural urge to be a part of it, and to be with you.

This is why I always encourage men to take on interesting hobbies, to try new things, to constantly challenge themselves and to do things they are passionate about. A man with an interesting life is very sexy.

Okay; at this point you may be asking yourself: but what about money, looks and fame?

My answer is that these things do help, but now having theme is definitely not a deal breaker, at least not with the vast majority of women.

At the end of the day, confidence, masculine energy, good social skills and an interesting lifestyle outweigh everything else. What do women want in a man most of all? It’s these 4 traits.

This is great because, while there are limits to how much you can improve your looks and few people will ever become millionaires, becoming more confident, masculine, and skilled socially, and gaining a more interesting lifestyle are within your reach, no matter who you are.

So, all that’s left for me to say is: get out there, better yourself as a man, live the best life possible and have fun. Your attractiveness will soar as a result.

Image courtesy of sebastien.b

Filed Under: Personal Development, Psychology, Relationships Tagged With: , , , , 2 Comments
June 20, 2011

Wow! 22 Personal Development Guides

If you are a personal development passionate, if you want to make the best out of your life, this is literally a once in a lifetime offer and I’m writing this post to let you know about it as soon as possible.

Some of the best and the brightest personal development bloggers out there have joined forces to give you their e-books, courses and guides in a package like you’ve never seen before. Check it out here.

Here’s why this is an awesome learning and growth opportunity for you:

  • There are 22 products in this package, worth a total of $1087.
  • For only 72 hours, you can have them all of them as a bundle, for only $97.

The package covers pretty much the entire range of personal development: money, career, happiness, confidence, relationships, productivity, traveling, love, and the list goes on.

Some of the tiles in this pack that grabbed my eye include:

  • Focus by Leo Babauta, one of the best and most read bloggers alive;
  • Reclaim Your Dreams by Jonathan Mead, who is an authority on, well, reclaiming your dreams.
  • A Daring Adventure collection, by Tim Brownson, one of the truly good life coaches out there.

What you have here is a compilation of the finest information products in the realm of personal development from people who really know their stuff. Their combined power to help you transform your life is impressive.

I can’t think of enough ways to tell you that you don’t want to miss this opportunity. Each guide in this package sells separately for anywhere between $37 and $77. For only 72 hours, you can get all 22 of them for just $97.

This special offer expires at Noon Eastern, on Thursday, June 23 and it will not be repeated. So you might wanna hurry up. Check out this package here.

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Filed Under: News, Personal Development Tagged With: , , , , Leave a Comment
March 1, 2011

The Benefits of Coaching

In the realm of personal development, there are two things I passionately believe in: people skills as a worthy set of skills to develop and coaching as a worthy method to employ. I believe in coaching because I believe in the benefits of coaching.

Coaching can take your personal development further and faster than any other method, in whatever direction interests you. Articles, books and DVDs can all help you a lot, but in comparison with individual coaching done right, they’re like a tractor racing against a Ferrari.

The way I see it, training is also a second rate option in comparison with coaching. The more confidence coaching I do, the more I believe in the benefits of coaching and the less I believe in the effectiveness of training, which is why I now do little training.

The benefits of coaching are numerous. However, I think there are five benefits of coaching that take the cake and make coaching the ultimate personal development solution. Here they are:

1. Seeing Your Blind Spots

Often, there are critical things we simply don’t see. I call these our blind spots. We can have blind spots about the way we come across socially, the limiting beliefs we operate on, the real consequences of certain behaviors, etc.

Since you can’t change or take into consideration what you don’t see, blind spots typically keep you stuck and thwart your improvement. Well, the best way to see your blond spots is none other than individual coaching.

Some of my communication coaching clients made big leaps forward by seeing crucial blinds spots they had. Seeing one of their blind spots was occasionally so mind-blowing that it kept them awake at night. It’s quite the transformational phenomenon.

2. Choosing the Best Action Steps

Once you know what specifically you want to achieve, the key question is: How? From improving your people skills to improving your time management, from getting more dates to making more money, there are so many tools and techniques available that choosing the best ones can be a burden.

