Paul Hata


Self confidence is an excellent attribute that can help a child succeed from an early age. Instilling self confidence at an early age will enforce the importance of possessing the necessity of this attribute and ensure your child will experience success early on is his or her life.

Low self confidence can be exhibited in many ways depending on your child. There are many cues to look for that can tell if you child is beginning to lose or experiencing low self confidence.

These cues can by extreme shyness, hesitance to begin projects, negative attitudes towards him or herself, overt frustration at having to try new things, and inability or fear when it comes to making even the simplest decision.

Parents can begin teaching self confidence immediately after their child is born. Provide endless encouragement when your child is developing new skills or trying new things. Young children especially need encouragement since they are continuing to develop new skills on a daily basis.

Whether physical or mental, these important developmental times can range from your child taking his or her first steps to learning to read.

Each step in your child’s development is exceedingly important and, in order to be completed as soon as possible, should be thoroughly reinforced in a positive manner. This positive reinforcement will encourage your child to work harder in completing the task at hand.

Teachers can teach self confidence from the moment a child enters the classroom. Carefully monitor each child’s progress in each subject and skill covered in your curriculum to ensure your students are accomplishing their academic goals and not falling behind with any aspect of your teaching.

This is invaluable to teachers of all subjects and all ages of children. Create ways to praise or reward your students when classroom or individual goals are accomplished. This will encourage children to strive to meet these goals and reinforce their self confidence.

Take great care not to use negative measures to reproach or criticize your students. Correcting issues using a positive demeanor can enable the child to understand your point more clearly while retaining their self confidence.

Negative tones or attitudes taken towards your students can do considerable harm to both their mental and emotional development and well-being.

Create situations where your child can work on his or her self confidence. Enroll your child in a sports program or other activity to allow him or her to express interests and develop new goals. A child who participates in activities such as athletics, dance, scouts, or music has more opportunities to try new things and develop new skills.

These opportunities will allow children to further develop their self confidence while gaining new friends and experiences in these activities. Take great care to support your child in any activity he or she decides to undertake.

Your child may not be the next great baseball player or a world famous piano prodigy, so be aware of the varying levels of success that can be accomplished. A child can succeed by maintaining a positive attitude and attacking each hurdle with enthusiasm and enjoyment.

Do not necessarily associate success in the activity with the overall success of the experience. Even though your child may not be able to dunk a ball with professional precision, he or she will have gained a phenomenal experience and self confidence during the duration of the activity.

When working with children of any age, you must lead by example. If your child shows that you possess a great amount of self confidence, he or she will develop a great amount of self confidence as well. Conversely, if you lack self confidence and show your child this by being negative, hesitant, or meek, he or she will not understand or appreciate the necessity of having high self confidence.



Gwyneth

Jon Mercer


There are lots of techniques and products that claim to be able to retrain your brain and improve self-confidence. But is there any clear evidence that it is possible to affect your subconscious and fundamentally change the way you feel about yourself?

I’ve been a personal development coach for pretty long time now, so I’ve obviously come into contact with many people desiring to make changes in their life. And one of the most common and fundamental changes a person can make is to improve their self-confidence.

One technique that claims to be able to improve self-confidence is affirmations. Affirmations are probably the easiest of all personal development techniques to employ. They simply require you to repeat — or affirm — positive statements to yourself. Research has shown that when used on a daily basis, affirmations can have some effect on self-confidence. However, this technique can take a very long time to show results, and in many cases, those results can be minimal.

Another technique to retrain your brain for increased self-confidence is to use self hypnosis. Hypnosis bypasses the critical conscious mind, to present commands or “suggestions” to the subconscious mind. Research on hypnosis suggests that approximately 55 to 60% of all individuals can be hypnotized, so while this technique can be useful to many people, it is by no means a fool-proof solution.

Self hypnosis in particular is difficult to assess as a meaningful way to improve self-confidence. Again, research suggest that self hypnosis can be useful for a wide range of issues, including calming fears and anxieties, and building greater self-esteem and confidence, though again, not everyone is likely to benefit from this technique.

Still another method of “mental reprogramming” is the use of subliminal suggestions. While there is much controversy about the effectiveness of subliminal commands and suggestions, several recent studies indicate that subliminal messages are both registered and understood by the subconscious mind.

The University of Bethlehem in Israel recently conducted subliminal research wherein participants were randomly shown subliminal images of either the Israeli or Palestine flag. The results of this research clearly indicate that subjects who had been exposed to the subliminal flag images altered their political points of view depending on which flag was used.

Follow-up research suggested that being shown the subliminal flag image could even cause the participants to change their voting behavior in the Israeli general election. This and other similar studies suggest that, not only are subliminal suggestions and symbols clearly understood, but they also have the power to change both attitude and behavior. While more research is necessary, the current studies suggest there is the potential to “retrain” states of mind and behavior through the use of subliminal suggestions and symbology.

Finally, one increasingly popular method to improve confidence is to use a “Gestalt” approach, which incorporates all of the above techniques and more in an attempt to “overwhelm” the subconscious mind with a deluge of new information. While there is little formal research on the effectiveness of this “all-inclusive” method of retraining the human brain, anecdotal evidence suggests that this may likely be the best approach.

The “Gestalt” method of overwhelming the subconscious mind is actually quite similar to brainwashing. The only difference being that the individual is in control of the process, and is basically attempting to brainwash themselves.

Overall, there isn’t enough empirical evidence to say with certainty how effective any of these methods may be to improve self confidence, though it stands to reason that using a multi-faceted approach to “retrain your brain” is likely to produce the best results.