8 tips to limit wine drinking and stop damaging your health, wealth, and wisdom
I've been there myself. Time to crack open a bottle of red/white/rose. It's the end of the day, the evening, time to relax, unwind. Come on! We’re all nannied to death, aren't we? The state cant help but interfere in our lives - guidelines and directives about everything. And anyway, were told red wine is good for us and that gives us carte Blanche to swig gallons of the stuff. If a little is good, more must be better - right?
A bit of exercise is good - overdoing it could make you sick.
One aspirin may cure your headache - 100 aspirins will not make you 100 times better.
Some wine may be good for you - too much can kill you.
Stop winning; it's my life!
I’m all for people living their lives how they choose. And I love wine; but, as we all know, more is most definitely not better, not in the long- or even short-term. It’s easy to kid ourselves we’re not drinking too much wine, to pretend it's harmless. But millions of people have let an innocent nightly tipple turn into a mortally threatening compulsion. Free will is important and that stretches two ways. Sure, people should choose what they do, but compulsion steals the very freedom of choice we all value so much.
So how much wine is too much?
According to most guidelines, one drink is equivalent to:
5 ounces of wine.
12 ounces of beer.
1.5 ounces of 80-proof distilled spirits, such as vodka.
These same guidelines recommend one drink each day for women and two for men. Many people are surprised by this. One woman I know never seems to drink less than two bottles of wine a night. But even just a few glasses a night add up to a significant health risk.
What exactly are the dangers of excessive wine consumption?
Reduce wine drinking to avoid all this
Too much wine too often can:
Make you fat - alcohol supplies calories with few essential nutrients. What’s more, the sugar in alcohol can stimulate appetite, making you want to eat more. Obesity carries its own risks, including heart disease and some cancers.
Cause chronic liver damage.
Prematurely age your body (particularly the skin).
Disrupt the quality (if not the quantity) of your sleep. And impaired sleep brings its own health problems.
Make you chronically tired and unable to concentrate the next day.
Make you feel at the mercy of an addiction.
Disrupt your sex hormones, with the possibility of loss of fertility in women and depletion of testosterone in men causing loss of sexual response.
Mm, think I'll just put that wine back in the fridge.
If you feel that your daily wine drinking habit has become or is getting out of control, here are some timely tips to help you reduce your wine drinking:
Tip 1: Keep a record
Before you change anything, keep an honest record for a week of all the wine you drink, all the bottles. Be brutally honest with yourself. Head-in-the-sand avoidance is so dangerous when it comes to health. You need to know the situation exactly. At the same time, keep a money record. Add up how much money you've been spending on wine per week, per month, and, by logical extension of this, per year. Know the beast.
Tip 2: Don't save up all your drinks for the weekend
It's a curious thing. We all seem to think in terms of banking. If I save up by not drinking too much wine during the week, then I'll be in credit and so be able to drink loads at the weekend. Drinking a lot sometimes is better than drinking lots all the time, but binge drinking is still harmful.
Tip 3: Find another wind-down ritual
We like demarcations, ways to delineate between ‘then’ and ‘now’, and people have many ways to ‘shift gear from work or day mode to evening time. It's not always the wine itself we become addicted to, but the ritual of shifting gear. And this still needs to happen, albeit in a healthier way.
At the time you'd normally start on the wine - say, six o’clock - take a warm shower instead. Disrupt the pattern. There are lots of ways to wind down that don’t make your head fuzzy and your skin tired.
Tip 4: Slow down!
Gulping down wine like theres no tomorrow is a sure-fire way to, well, drink more wine. We can drink so fast we forget to taste. People do the same with food and get very fat. You can enjoy one glass of wine and make it last. Saviour it, drinking one glass over an entire evening. Set this as a challenge to yourself and learn to do it.
Tip 5: Take days off
Drinking too much wine every day is hard work for your body. Start by assigning yourself one day off and get used to not drinking any wine on this day. Once thats a cinch for you, then start adding more wine-free days - but remember Tip 2. Don't make up for this time out by drinking more on other days. The overall effect should be for you to cut back your total weekly amount.
Tip 6: Don't keep wine in the house
It’s too easy, of course, to quaff the wine when it’s readily available. Make a point of not buying bottles in the store when you do your weekly shop. Buy one bottle at a time and take care not to buy more wine for at least three days. Don't make it easy for yourself to overindulge.
Tip 7: Don't run to wine at the drop of a hat (or any setback)
“I had to have a glass of wine after what he said to me!”
“What a day! Where's the wine?”
“Someone just asked me if I'm pregnant! I'm not! I need a glass of wine!”