This is where good coaching comes in, as a way to determine the tools and techniques that work best and that work best for your context, your problems and your person. Thus, you can pick the right actions steps for you and make huge progress instead of running in circles.

3. Implementing Each Step Effectively

One thing I’ve realized as a confidence coach is the enormous difference between understanding an idea conceptually and applying it correctly. Most people tend to think they’re practicing a new idea properly, when in fact they aren’t.

Coaching provides a coach the opportunity to study how you’re implementing certain ideas and give you accurate feedback. Role-plays, practical exercises and debriefings are great tools in the coach’s toolbox for this.

Thus, a coach can guide you into implementing what you’re learning effectively and can ensure that you’re shifting in the right direction, that you’re evolving not just changing.

4. Taking Massive Action

Fundamentally, changing any area of your life is at most 10% theory and at least 90% practice. You won’t see real results unless you commit to taking the insights you get and the ideas you discover and acting on them.

One of the key benefits of coaching is that it can help put the focus on results and take massive action. A good coach will help you get motivated, trust your power to change, get out of your comfort zone and do considerably more than you would on your own.

5. Staying On Track

It’s convenient to say that every person is responsible for their personal development and that if you don’t stick to it, then you’re just lazy or lack willpower. But the psychological fact is that humans find it hard to stay motivated to do something, even if it’s important to them.

Even the most successful and strong-minded people can easily get distracted and they frequently procrastinate if they just rely on willpower. The good news is that you don’t need to rely on willpower alone.

Through coaching, you can get precious support in staying on track with your personal development. A coach can help you set specific goals, take action daily and remain committed to the process. You’ll make progress week by week and the cumulative progress will be huge.

One small warning in the end: Keep in mind that as effective as coaching can be as a method, it is only one part of the equation. Another important part is the coach, and you want to pick one that works in a professional manner and can help you obtain quality results.

It is only the right coach that can make the noteworthy benefits of coaching show. So if you decided to pick coaching as a personal development method, you have my congratulations. Now it’s time to pick the right coach for you.

Image courtesy of HikingArtist

Filed Under: Personal Development, Success Tagged With: , 5 Comments
February 10, 2011

Low Self Esteem

Low self esteem seems to be one of the most devastating psychological conditions alive. Millions of people struggle with low self esteem, as it sabotages their people skills, their social lives, their careers and almost every other area of their existence.

Overcoming low self esteem can be done successfully. I’m going to touch on this subject shortly, but first I want to help you get a better understanding of what self esteem is and what causes its altitude. I believe it is only armed with such knowledge that you can take effective action.

What Is Self Esteem?

Psychologists define self-esteem as a person’s overall evaluation of his or her own person and the resulting feelings towards his or her person.

Therefore, as one can deduce, low self esteem means a low evaluation of one’s own person and the associated negative feelings towards oneself.

If that doesn’t tell you much, don’t worry; it doesn’t tell anybody. The art is in the details of self esteem. One such essential detail relates to the sources and forms of self esteem.

Conditional Self Esteem

For many years, the dominating view in psychology was that as a personal evaluation, self esteem is dependent on a person’s competence, effectiveness and likeability. The subsequent consequences of this view were simple:

  • If you are a seasoned and competent professional, then you have high self esteem. If you are just a novice, then you have low self esteem.
  • If you achieve success and performance in what you do, then you have high self esteem. If you fail, then you have low self esteem.
  • If other people praise you and they like you, then you have high self esteem. If they criticize you and reject you, then you have low self esteem.

Self esteem is thus a slave to the external and internal conditions of our lives. The more we improve these conditions, the better we can see ourselves and feel about ourselves.

There is however an alternative view on self-esteem emerging in psychology in the last years, a view I am in consent with as a coach with a background in psychology. According to this view, what I have described above is just one side of self esteem, meaning conditional self esteem.

But, there is also another side: the unconditional one.

Unconditional Self Esteem

This is the real crown jewel. Unconditional self esteem is not dependent upon anything. You may change, your life may change, but it is not affected by any of this.

Unconditional self esteem is not based on your achievements, your skills or how other people see you. It comes from realizing and embracing your intrinsic value as a human being.

