Of all the success qualities and characteristics a person can have, there is one that is the foundation for all others.

When you have this quality, every other success trait either comes along with it (like motivation, a high risk tolerance, the ability to bounce back after failure, etc) or can be learned very easily.

What I’m talking about here is self confidence.

Self confidence in simple terms can be described as the belief you have in yourself and in your abilities.

If you are a self-confident person, you will be relatively free from doubt, and will go about your life in a very assured and relaxed manner.

However, there is a thin line between confidence, over-confidence and foolishness that’s best illustrated by an example: Bill Gates bidding $45 billion for Yahoo is confidence; had he bid $50 billion, it would have been overconfidence; and if he had bid $75 billion, that would have been foolishness.

So, you must know where to draw the line based on reasonable do-able presumptions, but before that, here’s how you can increase your self-confidence:

Dressed not to kill

You shouldn’t wear clothes that hang out too dry – they kill your confidence! Wear smart clothes and go out wearing them after a refreshing bath – or whatever else makes you feel good about yourself. Maybe it’s getting your hair done.

You’ll feel great when you know you’ve left a good impression on people. Okay, no one’s asking you to look like the Duke of Stonehenge – just wear reasonably presentable clothes that look good on you and don’t cost a bomb to buy.

Posture!

If your back is slouched and you walk slowly, then it’s obvious your self-confidence has taken a hit. Plus, this posture makes you look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame!

If you want to boost your self-confidence then walk erect and at a purposeful pace.

Do unto others what they DON’T do unto you

Yeah, you got that right! No one’s said a kind word to you, no one has complimented you, no one has paid any attention to you when you’re talking because they are always so full up of themselves.

Well, you do the opposite – compliment people, look at them when they are talking, listen patiently to them and say nice things. You will automatically be viewed as a positive person and your confidence levels will bet a 5-star rating.

Get moving

Exercising can build humungous muscles on your self-confidence. Work out, stay in shape, make friends, enjoy yourself – you’ve got the picture, so go ahead and do a quick exercise right now!

Lead from the front

Lead yourself from the front – don’t shy away from any tasks, speak up when you think it necessary (but don’t argue) and don’t be a backbencher.

Don’t fear anyone or anything. Just muster up the will and the courage to do things and your self-confidence will beef up on its own.

Kill the superego

Everyone has an ego, but if they dwell too much on it, then it grows in size and they begin feeling overly important about themselves.

Ego is not confidence. Cockiness is not confidence.

This is wrong – do not ever act pompous or be rude to anyone, because if you do then people will start ignoring or avoiding you, and that will puncture the balloon of your ego really hard, killing in one go whatever little self-confidence you had. Remember, the humbler you are, the higher your self-esteem goes!

To build self-confidence you have to give up on that defeatist attitude and start thinking positively. Sure, others may snicker, but let them, who cares! People with low self esteem may care what others think about them, but not you.

You know there’s this anonymous saying that goes, “It’s not who you are that holds you back, it’s who you think you’re not”.

Does confrontation always have to be a bad thing?

When most people thing of confrontation, they think of negativity.

That’s because most confrontations are personal attacks.

Most of the population doesn’t know how to interact with each other when conflict arises.

They take things personally, get defensive and resort to insults.

No wonder so many people are divorced.

The biggest key to positive confrontation, the kind where you solve problems and move forward, is keeping it about the situation - NOT the other person.

Because after all, it IS about the situation. The situation is what needs to be cleared up.

When you start a sentence with “you” or “you are”, be very careful about the next thing that comes out of your mouth, because it will be taken personally.

If a particular situation isn’t going your way, rather than get angry and blame everything on the other person, take a step back, detach emotionally, and look at it logically.

I find it helps to completely remove yourself and the other person from the whole thing.

Take a third person view. Pretend these are 2 people you don’t even know.

As difficult as it may be, put yourself in each person’s shoes and analyze it from their view.

Ask yourself “Why might “Fred” be acting this way?”

“What reason might he have for thinking this is the right thing to do?”

And more importantly, “How might Fred react if Lola reacts by saying _____?”

Conflict can be difficult to deal with when you’re an emotional, right brained person.

