What is Self Confidence?
Self confidence comes when you are comfortable with who you are in the world. You feel worthwhile, with a right to occupy your place in the world. You feel capable, competent, relaxed, happy, energetic and positive.

People with high self confidence are likely to be successful and popular. They will be living their lives on their own terms - having a high degree of control over their environments. They will work in a job they enjoy, hold friends whose company they enjoy, live in a home they love with a partner they love.

High levels of self confidence give people inner strength, making them more resilient than others. They will be more in touch with what they want, and more motivated to go out into the world and get it. They will weather the inevitable setbacks better, and apply more stamina to breaking through the resistance into their chosen world.

Sounds good, huh?

Why Is Self Confidence Sometimes Low?
Personalities are formed in our early years. Before the age of 11 (some say before the age of 7) the major building blocks off our personalities are laid down. It is upon these blocks that the rest of our lives is founded.

During these formative years, the there are two major factors influencing the formation of our personalities:

• Parenting
• Schooling

Self Confidence & Parenting

Most parents didn't read the manual. They may have been very young and inexperienced, with little support from their own parents. They may be highly stressed by work, relationships, financial pressures and so on. They may be overwhelmed by the parenting burden, and they may also be damaged by their own parents.

Even the most loving and balanced of parents will propagate problems from their own environments and personalities, into the minds of their children. And average or struggling parents may do far worse. Children are, by definition - learning how to do everything - they don't come pre-skilled. If parents are impatient and critical with their learning offspring, they will wear down a child's sense of competency, instilling the notion that they are natural failures. If parents are openly angry, their children will learn that the world is full of angry people, and that much of what life has to offer is painful and frightening. Now when you consider that - in a child's eyes, their parents are all-knowing GODS who cannot be wrong, you'll come to see how children can be devastated by the parenting process. They will come to know that they no good at anything, and that failure attracts anger and pain. That's how poor parenting builds a child with low self confidence. And a child with low self confidence grows up - almost inevitably - to be an adult with low self confidence.

If you are a parent or working in education, please carefully consider the impact of every interaction you have with children and try to grow happy and successful people with high self confidence.

Self Confidence & Schooling

Even if your parents are pretty good, your school is probably going to bite you. Young children are raw human beings who have not yet been "civilized" in the ways of not being cruel, selectively articulating their thoughts. If they see that you have a big birth mark on your face, they are going to mention it, and they may already have learned to make fun of it, and to gather in groups based on social fit - the IN crowd and the OUT crowd. This is all natural playground stuff, but it is also a jungle where the vulnerable can learn some dreadful truths about the world. Principally, they learn that they are in the OUT crowd, and that the IN crowd are going to make them suffer for it.

Self Confidence & Beliefs

So, with one of both of these environments delivering many negative messages to a young child, you can see how damage can be done. Young children are especially vulnerable, because they have have no broader context by which they can dismiss the poor behaviour of others as irrelevant, and they have few personal skills to limit the damage. They will simply drink in those negative messages and swallow hard. This critical period in a child's is where their beliefs are laid down.

Let's reflect on what belief is. A belief is something you KNOW is true, without needing to think about why you believe it. Beliefs can be so entrenched and permanent that we don't even know that we hold them. Yet they sit there in our heads, silently directing our behaviour. They tell us that we're not meant to be successful, that we can't find a good-looking partner and so shouldn't try, that taking risks is always a bad idea, that the world is a scary place, that any group we might aspire to belong to is going to reject us, because we're in the OUT crowd. In such a world, what's the point in trying? It's just a recipe for misery.

I know from my coaching practice the truly astonishing power of beliefs. Here's an example:

Geoff is intelligent and a competent professional, but in social situations he considers himself something of a disaster, and his life is a much smaller one than he would prefer because of it. He is struggling with two sides of his self. One wants to be outgoing and fun-loving; the other fears rejection. Unfortunately, this latter half seems to be in charge. So one half of Geoff keeps putting himself in promising situations then his other half keeps sabotaging them. Geoff is very frustrated and out of ideas.

Whilst coaching Geoff, it became clear that Geoff was apparently blind to a whole raft of things he could do to build friendships in social situations. Through very careful questioning, I was able to uncover some interesting history.

As a child, Geoff had a minor physical abnormality and was taunted in the playground. At that time, Geoff learned two things about life:

1. He was ugly
2. People are cruel

More than 30 years later, Geoff still held these beliefs. In other words, he acted on the basis that he knew they were true. Though parts of his intellect knew that the facts did not support these beliefs, he continued to hold them inside, from where they drove his destructive behaviour. Before coaching he did not consciously know any of this.

Through some challenging dialogue about options, Geoff recognised that he was ruling out hugely productive things he might do in social situations, because they could not work. And they could not work, because HE WAS UGLY, AND PEOPLE ARE CRUEL. Geoff began a difficult process of un-learning these beliefs and now has a growing repertoire of social skills. He is taking more social risks and doing more things socially. He