When you comprehend that your worth stretches beyond what you do, what you own, what you are capable of, and how others see you, than you have unconditional self esteem.

I believe confidently that this is a much more powerful form of self esteem to have. It’s an inner force and drive that you can always count on, no matter the stupid things that you sometimes do as a human or that sometimes happen in your life.

It’s like your very own 500HP car that never runs out of gas.

Low Self Esteem Redefined

Now, with this new understanding, let’s look at what is low self esteem again.

Through the conditional perspective, low self esteem means an evaluation of your own overall competence, effectiveness and likeability as being poor. Here’s the key point: conditional low self esteem is not all bad.

Many people horribly underestimate themselves and thus, they end up with low self esteem that damages their lives. This is bad. However, a very good but unrealistic image of yourself is also bad practically, as it leads to poor decisions and childish choices.

In addition, there is some solid research today that points out how people with high conditional self esteem are often narcissistic and antisocial in their behavior. Not the kind of folks you want at your Christmas table.

Low unconditional self esteem on the other hand is always bad. It is a reflection of your inability to see your inner worth.

When your unconditional self esteem is high though, it means you see your inner worth with clarity. A lot of scientific research links this to more success, to better health and in combination with good people skills, to better relationships.

Overcoming Low Self Esteem

All this discussion has also been a huge overture to a few key points I want to make on overcoming low self esteem:

1. Before anything else, think carefully if your low self esteem is based on a faulty self image or not. It may be just a sign that you’re not growing or that you’re selling yourself short.

2. If you conclude that your low self esteem is indeed based on a faulty self image, then you overcome it by becoming more aware of your strengths, your successes and the people who like you (the conditional side) or your intrinsic value (the unconditional side).

3. Changing a false self-image can only be done effectively by gradually changing your automatic thinking about yourself. This is what you want to focus on. When the way you talk to yourself habitually improves, your self esteem improves with it.

In whatever ways you handle low self esteem, do not ignore the unconditional side of it. Competence and performance are all good, but they do not define you. There is a deep bright light inside of you and it shines unconditionally.

Image courtesy of vernhart

Filed Under: Attitude, Inspirational, Personal Development Tagged With: , , 5 Comments
December 23, 2010

How to Develop Accelerated Emotional Healing

One of my favorite comic book characters is Wolverine from X-Men. I find that accelerated healing power of his to be super-awesome.

Now in real life, unless you’re a Navy SEAL or something, you won’t have much use for accelerated physical healing. However, I find that most people find tremendous value in accelerated emotional healing.

What Is Accelerated Emotional Healing?

Quite simply, it is the ability to bounce back quickly when something bad happens: your partner breaks up with you, your boss fires you, a loved one passes away, they cancel the next season of Dr. House and so on.

Some people try to not feel any pain altogether when bad things happen, which often doesn’t work. A much better approach is to focus on bouncing back from pain quickly instead of not feeling it at all. The people who are able to do this are usually the people who are the happiest with life.

4 Steps to Accelerated Emotional Healing

In my communication coaching, I often touch on the subject of emotional healing. I believe there are four steps that work best in making it happen fast.

1. Accept Life as a Rollercoaster

Some of us get trapped in this illusion that we can somehow reach a point where our life is smooth and nothing bad happens anymore. Real life doesn’t work that way; it’s a rollercoaster with ups and down.

Accept life as a rollercoaster and keep it in mind like this. As a result, bad things won’t take you by surprise and you will find it easier to get through them and get over them. Don’t become paranoid expecting terrible things to happen everyday, but don’t delude yourself that life can ever be completely smooth either.

2. Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

Have you ever noticed this pattern unraveling? A person gets into a relationship; they’re very excited about it, they start spending more and more time with their partner and less and less time with their friends, until they eventually have no more fiends and the relationships consumes all their free time.

Then when the relationship ends (as it often does), the person has absolutely no social support system. They feel lonely, they get depressed, they take about two years to fully get over it. This is what happens when you invest all in one relationship, both in your personal and your professional life. For this reason, I encourage you to keep your people skills sharp and your social circle strong.

