I planned a rather ambitions project for this five-week winter vacation that started four weeks ago - to work on myself to improve myself mentally. But when I embarked on this project, I didn't know what and how to improve in myself mentally. In the course of time I found self-confidence had been lost in my life, be it professional and private. Since then I started my preparatory work for restoring and strengthening my self-confidence, until I focused my work this week on this character trait, which seems among the most important in all kinds of interpersonal relationships.
It is said that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. I can also verify this from my own past experiences every time I encountered some adversity and decided to learn a lesson by conquering it. My teachers this time were two amazing books by two American authors about the so-called A.M., stressing self-confidence as one of the most important components of this A.M. I've devoured each of them three times. They were quite revealing. For the first time I found a single unitary answer to a number of enigmas that seemed unrelated to each other - my insecurity! These two books explained what constitutes self-confidence and why it's extremely important for the A.M. but it didn't explain how to attain it.
One of the books I found and read about self-confidence immediately afterward this week was by one of the former United States Navy SEALs. I've learned that self-confidence is 80% mental and 20% physical, but physical self-confidence is a prerequisite for mental self-confidence. Then I read a few other books on the actual physical and mental training by SEALs. I was glad to find that what I've been doing on weekdays - five physical workouts, including resistance stretching, bodyweight strength training, running, swimming, and yoga - is more or less right. But I also realized that I've got used to these daily physical workouts quantitatively and remain in a kind of comport zone. In order to get out of this comfort zone and improve my physical fitness, which in turn may boost my physical self-confidence, I've doubled the quantity of my bodyweight strength, running, and swimming.
Since then I feel my physical self-confidence is being strengthened and more even daily. It's not enough to tell myself that I'm confident of myself. We also have to know that our self-confidence must be based on the fact. And sensing it physically is probably the most intuitive way to verify this fact. I also feel that a warrior that remained dormant inside me for quite some time has suddenly awakened. This awakened warrior also makes me fear nothing, stick to my newly found life vision, and persevere in my daily efforts to realize this vision. I become the best version of myself every day.
It seems that after this fundamental transformation I've started emitting a totally different, positive, frequency of self-confidence to the universe. I was flattered and encouraged later this week when some young athletic woman I don't know approached me on the street out of the blue and said to me, "I often see you running in my neighborhood. You run beautifully!", and then walked away. Wow! :-)
An even less expected by-product of this change of mine is that I don't have the obsession any more to remain Mr. Nice Guy and suppress all the negative emotions, including even hatred, but excluding fear of uncertainty. The saying that you only get more of what you resist is so true! Now I can accept them as they are and hope they will dissolve when the time comes.