In the course of most days, there are little upsets (sometimes major upsets), but there are better ways to respond than drinking yet more wine. Start practicing dealing with the normal stresses and strains of life by not reaching for the bottle.
Tip 8: Mentally prepare to remain wine-free
It's much easier to behave in a certain way if the mind (and body) expect to behave in that way. Strongly envisaging a day of not boozing on wine will make it both easier and seem more natural to remain dry. Close your eyes, relax, and imagine seeing yourself going through the whole day free of wine.
For a quick (non-alcoholic) taste of this exercise, click on the free audio below.
And as no less a personage than Will Shakespeare wrote: “Good wine is a good familiar creature if it be well used.”
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Monday, March 12
7 Easy Quit Smoking Tips
Quitting smoking can be hard or easy, depending on how you go about it
He was going to die. Dragged towards the tomb lying to himself. The very substance he turned into ashes every day was about to do the same to him. Ah, the powers of self-deception:
“Emphysema runs in my family! Stopping smoking won’t make any difference. Anyway, I’m physically addicted; nothing I can do about it!”
Ted’s wife had sent him to see me. He sat there, arms crossed; sceptical. He was reluctant, convinced his worsening health had nothing to do with the cigarettes. I spent an hour and a half feeling I was offering a rescue branch to a submerged man who, unaware of the upcoming waterfall, wasn’t grasping.
Then I shocked Ted. How? I told him he most certainly should continue to smoke. Prepared for battle, this took him off guard. “What?” He looked confused.
Smoking: An appallingly bad deal
“Certainly, you should smoke,” I told him. “It’s one of life’s pleasures. But you shouldn’t just like it; you should love it. Love it more than anything else in life. It shouldn’t just give you a ’bit of pleasure’, it should be ecstasy-inducing. You should be singing from the rooftops every time you smoke. It should be more meaningful to you than your wife or children. If it’s that important, that pleasurable, then yes, you should carry on. But anything less than that means the deal’s no good.”
“Deal’s no good?” he echoed, mouth ajar.
“That’s right, it’s a bum deal. The tobacco company gets thousands from you – you are a good deal for them. Your end of the deal means that you get to age quicker; have depleted blood into your penis (seriously; this man needed a wake-up call); say goodbye forever to your wife and kids on average seven years earlier than you would have done; destroy serotonin in your brain, leading to greater likelihood of depression; dim your eyesight; incubate cancers; and pay money. That’s your side of the deal. To make it worth it, you need to make sure that smoking is better than just something you ‘quite enjoy’.”
No one had ever spoken to Ted – big, square-jawed, man of the world – that way. I thought maybe he would hit me.
I told him how ’some people‘ went through life with a survivor’s instinct and how others got ’taken in‘ by stuff that undermined and worked against them.
He told me how he hated seeing people conned. I talked about how cigarettes convince ’some people‘ that they are harmless, a relaxant, physically addictive, and so on. I hypnotized him. Later, I told him I’d send him an email and if he ever decided he really did want to quit smoking, stop ’pussyfooting around‘, he should read it – but not until he’d learned to see the deal for what it truly was.
The core of that email is as follows.
1 – Don’t quit smoking, ‘outgrow it’
Don’t think of yourself as ‘quitting smoking’ but rather outgrowing it. After all, it was probably something you started to do when you were an adolescent. I’m guessing there are plenty of other things you did back then which you no longer do now. When you were a child and your feet grew, you didn’t have to try hard to stop wearing the shoes that were squeezing your toes. Because you’d outgrown them, it was a relief to discard them. Likewise, people grow out of smoking because it ‘starts to squeeze’; squeezing lungs, heart, and time from the end of life.
Imagine someone protesting that it wasn’t the too small shoes that were causing the discomfort in their feet!
Enhance this sense of outgrowing the smoking by clicking on the link below and listening to your free audio session.
2 – See through the lies
One hundred million people were killed by smoking in the 20th century; killed by something they paid good money for. Many of these poor souls would have been intelligent, decent people, but somehow they remained hooked into a victim/abuser relationship with cigarettes that destroyed them. In order to do self-destructive things, human beings need to have belief systems that ‘make it okay’ to self-destruct. Smokers are no different. Here are more common smoking beliefs:
“Smoking calms my nerves!” Yes, by delivering nicotine through your mucous membranes up into your brain, releasing adrenaline and raising blood pressure within 8 seconds. People may feel more relaxed if they take a break in unison with a cigarette or breathe deeply as they exhale. It is the break and the deep breathing which relax you, not the tobacco.
