During my 10 years as a Hypnotherapist I have worked with thousands of clients who come in looking to build their self-belief or self-confidence, lose weight, overcome a phobia, lose unwanted habits, become more successful or effective in certain areas of their lives, but it’s extremely rare that someone walks into my office and says “I’d really like you to help me accept myself”.    When I suggest that self-acceptance would be helpful as part of their process of change it’s often met with real resistance.

However when we accept ourselves, it feels really good, it’s like we’ve called a truce with ourselves.

So if acceptance feels so good for us then why the resistance? I believe the answer is motivation. We use our lack of acceptance (feels like self-punishment) as motivation to get us to do, not do, be, and not be what we think we should. Many people believe that if they accepted themselves as they are, they wouldn’t change or that they wouldn’t work on becoming more of who they want to be.  Let’s use the example of losing weight, if I suggest working on self-acceptance as a useful part of the process for a client wanting to lose weight they will often initially rile against it – thinking that I mean they just accept their weight and live with it, however the opposite is true, if we relentlessly hate our weight and bodies during the process of attempting to lose weight it makes it much more difficult to do so – what we resist persists!

Typically we judge ourselves unfavourably with the hope it will motivate us to change, does this work?   Sometimes, but only short term, most of the time it causes us to feel bad and the energy we use in punishing ourselves saps the energy we need to make the desired changes, and it can become not only counter-productive but a vicious cycle of self-punishment and guilt.  However if we can be kind to ourselves during the process and accept ‘this is where I am now but I would like to feel healthier, fitter and slimmer’ (using the example of weight loss again) it provides a way forward that not only works better but feels a hell of a lot better too!

Contrary to popular belief accepting something about yourself doesn’t mean you don’t want to change anything about yourself, it simply means that you are accepting who you are now and your own process of change, acceptance actually allows change, it says “I’m ok now even before I reach my goals’ (how much better does that feel than ‘I am hideous / bad / an unworthy person until I get ‘there’’?)

When you begin to accept yourself the way you are right now, you begin a new life with new possibilities that did not exist before because you were so caught up in the struggle against reality that that was all you could do.

What the hell are you waiting for?!

We can get very hung up believing we need to have the right ‘externals’:  job, car, looks etc in order to feel self-confident, however self-confidence is a power greater than the sum of your parts.

Many clients that come to see me for work to help with this come across as confident on the outside, and very often have many of the ‘externals’ in place, they report ‘people think I’m really confident but I just don’t feel it inside’, and of course that is what is important.   We can have the externals but it can be hard to appreciate them if we don’t feel good inside, another symptom of having the outer confidence (the mask) without the inner is a feeling of somehow not ‘deserving’ to have the good job or life and feeling like somehow you will be exposed or found out as a fraud!

A feeling of inner confidence is different: a combination of courage, ease and self-acceptance and an ability to handle the challenges in life without living in fear that things will be ‘taken away from you’.   You don’t have to think you’re the most incredible person that ever walked the earth, in fact this is often the opposite of true confidence – arrogance if often a sometimes-convincing mask for a raging inferiority complex!  Being happy and comfortable with who you are and possessing a certain degree of self-belief is enough to open many doors and enable you to lead a good and fulfilling life. In addition self-confidence doesn’t just make you feel good, it is what drives you to make your aspirations real

So how can you build your confidence?

1-    Don’t take yourself so seriously and be prepared to make mistakes.

What makes successful people is their ability to be themselves, laugh at their mistakes and keep going anyway. Security isn’t about ‘having things’ it’s about being able to handle things and that includes disappointments, mistakes and life’s knocks.

2-    Focus on your strengths and areas of confidence. It’s too easy to dismiss what we are good at and focus on what we’re not good at. Knowing our weak areas and being comfortable with them is just as important as really taking stock of our strengths and abilities.

3-    Use your imagination or it will use you. Stop misusing your energy imagining how things could go wrong. Why not use your imagination, which is actually your own self-hypnosis tool, to focus on what might go right and how you can act with decisiveness and energy. When you do that, things are much more likely to go well for us.

4-    Look at how you talk to yourself – would you tell your best friend they are a complete idiot for forgetting to hang the laundry out, tell them they will never meet anyone and are destined to end up alone if they broke up with someone, or call them fat or worthless?  No.  So don’t do it yourself either!   Becoming your own best friend is a life-long process, but one of the most important things you can do for your self-worth.

Stop saying yes when you mean no – this can show up in many areas of our lives:  continual unpaid overtime at work, not switching the phone off, going out when you really don’t feel like it, being a slave to the tyranny of ‘shoulds’ in your head, endlessly looking after other people and wearing yourself out.    Remember that when you say ‘no’ you say ‘yes’ to yourself and often it really is a case of ‘say no or get resentful’.    Help others but help yourself too.  If you really struggle with this one – sell it to yourself this way: ‘If I don’t take time for me I’m not going to have anything left to give to anyone else anyway!’