Step outside yourself, and try thinking like a left-brain person would. Picture the whole thing like an equation that needs to be figured out.

What do you really want to see happen?

All pride and emotions aside, what are the best steps to take to get the desired outcome?

If the other person has reacted in a defensive way, what might you have said to provoke that? How can you resolve that so you can tackle the real issue at hand?

Take all emotion and personal feelings out, and you’ll begin to see a big difference.

Confrontation will stop being such a scary, negative thing, and any problems that arise will actually be solved.

Did you know that complaining is severely damaging to your health, financial success and your entire life?

Studies have shown people who complain frequently tend to have poor health, less satisfying and enduring relationships, and don’t tend to do as well in their jobs or make as much money.

The key to getting what you want in life is focusing your energy and attention on what you do want, rather than what you don’t want. By complaining, the focus is always on what’s wrong, what’s going badly.

So why do people continue to do it?

Well first of all, it’s a habit.

Most people have been doing it their entire lives.

In fact, the majority don’t even realize they’re doing it half the time.

Most people complain much more frequently than they think they do.

Don’t believe me? For the next 24 hours, pay attention to how many people begin a conversation with you by whining about something that didn’t go the way they wanted it to.

The most common reasons why people complain (and why it can be so difficult to stop) is:

- It’s a good conversation starter.

It’s much easier to begin a conversation with someone and find a common ground by complaining. (Can you believe it’s going to rain AGAIN today?…).

To get over this particular hurdle, rather than use a complaint to start talking to someone - complement them. It’s a much more positive way to start a conversation.

- Complaining keeps people from taking action.

This is the #1 reason most people complain. That way they can procrastinate and have plenty of excuses why they aren’t reaching their goals. There’s always a reason why it’s not possible to do what needs to be done. It’s much easier to complain about it than it is to find a solution.

Not only that, but for some crazy reason, we’ve been taught that it’s okay to talk negatively about yourself, but it’s not okay to “brag” about what’s going well!

- Preexcuses failure

Another very common reason people complain is to pre excuse failure. For instance, walking to a meeting late while complaining about how bad the traffic was, how there was a huge line at the dry cleaner, etc.

It takes all the responsibility off of that person, they no longer have to own up to the fact that they should have left earlier or been more prepared.

The first step to stop complaining is to become aware of it, then replace that complaint about what you don’t like, with what you do want.

The goal is not to act like everything is great and pretend you are no longer bothered by anything, but instead to seek out solutions.

Instead of playing the victim and simply stating that the situation is not what you want - figure out what you DO want, and seek to create that.

What can you do about the situation? Don’t look for problems, look for solutions.

Today I’m going to share with you a great concept I originally learned from my friend Kevin Wilke. It’s what he calls the 4 most deadly words.

These 4 words are so deadly in fact, that using them almost guarantees you won’t be as successful as you would like to be.

The scary thing is that you probably think them all the time without even noticing - which is really bad because that means you have habit of thinking this particular way.

And those 4 words are…

“I already know that”

You may have just caught yourself thinking that right after you read those 4 words. Now that is super deadly!

What makes them so deadly?

Because the moment you start thinking you know everything already, your mind closes - even to new ideas you don’t know.

This makes it practically impossible to learn new things, and to expand your awareness and achieve greater success and breakthroughs.

This way of thinking will keep you stuck where you are currently in life. It will hold you back, and might even cause your failure. Consider this: Your current way of thinking has gotten you the results you now have. So to get different results, you must change the way you think about things.

Don’t operate from an ego based mindset. Don’t close yourself off from learning and growing because you would rather think you’re smart and know everything already. They let their ego keep them trapped.

There’s a saying I really like that goes like this: “You can be right, or you can be happy”. Now of course, we’d all rather be right AND happy, but the point is that people can be so stubborn at wanting to be right (even if they’re WRONG), that it keeps them from growing and succeeding. I know people who are like this and they continue to get the same results, nothing ever changes.

I was that same way for quite a long time. Rather than open my mind to the possibility that there may be more for me to learn, I would instead search for some sort of proof that justified what I already believed. I hate to think of all the time I wasted trying to prove my point when I could have been learning.

