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Functional Self Confidence

Friday

How to Achieve Your Goals If You're Born to Lose

Some individuals are just born losers, which mean that these people are bound to fail more than others. If you think that you belong in that category, then you a change of pace to start enjoying life more fully. There are some approaches that have been tried and proven by the experts and pros. You might find that you're not such a big loser after all.

Understanding Yourself

Take a pen and paper and give yourself a brief evaluation. Write down the things that you believe are your strengths and weaknesses. It is very likely that you have more items in your weakness list compared to the ones in your strengths list if you are a born loser. Next, try to write down the reasons why you have the strength or weakness. For example, if you listed down "Patient" in your strength list, put some more specific details such as "I am willing to wait several months to save for a new mp3 player" or if you wrote down "Lazy" in your weakness list, you can correlate by stating "I do not like to wake up until after 10 in the morning."

Knowing the specifics of your strengths and weaknesses can help you become more adept in improving the hindrances. It is vital that you know and understand how you can use your strengths as foundation, as well as turn your weaknesses into strengths gradually. You can aim to change one to three weaknesses at a time.

Changing Your Weaknesses

You need to give yourself time to improve on your weaknesses. Be specific in your action plan by creating steps toward your goal. For example, if you are "weakened" by "Lack of focus", you can start enhancing in that area by doing activities like "Reading more books about the matter for at least 30 minutes a day" or "Listening to a person talk for at least 1 minute before losing focus." Improve in the activities regularly by increasing the time frame and adding more challenges.

Learning from Winners

It is recommended that you stick with individuals who are successful and born winners. This way, you can adapt their habits and personality that will, in time, lead to nonstop success. Winners and leaders have great traits that you can follow, such as perseverance, critical thinking, stability under pressure, competence and the aspiration to never give up. Adopt these qualities as your own and use the individuals as your role models.

Read about people who have successfully made it in their chosen fields of interest. One of the reasons why you may fail constantly is because you are choosing the aspects where you are worst at. Try to ask yourself the things that you truly care about or even study and review without anyone needing to tell you to. These are the features that you are most likely talented in.

Remembering Success

Should you encounter success or achieve your goals, use these as motivational tools to remind you that you are always capable of gaining bigger benefits from larger tasks. Look back on your previous accomplishments and use these finished objectives to lead to your ultimate goal. It is also wise to expect failure once in a while, but you should use this as a way to learn. Failure should always be an opportunity for you to do better the next time.

Wednesday

Fear is one type of emotion that impacts one's life significantly.

What is Fear?

Fear is one type of emotion that impacts one's life significantly. Animals and humans alike have this emotional response based on any events in the environment that poses danger, whether physical, mental, or emotional. Indeed, fear takes on different forms and it will be discussed later. However, the effect that fear has on a person is important because it can potentially alter one's life and how he or she deals with the environment.

How do you know when one is undergoing fear? Despite of its cause, there are common physical indicators of fear. They are as follows:

• increase in heart rate and blood pressure

• tightened muscles

• inability to focus your senses

• dilated pupils

• sweating

Different Forms of Fear

Fear comes in various forms. And yet, its effects are similarly devastating to the person involved. There are various triggers for these fears but all have the potential to impact one's ability to think clearly and respond to situations logically.

Below is a list of the different forms of fears:

• Places: crowds, enclosed places, below ground, or heights

• Animals: rats, snakes, mice, spiders, etc

• People: strangers, homosexuals, feeling over-responsible for others, talking to groups of people, etc

• Events: war, crime, public speaking, etc

• Family member/loved ones: death of family member, getting ill

• Disaster: hurricane, lightening, injury or pain, blood, death, earthquake, etc

• Other people's reactions or responses: rejection, disapproval, being humiliated, being ignored, pretension, insecurity

• Feelings about one's self: taking the leadership role, speaking to a large crowd, stage fright, embarassing yourself

There are more different categories of fear that is experienced by people, hence people response differently. Some are able to use that fear they experience in order to sharpen their responses to a given situation. Others, however, do not have control over the level of fear they are experiencing, which often leads to panicking.

