3 Fast and Easy Ways to Improve Social Self-Confidence

Believing that you are unacceptable or unlikable socially can be painful. Lack of self-confidence can make you get afraid to interact socially. When in situations where you will be observed by others or where you need to speak in front of a crowd or to strangers you might feel anxious. This might cause you to act awkward. You might avoid eye contact and behave too cautiously. The idea that you are socially unacceptable might get reinforced to you when you feel that other people react strangely towards you.

As the result of the challenges you face you might end up avoiding social contact even though you know being in social places and interacting with others is a big part of any persons' life. We cannot always avoid social situations in living our daily lives. You might get invited to parties where friends are celebrating or by colleagues at work celebrating their birthdays. It is not always possible to avoid interacting socially.

So how do you improve social self-confidence when you do not have it? Before I tell you how, let me start by telling a little story about a rat.

When you have a rat in the house that eats up your tomatoes and messes up your fruits. To catch it, you would need to know how and when and where it operates. You would want to catch it when the house is quite with a piece of cheese in the mouse trap or place a rat poison in places where the rat is likely to hang around.

A similar approach is applicable to improving self-confidence. You need to understand how your mind operates and what patterns you go through so that you can interrupt those patterns and form new ones.

The first trigger is mentally, you get images of you doing something that will cause you embarrassment. What you think is what you feel. Your thoughts cause you to feel anxious. When feeling anxious you respond by avoiding interacting socially and the result is that you lack social self-confidence. To overcome social anxiety therefore you need to influence this pattern. Let's draw how the pattern looks like:

social situation (environment) - images of embarrassment (thought) - anxiety, fear (feelings)- avoidance (response)

We do know that we cannot change the external environment (sometimes you will be in a social situation whether you want to or not). We can only influence ourselves internally in terms of how we respond to the external environment. Constantly trying to avoid social situations may serve as a temporary solution. However, this cannot guarantee long-term success towards improving how you interact socially. What you can change is the thought process, your feelings as well as your responses.

Past failures might have conditioned you to view every social situation that you need to interact in as anxiety triggering. We are human after all human, once we are burned we never want to move near a lit candle. So to help you improve social self-confidence you might first need to forget past failures and try to change how you view social situations first. Here are the 3 ways that I have developed to help you overcome social anxiety and improve social interaction.

1. View social situations as opportunities by recalling past success

Some successful sport teams have a tradition in which they take players through past successes before a cup final. The players get shown previous cup finals before the match and get taken through all the trophies that the team has won before. The past success of the team helps players get motivated to win another cup final for the team. If you ever had past successes interacting socially use this as anchors for yourself. Remember how you successfully delivered a presentation in front of an audience and interacted very well with a stranger. Have you ever been in a situation where you delivered a public speech and did well despite your fear? This is the time to have these memories fresh in your mind. Remembering your past successes and celebrating past victories can help you believe in yourself and be able to overcome present anxiety feelings toward social interactions.

2. Use visualization to empower yourself for social situations

Access the power of your subconscious mind by constantly picturing yourself interacting well socially. This need not take long. Just spending 5 minutes seeing yourself approaching a stranger and having a pleasant conversation or picturing yourself delivering a great presentation publicly can help. Once our mind has been where we want to be, our bodies just need to support us in getting there. By mentally picturing yourself having social self-confidence, you will be able to give yourself better strength to play out your mental images in real life when the situations calls for it. Be careful though, visualization needs to be done before a social interaction. Doing this actively as you are interacting socially might be problematic because it will force you to think about what you are doing. When thinking about what you are doing you are more likely to get anxious. So visualize before social interactions and try as much as you can to remain natural when in social situations.

3. Make social interaction a challenging game of exposure

Sometimes we take ourselves too seriously and this does not help. Improving social anxiety requires you to occasionally have a playful attitude. Use a playful attitude to expose yourself socially. Exposure is scientifically proven to be very effective when it comes to improving social anxiety. I know this is the last thing that you might want to hear because when you are uncomfortable interacting socially the immediate response is to avoid social interaction. However, the more exposure you get interacting socially the better you will become. Aim to start a small conversation every time you are in a social situation with a stranger. This can be as simple as saying hallo to a cashier each time you pay for items in a store or when shopping. Just asking the cashier his/her name and thanking him/her for the service is enough to get you going.

