Overcoming a defeatist attitude. Part 2

In my most recent posting I shared with you how a defeatist attitude can rob you of your motivation. It does this by negatively impacting your successability, your confidence in your competence. I encouraged you to identify those things that made you feel you were not capable of achieving your dreams. It is only by knowing what those things are, that we can address them.

Once you have identified them, your social environment can be very helpful in fixing them and thereby increase your confidence. Your social environment includes all the people and organizations that surround you or that are available to you. Your social environment is helpful because it contains resources that can help you fix these problems.

Let’s look at some of the ways we can use our social environment to increase our confidence.

If your lack of confidence is because you lack certain skills, you can use resources in your social environment to gain these skills. A source for learning those skills may be as close as your present job; find out if your present employer offers on the job training. You may have to look outside your job, maybe contacting a local community college or technical school. On-line training is a wonderful resource for learning skills, as learning can take place in your own home, at a time when it is convenient for you.

Maybe your lack of confidence is because you don’t have any contacts; you feel you don’t know the people you need to in order to open the doors that need to be opened. If this is your identified problem, take advantage of organizations in your social environment in which you can network to make those important business contacts.

If your lack of confidence is due to a feeling that you just aren’t the type of person who does whatever your dream is, you need to find an organization where you can practice the traits you feel you need to develop. For example, if your dream is to be a sales person but you feel you are too shy to speak to people, join a social business club and learn in a safe environment how to mingle.

Your social environment is as big as you want it to be. There is an organization to meet just about any need you have.

Be creative in utilizing the resources in your social environment. They can give you a big boost in your motivation.

Overcoming a defeatist attitude. Part 1

Your confidence in your competence, what is called your successability, plays a large part in how motivated you are. If there is a particular goal you desire, but in your heart of hearts you feel that you will not be able to achieve it, you will not be motivated to go after it. It follows, of course, if you don’t go after it, you guarantee you will not achieve it.

When we face such a situation, wanting something but not believing we are capable of getting it, are we caught in a no-win situation? Luckily, we are not. There is a strategy we can use to extricate ourselves from the unpleasantness of the situation. The strategy is called overcoming a defeatist attitude. With this strategy and a little bit of work, we can restore our self confidence, and become motivated to move forward toward our dreams.

Encouraging someone to “be more confident” isn’t very helpful, is it? What they need are specific tasks, behaviors, they can do that will result it them being more confident. This strategy will give you exactly that.

The first step is to identify those things that make you feel you will not succeed at your goal. Do you lack certain skills, skills you feel you need to achieve your goal? Do you lack the contacts you feel are necessary to succeed?

Do this step by brainstorming. Though brainstorming is usually thought of as being done by a group, research has shown that brainstorming is more effective for individuals. In this situation what it means is non-critically thinking of answers to the question, “What do I think will prevent me from achieving my goal?” or “What things will I need to do to get me to the place so I can achieve my goal?”

Try not to think of the issue as how you are deficient as a person, but rather as in what way you have not yet grown so as to be confident in this situation. In other words, the focus will be not on your deficits, but rather on what you can do to help yourself. Non-critically means we just list the things that pop into our mind when we ask the question. We don’t judge our answers, nor do we judge ourselves. We are merely gathering information.

Take some time with this very important first step. Only by identifying specifically what is making you lack confidence can you move forward and remedy the situation.

Once you have identified those things that are adversely impacting your confidence, the next step is to come up with actions that will counter those things.

In my next blog post, on Wednesday, I will provide you with guidance in coming up with the actions you can take to increase your confidence in your competence, and get you moving once again toward your dreams.