Restoring and Strengthening Self-Confidence

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.

Taking Actions by Embracing Fear of Uncertainty

Recently I've made what I consider one of the most important conscious decisions I've ever made in my whole life - taking actions by embracing fear of uncertainty. In implementing this almost life-changing decision I've been constantly encouraged by various words of the wise to the same effect, including, for example, those by Mahatma Gandhi - "You may never know what results come of your action, but if you do nothing, there will be no result."

This decision concerns and affects mainly, but not only, my professional life. I've already started to try transforming it by taking small proactive steps. One of the first questions I ask myself first thing every morning now is what actions I can take to promote my transformation, which in turn will realize my new life vision.

I've even taken at least three large steps. The most important of the three is that I've started learning something new professionally as the indispensable investment in my transformation. The other two concern cleansing those aspects of my past life that have stopped serving me and have become irrelevant and even harmful to me. As part of this cleansing I even conducted for myself a ceremony of forgiving all those who hurt me and setting myself free from them and their harm.

After this cleansing, including its ceremony, an interesting, but expected, thing has been taking place. On the one hand, those friends, colleagues, and acquaintances of mine with whom I got acquainted and remained in touch through my older, lower, spiritual frequency simply have started to fade out, and in a few extreme cases I had to block "jammers" by consciously severing my connection with them. On the other hand, however, I've also got acquainted and made friends with new like-minded people who can tune in to my new, higher, spiritual frequency.

While continuing to take actions for my new life vision, I've been working on myself to embrace fear of uncertainty. Fortunately, the only fear I still have is that of taking no action and remaining stuck in the preset condition that doesn't match my new life vision. Quite expectedly, many friends and colleagues of mine, who are seemingly controlled by fear of uncertainty, have been trying to persuade me to keep my status quo. But I'm neither convinced nor scared by their cowardice. I'm not afraid of daring to become a wild wolf who is never satisfied with his comfort zone instead of remaining an emasculated dog who is satisfied with his comfort zone.

Powerful Mental Workout for a Positive Change

Since our winter vacation started two weeks ago, I've been working on myself, or to be more precise, my mental, emotional, and physical improvement for my spiritual growth, more consciously and intensively. I've added one new mental workout to my daily mental and physical workouts. I've discovered later that it's also practiced in Judaism.

Having been inspired by my two new Hasidic friends, I've also started augmenting this new workout with one visual, one auditory, and one physical actions. The result has been immediate and powerful.

On the first day when I started doing this visually, auditorily, and physically augmented new mental workout before my daily running in the morning I bumped into a neighbor of mine who had remembered me in deep depression. When he saw me starting to run, he seemed to be shocked. When he immediately said to me, "What has happened to you?! You are shining with happiness!", I understood that this workout has had such a powerful impact upon me in such a short period of time. I also feel my positive change is not only mental but also emotional and even physical.

I have three more weeks to keep working on myself without meeting many of those I have to meet regularly. If you see me after this winter vacation ends in three weeks (or even before that) and also notice a positive change in me, you are welcome to ask me what powerful workout I've started doing. It costs no money and requires no equipment. I'm be glad to share it with you personally though I still hesitate to share it publicly. :-)

Starting to Reread All the (Saved) Email Messages to and from Someone Significant

I've decided to visit the past in order to understand the present and build the future. The past I've chosen to visit is my correspondence with someone significant since mid-August 2015 until the present - about 6,000 (saved) email messages to and from her. This week I could reach only mid-October 2015 as quite a few of these messages, whether by myself or by her, made me stop to ponder. While rereading them, I've asked myself constantly how I have changed - unfortunately, in a negative way - and what mistakes I have made since we started corresponding by email between two distant cities (and later under the same roof, then again in two separate places though in the same cities).

It was enough to read the email messages in the first two months of our correspondence to realize what (negative) changes I've undergone since then as the contrast between what I used to be and what I've come to be is simply stunning. I don't know how these changes have occurred, but I've realized that I lost the following important attributes in this chronological order: self-confidence, enthusiasm, and hope, until I found rather recently a new life vision. These changes of mine seem to have brought about the following (negative) changes on her side in this chronological order: hope, enthusiasm, happiness, and confidence, until I threw her into total confusion about life.

I've also realized that I've made some fatal (but hopefully not irreversible) mistakes: decreasing use of written communication to express and exchange our innermost thoughts and feelings, increasing dependence on alcohol to cope with increasing sociocultural and professional frustration and stress, and worsening outbursts of anger under the influence of alcohol. I believe that there is a fundamental difference between mistakes and failures - as long as one can learn some important lesson from these mistakes (and stop repeating them), they are not failures. Actually, I've also realized that one can learn from these mistakes far more than from the so-called success. Yes, I've not only stopped all these negative habits but also learned a couple of very important life lessons.

Now my mission for the future is to restore those positive attributes of mine I seem to have lost, especially self-confidence and enthusiasm. Before I started checking our email correspondence, I thought that enthusiasm might precede self-confidence. But now it seems to be that the opposite is the case. I'll be spending the coming one or two months trying to restore my self-confidence and enthusiasm. I've found a couple of interesting ways to do so and already started implementing them. In parallel I've also started developing compassion not only for others but first and foremost for myself. I have to start my spiritual recovery by approving of myself first. Life is the best school, and its adversities are the best teachers but as long as we know how to "fail forward".

PS: Actually, there is no failure in life in the deepest sense of the word. What is considered "failure" in the conventional sense of the word can be a huge success at the level of our soul.