Stop thinking you’re not ready. –  None of us feel 100% ready when a really big opportunity arises, because we are only really growing when we are stepping out of our comfort zone!  And this feels uncomfortable!  However if you look back at your life you’ll more than likely see that those big scary steps you took where the bridges to bigger experience, learning and growth, and you survived it!    In the words of Dr Sheldon Kopp (author of ‘Raise Your Right Hand Against Fear’): “I have never begun any adventure for which I felt adequately prepared”

Stop ignoring your problems – None of us are capable of faultlessly handling every punch thrown our way, we aren’t supposed to be able to instantly solve problems, and we can’t always do it all on our own either.  No matter how confident, evolved or self-aware an individual we are we all have “blind spots” when it comes to ourselves, and often a bit of help from an objective source can go a long way to helping you resolve the seemingly unresolvable!  Facing and learning to deal with your problems, sometimes alone, sometimes with support, not only builds character but also courage, strength and wisdom.

Stop focusing on what you don’t want! – Have you noticed when you indulge in what I call ‘negative fantasies’ (losing your job, ending up alone, falling into ill health) how bad you feel?  And it hasn’t even happened! When you catch yourself doing this – say to yourself “stop it” and consciously switch your thoughts to things you ‘do’ want!  It won’t be easy – sometimes we are looking at changing 20 – 30 years of conditioning, but it’s absolutely worth it, not just in terms of how you feel on a day to day basis but also in terms of results.  It’s no secret that what we focus on we get more of so start getting excited about what you do want, the better it gets, the better it gets!

We are all guilty of this right?    We may have gone out with someone who we ‘knew’ wasn’t right for us, acted in ways that let us down, gone ahead with something despite our inner voice  telling us different (often experienced as an uneasy feeling), got ourselves into experiences that were difficult to extract ourselves from or simply stayed in an unhealthy situation for way too long.

I’m not saying anything new here when I say that unless we make mistakes we cannot learn or grow, often we need to experience a painful difficult situation, such as the burden of debt, so as not to repeat it.    We all make mistakes, have struggles and regret things in our past.    But there is nothing quite like beating yourself up for keeping you stuck in the same old pattern or situation.  What’s important is that you do something now to begin creating the life you do want – and begin to see those mistakes as painful but, perhaps, necessary stepping stones to greater awareness and clarity.  To quote Louise L Hay ‘the point of power is always in the present moment’.

A phrase that has always stuck with me is ‘when you say no, you say yes to yourself’.   By this I mean saying no to others demands in order to protect our own creative or relaxation time, noticing when you’re going into people-pleasing and workaholism and getting out of balance.

We all have to do things in life we don’t want to do, but when the balance gets tipped so that we are continually putting ourselves second, sixth or tenth, looking after everyone else’s needs but our own or being ruled by the tyranny of the to-do list on a daily basis then it’s time to re-evaluate.

So what happens if we don’t set boundaries?   Well we become over-stressed, our nerves short-circuit and we tend to get resentful, irritable and snappy!    When we ourselves feel like the food source, it is hard to find food for thought.

So when we do set boundaries – no work on Saturdays, no replying to emails after 8pm, screening the call from a friend who seems to be endlessly caught up in a personal drama we begin to experience a sense of safety and relief!

We are about to enter 2012, spend some time thinking about what or who you can begin to say ‘no’ to and how in turn you can say a great big ‘yes’ to yourself  next year!

I’ve had several clients recently who have talked about the difficulty in letting go of previous relationships and who are seeing me to help them overcome and move on from their ex.   I also have many clients who struggle with their self-esteem.   In my 9 years practice as a Hypnotherapist neither of these issues are new but what is new is the addiction to social media that clients often use to inadvertently hurt themselves by either checking up on their ex via dating sites, Twitter and Facebook or use to ‘compare themselves to others’.

Social media has made spying on and checking up on the ex or going ‘comparison shopping’ an incredibly easy thing to do.

It’s worth remembering that social media sites such as Facebook are an unrealistic portrayal of someones life, it’s very easy to convince ourselves that everyone else is out whooping it up in exotic locations whilst we are sitting at home with a nothing but a ready-meal for company.     It’s called feeling ‘less- than’.

When we are doing something that we know is a bad for us and hurts us but we keep on doing it anyway, it’s not just a lack of self-care it becomes a form of self-harm.   If we are working to heal from a relationship we need to allow ourselves the time and space to do that, constantly checking up on your ex’s movements and ‘all fun you think they are having’ does nothing but hurt you, hinder your progress and keep you ‘stuck’.   The same with self esteem – if you are dedicated to healing your low self esteem one of the first things to do is lose the ‘comparison shopping’ – I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – we are all on very different and unique journeys – with wildly varying talents, skills, advantages and disadvantages therefore the only person we can truly compare ourselves to is ourselves and how far we’ve come.

If you recognise any of the above it may be time to put self-caring higher on your agenda, self-harming is easy to recognise – if you feel worse after a certain activity it’s probably a form of subtle or not so subtle self-harm!

I can’t remember where I read this but isn’t it great? Whenever anyone is asked what they want in a prospective life partner / potential love for their life they give similar answers; warm, loving, honest, supportive, dynamic, faithful, GSOH and the list goes on, what we forget to ask ourselves is how many of these we are? We can get so hung up on ‘ticking all the boxes’ in the hunt for love that we forget to look at our own part of it – how many of our own boxes are we ticking? Remember ‘like attracts like’ and the more you embody what you want the more likely you are to get that right back!