© High Five Motivation, LLC
Give Me Confidence at www.BeConfidentToday.com
Lynn Kennedy Baxter, BSN, MA
(719) 534-3104

© High Five Motivation, LLC
Give Me Confidence at www.BeConfidentToday.com
Lynn Kennedy Baxter, BSN, MA
(719) 534-3104

© High Five Motivation, LLC
Give Me Confidence at www.BeConfidentToday.com
Lynn Kennedy Baxter, BSN, MA
(719) 534-3104

New Year’s resolutions are famously short lived, lasting only a few days or a few weeks. Rather than totally give up on resolutions, use smart strategies to build your confidence. The beginning of a new year just feels like the right time to make changes and start going in the right direction.

I’ll post one important strategy each day over the first 5 days of 2012 to help you be successful with your resolutions and build your self-confidence. Come back tomorrow for the third strategy.

2. Do you mean it? You gotta mean what you say, if you want to have self-confidence. Think about it before the words come out of your mouth.

When you decide to make a resolution, think about what you are promising yourself.

• If you can only manage 5 minutes of exercise, do 5 minutes.
• If you are going to cut back on your food to reach a better weight, think about how you are going to do what you say.
• If you want to improve your education, figure out exactly how, when and where you are going doing that.

This is the commitment muscle of New Year resolutions. Doing what you say you will do builds the strength of commitment. Monitor your words carefully and don’t say it, unless you really intend to do it.

Building your strength of commitment builds your self-confidence. Commitments can be revised, if necessary, but be conscious of what you are promising.

If you can’t keep you word to yourself, how will others trust you to keep you word? Remember that the word confidence comes from the Latin word meaning “to trust fully”.

© High Five Motivation, LLC
Give Me Confidence at www.BeConfidentToday.com
Lynn Kennedy Baxter, BSN, MA
(719) 534-3104

The Right Direction

New Year’s resolutions are famously short lived, lasting only a few days or a few weeks.
Rather than totally give up on resolutions, use smart strategies to build your confidence.
The beginning of a new year just feels like the right time to make changes and start
going in the right direction.

I’ll post one important strategy each day over the first 5 days of 2012 to help you be
successful with your resolutions and build your self-confidence. Come back tomorrow
for the second strategy.

Make it doable. Be honest with yourself and make the change a small step that is doable for you. Forget the experts. Disregard what other think of you. Just do something small each day.

Better to resolve to walk for exercise for 15 minutes 3 times a week, than to decide that you are going to exercise for an hour at the gym 5 days a week. In 6 weeks when you have kept your resolution, you can increase the time by 5 minutes to maintain your success. Truth is that you won’t be able to continue going for 5 hours a week for very long.

You can apply this principle to any New Year’s resolution. Keep the steps small so they fit into your lifestyle. Increase the change – time, duration, amount, etc – in small increments to build confidence.

If you have decided to tackle your habit of procrastination, don’t think you can do a sweeping change throughout your life. Choose one, small area of your life where you put things off and then get very specific about how you are going to take action in that specific area.

© Lynn Kennedy Baxter, BSN, MA, LMFT          www.BeConfidentToady.com

1.1.12

November 2, 2011

Is it smart confidence or is it the “American Idol Effect.”

Self-delusion is what we have seen for 10 years at the beginning of each season of American Idol. Somebody dreams of a singing career, but absolutely cannot carry a tune. Somebody dreams of a singing career, has a family member who believes that their child is the next Carrie Underwood or the next Scotty McCreery, but they just don’t have the voice or the charisma to make it.

“The American Idol Effect” was named by James C. Kaufman and Michelle Evans in a recent article in Psychology Today. It describes in detail the self-delusion phenomenon.

These are the more extreme examples of self-delusion. Often, what really happens is that the person with a dream really doesn’t know if they are “good enough” to make it or not. They fall on that continuum somewhere between smart confidence and self-delusion.

Smart confidence is the term I use to recognize confidence that is based in reality, based on objective performance and validated by the appropriate jury. This validation may be the boss, the marketplace or your coach.

There is a relationship between a person’s performance and the evaluation. Believing in yourself can make you try harder and polish your act or your novel to overcome rejection. It can be a fine line to balance between your belief in yourself and the feedback you get from the jury.