3. Don’t Repress the Pain

Often, people try to drown their pain using distractions. Drinking, eating, partying, having sex all can be used for this purpose. Unfortunately, as more and more psychological research now points out, distractions only make the pain submerge for a while and when it comes back, it comes back even stronger.

You don’t want to wallow in self pity, but you don’t want to repress you pain either. Pain is a natural part of the healing process. Sometimes you just need to accept it and up to a certain point, let it be.

4. Practice Realistic Thinking

If the hurt a bad event creates has a very high intensity and lasts unreasonably long, it’s frequently due to unrealistic thinking. In the heat of the moment, you start thinking to yourself that “this is intolerable” or “life will suck from now on” and so you feed the pain instead of letting it drip away.

Of course, this is nothing more than dramatizing and unrealistic thinking. If you want to heal quickly, an essential thing to do is to take conscious control of your thinking and correct it when it distorts the facts.

Accelerated emotional healing is a truly amazing super-power. When you have mastered it you can embrace life as it is, with the good and the bad, and you can always make the best of it.

Image courtesy of Monja

Filed Under: Attitude, Personal Development, Psychology Tagged With: , , , 14 Comments
December 8, 2010

Overcoming an Inferiority Complex

An inferiority complex is a persistent feeling of being inferior to others in some way. It is usually connected with a real or imaginary shortcoming in physical appearance, intelligence, personality, education, social status or economic status.

I believe that an inferiority complex is one of the nastiest psychological traits you can have. Seriously, it will mess your life up in a sadistic way, as well as your social skills.

Many people struggle with a feeling of inferiority for years, even their whole lives, and this has ramifications in most aspects of their existence. As a communication coach with an attitude-based approach, I have something to say about overcoming an inferiority complex, and this article is it.

First, My Story

inferiorIn high-school, I used to have an inferiority complex because I was very thin. Yeah, I know many people have the opposite problem of being too fat. Well, I was skinny as a rail and I felt embarrassed by it.

Actually, I still am skinny as a rail, but it no longer bothers me in any way. It’s something I’ve learned not only to get over, but also to embrace wholeheartedly. Now, when I see people who have an inferiority complex, I totally understand where they’re coming from, but their state also seems silly from where I’m standing right now.

This is probably one of the reasons I find it fulfilling to do attitude and confidence coaching and help people who feel inferior to others in some way.

The Real Cause of an Inferiority Complex

There’s a big catch to overcoming an inferiority complex: you have to understand its genuine cause.

The apparent cause seem to be the fact you are inferior to others around you in a particular manner: you’re short, you’re fat, you’re bold, you’re poor, you’re less educated, you have an extra nipple etc. However, that’s not the real cause.

You see, we are all inferior to other people in some ways, and superior in others. We all have our combinations of qualities and flaws and overall we’re not that different from each other. My point is that a certain flaw is not a realistically sufficient reason to have an inferiority complex.

The real cause of an inferiority complex has little to do with reality and it has a lot to do with how we process it. In order to get an inferiority of a complex, you have to dramatize in your head the meaning of a certain flaw.

You have to tell yourself that, for example, you are so short you look like a midget, that everybody is making fun of you and that this in intolerable. Thus, you make yourself feel shitty (but the scientific phrasing is that you develop a complex of inferiority).

How to Overcome an Inferiority Complex

Since an inferiority complex is created through your thinking, it is through your thinking as well that you can overcome it.

If you want to learn how to shift from feeling inferior to being confident in interactions with other people, I encourage you to check out my instructional presentation on building social confidence. It will show you my practical formula for boosting your confidence. You can find it over here.

I have worked with clients with inferiority complexes and the way they’ve made real progress was to systemically combat their distorted thinking patterns. This is also what has worked for me.

Basically, overcoming an inferiority complex implies a set of key shifts in thinking:

  • Realizing that any flaw you have is not as bad as you think;
  • Realizing that having a certain flaw does not equal with not having any personal qualities;
  • Realizing that all people have their flaws and most people have major flaws.

And when I say ‘realizing’ all of these, I’m referring to taking them in and making them a part of your automatic, everyday thinking.