Few of us remember to appreciate cashiers when shopping, you will make their day just showing appreciation and equally improve yourself. Try as much as you can to expose yourself.

Petrol attendants are also good people to interact with in a non-threatening environment to start a conversation. This is better done playfully so that you see it as a challenge instead of getting too serious and reading too much on the results. The more you bring it to your awareness to interact with others the better you will expose yourself and improve how you interact socially.

Spending time with a friend who is not afraid to interact socially might also help in this situation. Human beings learn by seeing also. If your anxiety is specific such as falling in a public place then get a friend to pretend falling in a public space so that you can visually see that the results are not as worse as you thought they would be. Expose yourself without emotional attachment. Use a playful attitude with any friend who is comfortable interacting socially and have fun doing so. Practice makes perfect, this is also true in getting rid of social anxiety.

http://ezinearticles.com/?3-Fast-and-Easy-Ways-to-Improve-Social-Self-Confidence&id=9448989

4 Signs That Someone Is Insecure

... and what narcissism has to do with it.

You’re with someone you’ve just met, and within seconds you feel that there’s something wrong with you.

Up until meeting this person, you were having a pretty good day, but now you’re starting to question everything from the way you look to the accomplishments you’ve racked up over your life so far. Let’s say the person is the mother of one of your children’s playmates. Not only does she seem perfectly outfitted, but in simply introducing herself, she’s made it clear that she’s got an important job and a perfect family life, and that she associates with all the right people.

It’s easy to get thrown into a personal purgatory of self-doubt in these situations. Whether it’s a social contact or a business interaction,  people who want everyone to know how big they are can make the rest of us feel pretty small. Just think how much better you’d feel if you could brush these situations aside and go on about your day without doubting yourself and your life.

It turns out that armed with a simple set of detection tools, you can not only help yourself feel better, but also recognize the weaknesses in the façade of those practically perfect people.

The psychology behind this process stems from the theory of the Viennese psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, who coined the term inferiority complex.

According to Adler, people who feel inferior go about their days overcompensating through what he called “striving for superiority.” The only way these inwardly uncertain people can feel happy is by making others decidedly unhappy. To Adler, this striving for superiority lies at the core of neurosis.

We now think of this striving for superiority as a feature of narcissistic personality disorder, that deviation in normal development that results in a person’s constant search to boost self-esteem. The two kinds of narcissists are the grandiose (who feel super-entitled) and the vulnerable (who, underneath the bravado, feel weak and helpless). Some may argue that at their core, both types of narcissists have a weak sense of self-esteem, but the grandiose narcissist may just be better at the cover-up. In either case, when you’re dealing with someone who’s making you feel inferior, there’s a good chance that narcissism is the culprit.

Narcissism doesn’t always reach pathological levels, but it can characterize people to more or less of a degree. Using the concepts of “overt” and “covert” narcissism instead of grandiose and vulnerable, some personality researchers believe that they can learn more about the type of narcissism you might spot in everyday life. University of Derby (U.K.) psychologist James Brookes (2015) decided to investigate the way that people high on these tendencies actually feel about themselves both in terms of self-esteem and self-efficacy, or one's confidence in their ability to succeed.

Using a sample of undergraduates—an important point to keep in mind—Brookes analyzed the relationships among overt and covert narcissism, self-esteem, and self-efficacy. The two forms of narcissism were not related to each other, supporting the idea that these two subtypes have some validity. Examining which were more related to self-esteem, Brookes found that those high on overt narcissism in fact had higher self-esteem: Their need to feel “special” seemed to play the most important role for these self-aggrandizing individuals. Covert narcissists, for their part, had lower self-esteem scores.

Looking at self-efficacy, or the feeling that you can reach your desired goals, the overt narcissists also won the day, compared to their more hypersensitive and insecure counterparts. In particular, for overt narcissists, the need to have power over others seemed to give them the sense that they could accomplish anything.

The Brookes study provides some clues, then, into what makes up the narcissistic personality. It can also offer insight into the ways you can interpret the actions of narcissistic friends, coworkers, or partners through examining their insecurities:

1. The insecure person tries to make you feel insecure yourself.
   When you start to question your own self-worth, is it typically around a specific person or type of person? Is that individual always broadcasting his or her strengths? If you don’t feel insecure in general, but only around certain people, it’s likely they’re projecting their insecurities onto you.
    