Sure I got to be “right”. But it certainly didn’t make me successful or happy. I just got to bask in the miserable glory of being right, and not being open to different mindsets and ideas that would have improved my life a lot faster.

These days, I’m always looking to learn. I make sure never to say or think the phrase “I already know that”, and as a result end up learning more than I ever expected.

Now you may be asking, what about things I already do know?

Good question. Let me ask YOU a question now.

Do you really already KNOW it? Do you know it in and out? More importantly, do you DO it and LIVE it every single day?

Or is the reality that you just heard about it or read about it somewhere?

There’s a HUGE difference between learning something and truly knowing it.

Knowing something means doing it, not just thinking it or learning about it.

The reality is that, no matter how much you think you know about something, there is ALWAYS a possibility to learn new things. Especially when it comes to personal growth.

There are several personal growth books I read again and again, because each time I read one of them I get something different out of it than I did before.
Why?

Because each time I read it I have a different perspective. I’m at a different stage in my life, so I see things in a completely different light.

It’s amazing how you can read or hear what seems to be the same information multiple times and each time get something new out of it. This happens all the time.

Whenever I approach a situation or begin to read/watch/hear something and those deadly words pop into my mind, I immediately catch myself and ask “What can I learn from this?”

This forces my mind to not only be open to learning new things, but actually be looking for ideas I may not have picked up the first time around.

It feels really great to walk away from something knowing more than I did before. Feels much better than thinking I already knew everything they were talking about.

If you look at anyone who is successful for the long term, you’ll notice their desire to constantly be learning new things. Successful people don’t have the “I already know that” mindset. But that mindset is certainly common among poor and unsuccessful people.

Anything can be a learning experience if you choose it to be.

On this blog you will learn the principles, techniques and ideas that have taken me from a depressed, drugged up teenager with ADD who almost didn’t graduate high school (in fact I rarely went to class at all, and got D’s and F’s in nearly every class the entire time I was in Junior High and Senior High School) to completely turning my life around and becoming successful, focused, and most importantly - happy.

My mission with this blog and website is to make a profound difference in people’s lives. What I’d like to prove to you - for your own benefit - is that it doesn’t matter where you are now.

Even if you grew up dirt poor (like me). Even if you have a horrible attitude and mindset regarding money and success (like I used to), even if you didn’t get straight A’s all through school and graduate college with a Ph.D (I barely graduated high school and that was only because one of the school counselors felt bad for me when my dad died and gave me a 2nd chance. To be able to graduate I had to go to school 6 days a week and complete a year and a half worth of school work in just a couple of months.

Even if you’re at the point now where you feel scatterbrained, overwhelmed or stressed - if that’s where you are now, I can relate. I used to be in your shoes.

Maybe your situation is not or never has been quite that bad. Despite your current circumstances, I hope the information I share here will help you change your life as it has helped me changed mine. Here is a key point to remember - take baby steps. Especially if you’re the kind of person who gets overwhelmed easily or procrastinates.

Did you know that clinically depressed people often have goals that exceed what they feel they can really accomplish? As a result, they often get stuck in “paralysis of analysis” and find themselves unable to act because they feel like they must have new skills or more information first. They get stuck in a cycle of learning and learning but never doing.

I’ve experienced this myself (MANY times) in the past when I had very low self esteem, and would set lofty goals I didn’t believe I could actually achieve. To overcome this, you need to get the ball rolling and gain some momentum by setting and achieving very small goals. Then use your small successes to motivate you and move you toward larger successes.

One last point I’d like to make is that part of the reason I’m starting this blog is I’d like to create a positive community and connect with like minded people, rather than negative people and “energy leeches”.

If you have come here to learn and grow from valuable life-changing information, to improve yourself and the lives of others around you - great! I’m excited for you to be here, and I hope you’ll return often and benefit from what you learn here.

However if you’re a negative, scarcity-minded person who likes to argue, complain, make idiotic excuses and bring others down - this isn’t the place for you. Please close this browser, and find somewhere else to spread your misery.

In the next blog post coming up, I’ll be sharing something with you that will open up your mind to future success principles you’ll be learning. See you back here soon.