“Smoking helps me concentrate.” Yes, in short bursts, but like any drug there is a comedown during which your concentration will be poorer than if you hadn’t smoked at all.
“Smoking gives me something to do with my hands.” Well, so does strangulation! What do non-smokers do with their hands? I have worked with other types of self-harmers (cutters) who told me that cutting gave them ’something to do with their hands’.
“Smoking is physically addictive.” But not addictive enough to stop people sleeping for hours at a time without it; or to go on long-haul flights and forget about smoking. Nicotine takes 24 hours to clear from your body and then you’re free.
If you clicked your fingers a thousand times a day for 20 years, every time you had a coffee, every time you finished a meal, or after sex (if you were lucky enough to get any with such a crazy habit), then it would feel weird at first to have the coffee without the clicking. This isn’t physical addiction; it’s just conditioned expectation through repeated association of two behaviours. Of course it’s possible to have a drink without clicking your fingers or smoking. There is no natural association between smoking and finishing a meal. Once these associations die away, you no longer feel addicted.
“Smoking is ‘cool’ or ‘bohemian’.” This one is more easily swallowed by younger smokers. Of course, to make something acceptable when it’s threatening our very existence, it needs to seem ‘cool’. Some kamikaze pilots may have thought it was ’cool‘ or ’honourable‘ to die for their beliefs.
“Smoking punctuates my day.” “I need one after a meal, before and after a meeting, when I get home” and so on… Yes, we all need to ‘punctuate our day’, but we can do this by just taking time out to relax, have a cup of tea, or some other pleasurable activity.
“I could get run over by a bus tomorrow; you’ve got to die of something!” Well, that’s true. In the UK, one in 15,000 people get run down and one in two smokers are killed by smoking. Odds can be tricky things to get your head round.
“My uncle lived to 110, ran marathons, and smoked three packs a day from the age of 3.” Yes and we can remember the phrase: ‘The exception that proves the rule.’
These are some common beliefs (lies!) that smokers have told themselves and one other as a way of dealing with the cognitive dissonance of doing something they know will corrode them or kill them. See through them.
3 – Separate your identity from the smoking
It’s far easier to quit smoking once you see it as entirely separate from you, not as a ‘part of who you are’. It’s no more central to you than a thieving parasite. ’Smoking‘ is not something your body can do unless it’s set on fire. We can digest, oxygenate, eliminate but we cannot smoke – it’s not a human process.
You had years at the start of your life when you didn’t think about it at all but you were still you. When you again become a ‘non-smoker’, your identity doesn’t have to be defined in this way either. You will be you. I don’t canoe but I don’t think of myself as a ‘non-canoeist’.
Remember everybody quits smoking eventually, whether it’s five minutes before they leave this Earth or thirty years. Your relationship with smoking is finite anyway.
Separate your real identity from the smoking.
4 – Remember you only have to deal with three or four cigarettes
Even if you smoke 60 a day, you’ll have noticed that there are only three or four that you really savour.
Maybe it’s the first one of the day, the one after lunch or immediately after work. All the others just ‘slip under the radar’, cheating their way in when you’re not even thinking about them – a rushed one in the car or a hurried cigarette in the rain.
Once you deal with the main cigarettes and hit those on the head, then, like collapsing the pillars, the whole smoking ‘structure’ will collapse easily.
5 – Smoking is not a ‘friend’
If you knew that a person was stealing your money, your looks, your health, and possibly years from the end of your life, then how much of a ‘friend’ would they seem to you? Would you want to associate with them?
Some smokers gaze through rose-tinted (nicotine-stained) glasses at the habit. They see their smoking as something that they can turn to when they are down, as if smoking were a friend they could have a drink and a chat with, be consoled by, have a laugh with. But what kind of friend steals all this and then one day turns around and stabs you in the back?
6 – Don’t become ‘anti-smoking’
I’m not an anti-smoker. Really I’m not. If you hate something, you are still too emotionally involved with it. And if you really think it’s a good deal and can swear you’re not being conned by it, then you should do it. Hate can be as intense as love. When smoking becomes irrelevant to you, then it becomes a non-issue. You don’t ever need to become a boorish anti-smoker.
7 – Watch out for the sweet talk
When a person leaves a relationship, no matter how abusive and destructive it was, there may be times when they feel like backsliding. The liberated person may feel down one evening, or bored, maybe a little drunk. The ex-abuser calls them up, charms them, and says they can’t live without them. And if they weaken then, before you know it, the old abuse has started up all over again.
Be prepared. Smoking will ‘call you up’ during these times and try to charm its way back and manipulate you. Be ready for it. The more you ignore it, the stronger you’ll become and the weaker it will become.