2. The insecure person needs to showcase his or her accomplishments.
   You don’t necessarily have to feel insecure around someone to conclude that inferiority is at the heart of their behavior. People who are constantly bragging about their great lifestyle, their elite education, or their fantastic children may very well be doing so to convince themselves that they really do have worth.
    
3. The insecure person drops the “humble brag” far too often.
   The humble brag is a brag disguised as a self-derogatory statement. You’ve all seen these on Facebook, when an acquaintance complains about all the travel she has to take (due to the importance of her job), or all the time he has to spend watching his kids play (and, by the way, win) hockey games. (The "Facebook gloat" is a bold-faced brag which is easier to spot but may very well have the same roots.)
    
4. The insecure person frequently complains that things aren’t good enough.
   People high in inferiority like to show what high standards they have. You may label them as snobs, but as much as you realize they’re putting on an act, it may be hard to shake the feeling that they really are better than you. What they’re trying to do, you may rightly suspect, is to proclaim their high standards as a way of asserting that not only are they better than everyone else, but that they hold themselves to a more rigorous set of self-assessment criteria.

Returning to the Brookes study, there can be aspects of overt narcissism that actually do work in helping the insecure feel more confident in their abilities. However, this comes at the price of making everyone else feel less confident. I wouldn’t recommend bolstering your sense of self-efficacy by putting down everyone else.

To sum up: Being able to detect insecurity in the people around you can help you shake off the self-doubts that some people seem to enjoy fostering in you. Taking the high road, and not giving in to these self-doubts, may also help you foster feelings of fulfillment both in yourself, and in the insecure people you know and care about.

www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201511/4-signs-someone-is-insecure

Quitting Booze For A Month Has Some Awesome Benefits

This is crunch time. Are you really going to commit to that resolution or have you already thrown in the towel after just six days? Well, if it has to do with cutting back on the booze, power through. You're not alone. Many people are participating in what's called "Dry January" or "Drynuary," which means giving up alcoholic beverages for a month. And apparently, it's worth it.

The staff at the magazine New Scientist decided to find out if such a short-term period of alcohol abstinence could actually have health benefits, using themselves as the lab rats. The findings of their small experiment suggest the answer is yes.

In late 2013, 14 members of the magazine's staff — all of whom consider themselves to be "normal" drinkers — went to a hospital in London and answered questionnaires about their health and drinking habits, then underwent ultrasounds and gave blood samples. Then, 10 of them gave up alcohol for five weeks, while four of them continued drinking normally. After, they returned to the hospital to repeat the tests.

"Normal" drinking for this group ranged from 10 units of alcohol per week — which is about eight bottles of beer — to 80 units, or 64 beers, per week. This may seem high, but keep in mind that drinking is a national pastime in England, and the doctor told them that none of them were "problem drinkers."

Now, listen to these findings. You'll want to put your wine glass down so you don't spill anything.

Dr. Rajiv Jalan, a liver specialist at the Institute for Liver and Digestive Health at University College London, analyzed the results. He said that that among the abstainers, liver fat — a preface to liver damage — fell by at least 15%. For some, it fell almost 20%.

Surprisingly, those who quit drinking also saw their blood glucose levels — a key factor in determining diabetes risk — drop by an average of 16%.

"I was staggered," said Kevin Moore, consultant in liver health services at UCLMS. "I don't think anyone has ever observed that before."

The only negative was that people reported less social contact.

However, the findings cannot predict how this abstinence would work in the long-run. Blowing off booze for the month of January surely makes for a healthier entrance into February, but we don't know if the benefits would persist come March, April, and so on.

Just because you stop for a month doesn't mean you can just go on a crazy binge for the 11 other months. Do that, and you'll likely just drive your liver fat and blood glucose levels right back up. What's so exciting about this study is that it shows how quickly the benefits were evident, so we can only imagine the effects of prolonged abstinence (or even just cutting back).

And if these British journalists who are accustomed to drinking 64 beers a week can do it, why can't you? Try it out and let us know how you feel at the end of #Drynuary!

http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-16932/quitting-booze-for-a-month-has-some-awesome-benefits.html