Con: With
Fidence: Faith
Confidence: With Faith
Confidence is not about doing, but the way you approach something. The attitude with which you do things. I might not know how, but let me approach it with confidence.
What builds confidence?
– Knowing your values. Your values hold you in a certain way. If you are pulled out of your values, then your confidence might fluctuate as well.
What damages your confidence?
– Comparison. I am only seeing a very small part of myself and not seeing myself with integrity. I am on a separate journey, how can I compare myself with another? Denying our own experiences can be a real killer.
– Holding onto past experiences. This doesn’t allow me to move on. I need to re-frame things and begin to look at the situation in a different way and to throw light on it.
How to do this?
1. If something happened, first create distance between you and the event. This comes with time or in supportive people’s company.
2. Reflect: Look back at what was going on. Begin to explore. We tend to blame someone else. What were the emotions going on inside you? Where were they coming from?
3. Contemplation: It is about bringing knowledge into the situation. How can I use that experience to do something differently next time?
4. Visualisation: Renew, recreate the event in your mind’s eye and visualise the best possible outcome, where you achieve your potential. This is like setting a blueprint that later unfolds.
If you know something is going to come up, think about it. How you are going to approach it, what will you say? It is a very simple thing. In visualisation, I can see the opportunities that I haven’t been given before.
5. Game of a hundred blessings: Look at the world with the eyes of appreciation. You will become more aware of the positive. If I am focused to see, they are there in front of me. Do this for yourself, begin to look for the things that makes you feel good.
6. Refocusing: Re-framing and refocusing are connected. If you are asked appreciative questions, they make you focus on the positive. Go back to an individual experience where success was experienced in your mind, set a similar experience as an aim for the future – a vision for one year’s time. It is like a compass. In this process of reaching my aim, if things challenge me I work through them, then I come back on course again, I re-align with my goal. It is a game that we play in our mind. What do you want it to be like?
7. Re-source: Take regular time for silence. At first you might feel even if it is silent outside, your mind is busy. Then you become more focused after a while. A thought is created, then a pause, waiting for a new inspiration, like gentle ripples massaging the shore. What you are looking for comes to you because the mind is more focused and silent.
Raja yoga is an active process where I focus on a thought, I explore that thought, it is not just thinking. Thought and experience are working at the same time. As I experience, my mind becomes silent, my thoughts slow down, then it is one thought followed by an experience. It is not about silence, but less thought and more experience.
We say that we want the freedom to be ourselves. I want to be able to have freedom from myself. I want to be free from myself so that I can start experiencing my original self; to move from the state of current human limitations into a stage of perfection and light. If we break free and experience this for even just a moment we are left with the incentive and the motivation to want to go there again. If I am motivated nothing is going to stop me. If I have a glimpse of this even for a second I will want to go there.