Probably the most meaningful shift in thinking is understanding that there is a huge difference between being inferior to others in some way and feeling bad about it (a.k.a. having an inferiority complex).

What Does It Take?

All the stuff you may hear about just being yourself, meditating or visualizing yourself in a better way is in my experience hyped up self-help bullshit and it will do little good in dealing with a complex of inferiority.

Overcoming an inferiority complex requires a scientific and pragmatic approach. The techniques I use in my work on attitude change are mostly from the areas of Cognitive Behavioral Coaching (CBC) and Therapy (CBT), which I encourage you to research.

CBC is not a miracle cure; it is a psychological change system which involves repetitive action, consistent practice and taking things in small steps. If you do the work, you will get the results.

I’ll teach you the most powerful CBT techniques to overcome inferiority and gain conversation confidence in this presentation. Don’t miss out on it.

Equip yourself with the right tools and a lot of perseverance, and I promise you that you’ll free yourself from an inferiority complex. Then, when you’ll look back and remember how you used to feel about certain parts of yourself, it will seem sooooo silly!

Image courtesy of Jarostaw Pocztarski

Filed Under: Attitude, Personal Development, Psychology Tagged With: , , 37 Comments
August 25, 2010

Get Off the Therapy Couch! Why Exploring the Past Is Nonsense

Client: “I’ve always been lacking the confidence to speak up. In childhood, my parents were very harsh with me and would always criticize me when I opened my mouth. There was this one time when I was 9…”

Me: “Aham (cough)… I don’t really need to know that. Give me an example of how this lack of confidence manifests itself NOW.”

The fascination many people have with doing a heavy, skilled analysis of their past is something I understand very well and in terms of practical benefits, I find pointless.

Coaches have traditionally been making a lot of fun of some types of therapists for focusing to much on the past and not enough on the present. I guess somebody forgot to inform the potential clients as well about this frequent weak spot of therapy.

Why We Like to Explore Our Past

There are several reasons for which I believe that many of us put a lot of emphasis on exploring our past in our personal development:

  • We have a need to know ourselves, which includes understanding clearly how our past experiences left their mark on us. This is all fine but, do you really want to put a lot of effort and sometimes money in that?
  • We have this idea (probably induced by cheap self-help books) that there is this one negative experience in our past which is single handedly responsible for a certain flaw or fear we have. And we need to find it.
  • We think that in order to change our beliefs or get rid of our fears, we need to understand exactly their source in the past. And when we do and we embrace our past, the change often happens just like that.
  • We sometimes us it as a way of running from the responsibility of acting and changing ourselves. We focus on the past so we can forget about the person development work required in the present.

The Reality of Personal Development

I will sometimes read a psychoanalyst’s opinion on how our present problems are rooted in the past and we need to skillfully uncover the past in order to heal the present. And it will crack me up; because in all my research on this topic, I haven’t found a single convincing shred of evidence to support this.

Analyzing your past, digging dip and unraveling all sort of stuff may sound cool, but it is basically a useless process judging by the improvements it creates. The bottom line is this:

Exploring your past is not necessary or very useful in transforming yourself.

Why? Because our present ways of thinking and feeling may have their origins in the past, but it doesn’t really mater. Our beliefs, thinking patterns and emotions have a life of their own in the here and now.

Consequently, it is in the here and now that we need to address them if we wanna see results. Understanding the kind of experiences that created them may give us some extra clarity and help us discover irrational thinking, but that’s about all it can do. And we only need a small amount of past exploration to get this effect.

This is why I use principles and techniques from CBC (Cognitive Behavioral Coaching) when I assist my clients change their thinking and emotional reactions, in order to improve the people skills they aim to improve. CBC has a focus on the present and on getting real, quantifiable results.

If you’re looking for improvement, focus on the present. Identify those limiting ways of thinking you have now and combat them now. Do this repeatedly, systemically, and you’ll see some real progress. The answer to your personal development is not in the past, it is in this moment.

Image courtesy of geroco

Filed Under: Inspirational, Personal Development, Psychology Tagged With: , , , , 22 Comments