Some well known, if not famous, “failures” endured a tremendous amount of rejection before becoming famous and successful. Can you guess who these self-deluded successes were?

1. This best selling novelist’s first novel was rejected by sixteen agents and twelve publishing houses.

2. He was fired by the editor of a newspaper for lacking in creative ideas.

3. This baseball legend struck out 1,330 times, but hit 714 home runs.

4. This household name dropped out of high school and applied to attend film school three times, but was unsuccessful due to his C grade average.

5. He had a nervous breakdown and failed in 8 elections.

Which category do you fall into? How do you discover the answer?

Sometimes it is difficult to figure out if you have smart confidence or you are self-deluded. Any list of renowned failures, who eventually succeeded, also overlooks all the people who kept on trying in spite of many failures and still failed.

Only you can determine if you have smart confidence or you are material for the “American Idol Effect,” but it may help to find a trusted mentor to guide you.

Answers: 1. John Grisham, 2. Walt Disney, 3. Babe Ruth, 4. Steven Spielberg, 5. Abraham Lincoln.

© High Five Motivation, LLC
Give Me Confidence at www.BeConfidentToday.com
Lynn Kennedy Baxter, BSN, MA
(719) 534-3104

October 16, 2011
Avoid your dream and you feed your fear. Feed your fear and it grows.

Eventually you will be ruled by your fear, as your lifebecomes smaller and smaller. You will have less and less confidence. It becomes a vicious cycle, because as your life shrinks, your anxiety continues to grow.

Use common sense. Fear is a necessary warning, when you use it correctly. You don’t jump off a building, because you are afraid of severely injuring or killing yourself. This is a rational and sane fear that keeps you alive and healthy. This fear is a good thing.

The fear referred to here is the fear that stops you cold and prevents you from having the confidence to live your dream.

Starve your fear and feed your confidence with these 6 tips.

Do It. If you procrastinate on something that you need to do, you feed the fear. Don’t let the action that will advance your dream constantly slide to the bottom of your “to do” list.

Every time you take action, you build a little bit of confidence.

Make a decision to do it. Yes, you made an active decision to procrastinate or avoid taking action, even if you didn’t notice that you were making a decision. You and only
you are responsible. You chose to watch TV or even clean the bathroom, rather than face your anxiety, and do some problem solving, or get some help to be confident.

Decide to regularly do something constructive to build your confidence. Find your favorite quote and post it on the bathroom mirror. Watch your favorite YouTube inspirational video every morning.

Don’t listen to the voice of fear.  If you tell yourself you are not strong enough, not smart enough, not good enough, you won’t have the confidence to go for your dream. That voice has a very good strategy to keep you down. It stops you from gaining the skill, the knowledge and exercising your talent to make your dream come true.

Find good people with strong voices, who you are willing to listen to, who can realistically help counteract the voice of fear.

Silence the voice of fear. What you resist, persists. Don’t try to suppress that voice. It only gets stronger.

Acknowledge the voice and telling it, “Thank you for sharing, now be quiet.” An even stronger message is, “Thank you for sharing, now shut up.” Say either one as many times as necessary for about 3 days and the voice will be silenced.

Stop beating yourself up for avoiding. If you call yourself names, nasty names that make you feel bad, you will just avoid more. This is sure to rob you of confidence. The
problem is that you secretly believe that you are absolutely right to beat yourself up this way.

You have to be willing to seriously revise your secret beliefs and create better ones that sustain your confidence and support your dream.

Find your voice of encouragement. The other problem is that you also believe that beating yourself up is an effective strategy to get you going. Wrong. It just demoralizes you.

Learn how to develop the knowledge and the skills that make your dreams come true. Do you watch American Idol? The final contestants constantly have to accept professional feedback that hones their talent.

Watch and learn, then copy.

© High Five Motivation, LLC
Give Me Confidence at www.BeConfidentToday.com
Lynn Kennedy Baxter, BSN, MA
(719) 534-3104

September 28, 2011
Your confidence level needs to be replenished daily as Mia Hamm of the US Women’s Soccer Team said, “Confidence takes constant nurturing. Like a bed, it must be remade every day.”

So make it doable and a little more glamorous than making your bed. Fight being seduced by your automatic thoughts that feed your anxiety. Incorporate the following simple actions into your daily activities to cultivate and build your confidence level.