Negative Impacts of Fear

Fear is not always negative, provided that you learn how to deal with the feeling of fear. And yet it can be potentially dangerous when the feeling of fear has gotten really extreme. Therefore, it is important that you are able to understand where fear is coming from and deal with it logically. If not, it can lead to you making irrational responses on the situation at hand, such as the following:

• Inability to make clear and logical decisions.

• Prevents your ability to trust in your surroundings and other people, which is crucial in your own growth and development.

• Brings about fear of change due to the uncertainty of events, even though the situation requires it.

• Results to resistance of help from others.

• It confines you and unable you to explore opportunities that come your way.

• You become unmotivated to pursue your dreams.

• Tendency to exhibit self-destructive behavior.

Confronting Your Fears

Before you even think about overcoming your fears, confronting them is a necessary first step. You start off by recognizing your fear. If you have several types of fears, then you can rank them according to intensity. That way, you will be able to recognize which fear needs attended to the most as it can also produce the most negative impact to you.

The best way to get yourself to confront your fears is realizing what you can get once you have let go of these fears. The lack of such fears in your life will motivate you to take steps to rid yourself of it. Whether it's regaining control over your life or improving your own self image, losing that fear will help boost your confidence about yourself and the world so you can become a better individual.

Overcoming Fears

The most effective means to overcoming your fears is to change your perspective and behavior towards it. Since it is not easy to do, you need to keep yourself motivated in order to live life free of fears. The first step is identification of fear, which is closely tied with the step of confronting your fear. Then, honestly assess the extent of your fear. This is the only way that you can logically come up with methods that can reduce or eliminate the fear you are experiencing.

When you encounter a stimuli that could potentially trigger the feeling of fear, think of ways to release tension and keep yourself in a relaxed state. This is important since once you have acknowledged fear, it can quickly consume and overtake you. If possible, tap the help of others (whether your friends or family) to provide assistance in conquering your fears. Lastly, this is a long-term procedure and you cannot expect to get rid of your fears overnight.

Monday

Through time, as you grow old, you will encounter many health problems that can be countered by leading a healthy lifestyle. This will also be beneficial in the goal to better your memory. In psychology, this is defined as one's mental ability to enc

You must do everything necessary to keep your brain functioning well. This way, you can avoid getting numerous disorders that are associated with the brain. As people grow old, the one aspect that usually gets affected is their memory. They are having difficult time remembering valuable information, especially at times when they need to come up with an answer. The following processes of how your brain functions get affected, especially when you just let it be and you don't act upon the problem.

1. Encoding. When your brain receives information, it processes everything and combines pieces of what has been received with the data already stored in your system.

2. Storage. Your brain acts like the hard disk of your system where you store everything. But unlike the computer system, your brain records the information permanently. And it will stay there for as long as you are healthy and you haven't encountered serious problems that have caused your brain to malfunction.

3. Recall. In cases wherein you have to answer questions and situations based on what has already been stored in your brain, you try to recall the data that may help you arrive at the right conclusions.

Improve Your Memory

The International Longevity Center released a report in 2001 that includes vital tips in improving your brain's performance. The more pronounced tips include actively seeking new information through learning. This can be achieved by reading and training. You should also engage yourself in physical activities that promote blood circulation on your brain. You should also learn to keep your stress levels at a low by not thinking too much about problems. It is also recommended to get enough sleep and eat right. To help you exercise your memory to improve its performance, here are some more tips that you can opt to do.

1. Make it a habit to write down notes about the things that you want to do and whatever you want to remember. This can aid you in achieving your goal until you no longer have to resort to this activity or do it less often.

2. If you are reviewing for exams and the likes, you must get enough rest after storing too much information on your brain. You can repeat the process after you have rested and before the date of the exam to help your brain absorb more information and retain most of them.

3. You should also practice visualizing things that you need to remember. For example, you need to remember too many names at a short period of time. It will help if you will associate the faces of the people and their names on images that will make you recall them easily.

4. While some people may attest that cramming work for them, this is not healthy as you try to force and overload your brain with too many information for a short period of time. If you have to study, give yourself ample time to finish everything that you have to review. Give your brain time to rest after absorbing too many data. This will help better your memory and for you to perform well on your exams.