Do affirmations in the shower. Affirmations have been around forever, it seems, but they work. Write 3 to 5 affirmations and post them on the bathroom mirror, where you will read them every morning. Say them out loud in the shower. Better yet, sing them for fun and motivation.

Flash subliminal affirmations on your computer screen for an effective, passive form of using affirmations to create confidence. There are several good programs available to effortlessly help you reprogram your unconscious mind.

Read something for just 5 minutes in the morning that boosts your confidence level. Yes, only 5 minutes daily will make a substantial difference. You choose what is motivating, inspiring or educational for you to hear every day to feed your growing confidence. This “do-able” will keep you pointed in the right direction.

Listen to an audio that builds your confidence while you commute. The amount of material that is available is incredible. A 30-minute drive to and from work equals 5 hours/week of education, inspiration or knowledge. The famous Earl Nightingale, personal development pioneer and radio legend, claimed that 5 hours per week would put you at the top of your field in 3 years. You are spending the time driving anyway; why not create more confidence by adding to your knowledge and skills?

Count your achievements, your “wins”, the successes, the triumphs, and the little things you did today that you are proud of. This simple exercise performed at the end of every day will build a tremendous amount of healthy, vigorous confidence. This is not bragging. This is not arrogance. This is healthy pride in your accomplishments that builds your confidence level.

Listen to guided imagery to boost your confidence while you sleep. Turn on your Ipod or CD player and put in the ear buds to passively listen while your drift off to sleep. That’s the only effort required to reprogram your unconscious mind to achieve, perform and have confidence to reach your dreams.

Just a little bit of effort and energy every day will have a huge payoff in building your confidence level.

© High Five Motivation, LLC
Give Me Confidence at www.BeConfidentToday.com
Lynn Kennedy Baxter, BSN, MA
(719) 534-3104

  September 2, 2011

 These habits of thinking are very frequent errors that people make talking to themselves. Thinking this way ruins your confidence, perhaps without your realizing it. It usually takes some practice to apply the “cure”, but the resulting increase in confidence is completely worth the effort.

Discount your successes and achievements. A friend once told me, “As soon as I reach my goal, it doesn’t count anymore,” so he ignored one of the major building blocks of confidence.

Remedy: Acknowledge and count your small daily successes and give yourself credit. A legitimate pat on the back won’t give you a big head and it will build confidence.

Reinforce your flaws, inadequacies and shortcomings with frequent affirmations. Keep telling yourself that:

~ I can’t do that,
~ I never can do that,
~ I always make that mistake,
~ I’m such an idiot. 

What you focus on expands and keeps you stuck with out the confidence to move forward.

Remedy:  Either accept your inadequacies or choose to develop the character trait or the skill you would like to have. If you can’t do something that you need to do, get a teacher, read a book, hire a consultant. Learning always improves confidence.

Believe you have to be perfect or your achievements have to be perfect. This is a confidence killer. Nobody is perfect and everybody makes mistakes. “Perfection” is only possible when a team works together to back each other up to catch the mistakes and rectify them.

Remedy: Give yourself permission to make mistakes, learn from them and do better the next time. Even Phil Mickelson has his bad days on the golf course.

Ignore your body’s need for enough sleep. Research clearly demonstrates that even a few days of sleep shortages causes the amygdala, a structure deep in your brain that regulate moods and emotions, to go into overdrive with fear and anxiety. Confidence vanishes as fatigue sets in.

Remedy:  Get off of Facebook, quit the video games, turn off the TV, and go to sleep. If you can’t turn off the TV, select a soothing station and set the timer for the TV to shut off automatically.

Never admit you are wrong and never apologize. People who do this are very small inside and feel very, very insecure. They are doomed to repeat their mistakes and fear doing so. What confidence can they possibly have?

Remedy: Decide to be a “bigger” person, learn to take responsibility for your mistakes and learn to apologize. Responsibility is not blame. It is the ability or the power to right the wrong. Paradoxically, your confidence in yourself will expand and your insecurity will diminish.

Confidence Tip: EFT or Emotional Freedom Technique is a very effective method for quickly changing mental patterns that sabotage your confidence. 

© High Five Motivation, LLC
Give Me Confidence at www.BeConfidentToday.com
Lynn Kennedy Baxter, BSN, MA
(719) 534-3104