These seven tips for quitting smoking should be read and internalized. You need to make them your own. Why not print them off and read them through – with a cigarette perhaps?
Ted called me up. “Hi, I’ve quit!” he said.
“Quit what?” I said, desperately trying to recall whether this was the Ted who smoked chronically or the Ted who’d been thinking about leaving his job. But then the deep gravelly voice was unmistakable.
“No one takes me for a fool!” he said.
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7 Steps to Self-Belief
How to develop powerful tools to get your mind on your side
"7 Steps to Self-Belief" courtesy of divemasterking2000
The crowd waits. Surely he’s going to die. How can he survive a dive from such a massive height into a tiny pool of water? But he can fly! – Only he doesn’t yet believe it. He’s been shunned all his life as a freak with gigantic ears. He’s lost his ’magic feather‘ and thinks that without it he can’t fly. Timothy mouse desperately, frantically tells him:
“It’s not the feather, it’s you! You can fly. Forget the feather. It’s time to dive.”
He falls. The crowd gasps. But just as he’s about to smash into the shallow water, Timothy’s words come back to him: “It’s you, Dumbo, not the feather!”
At last he flies! He doesn’t need the feather. Finally truly believing in himself, he escapes the captive circus.
This article is about your escape. How you can disregard ’magic feathers‘ and believe in yourself.
Why you need self-belief
Self-belief is vital. How many things have you not done or tried because you lacked belief in yourself?
Many fail to believe in themselves because others didn’t (take my friend Dumbo). But as Eleanor Roosevelt so deftly put it:
“Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
Yet self-doubts creep in, don’t they? Like unwelcome house guests that keep calling round simply because you played host to them before. Doubts such as:
Can I really do this?
Other people are better, smarter, more worthy than me.
What will other people think if I do/say this?
I can’t risk failure.
Success is for others but not for the likes of me!
If you sometimes have trouble believing in yourself then read, absorb, enjoy, and practice these self-belief tips.
Tip 1 – Remember self-belief is learnable
Your level of self-belief isn’t set in stone; not unalterable. We can all be flexible and change, even ’fly’. Remember you were born into this world with no sense of what you could or couldn’t do. Then, bit by bit, life started to teach you to limit yourself. A very young child never says: “I’m not the kind of person who could…” They haven’t yet learned to limit their own horizons or listened to people who leak pessimism.
One of the first steps is to re-examine and discard many of the limiting ideas you have about yourself; ideas that you’ve somehow collected along the way.
Tip 2 – Deal with the inner negative voice
When you start to doubt yourself listen, for a moment, to that little negative inner voice. Whose voice is it really? A parent’s, old school bullies? A collection of lots of different voices from different times and people? One thing’s for sure; that little inner self-critical voice wasn’t yours originally. It may masquerade as belonging to you now, but it doesn’t really.
Tell yourself: “This is not my true voice!” Then start to challenge it and also to just plain ignore it.
Tip 3 – Flip a weakness into a strength
Dumbo, our cartoon quadruped, was humiliated by his outsize ears. He hated them at first. But, through time, he came to use them, to fulfil his destiny even, by changing his attitude.
If we just focus on what is not right about ourselves rather than what is, then we miss opportunities for self-belief. We shouldn’t assume there’s nothing to improve about ourselves, but just focusing on perceived weaknesses without either a) taking steps to improve them or b) also giving fair focus toward our strengths gets us nowhere.
For example, if you know that you can be stubborn then find the positive in this. Stubbornness used well is called single-minded determination. If you worry a lot, know that the positive flipside of this is that you have a powerful imagination which, in the right context, can be put to good use.
Take any negative belief you have about yourself and creatively flip it so that it becomes, in its place, a positive resource (think: ’ears/Dumbo‘). You’ll find this exercise fun to do.
The next tip is a favourite of mine:
Tip 4 – Develop your ‘super powers’!
Think of the typical powers of the more popular superheroes and write them down before you start your day. They may be such things as super speed, the ability to climb walls, flight, x-ray vision…whatever. Why do I suggest this? Because ‘priming’ your mind with qualities and positive characteristics can actually determine your behaviour.
Not that you’ll start flying to the rescue of stranded citizens, but the pattern of superhero powers is one of ability, courage, and competence. In one study, people asked to write down as many super powers as they could think of were more likely to give to charity months afterwards. The pattern of giving to charity is that of being able. Prime your mind with ‘able words’ before you start each day.
As well as superhero powers, write all kinds of other positive characteristics (whether you think you have them or not). Do this before you go out. For example, I might write:
Strength
Dignity
Calm
Intelligence
Humour
Generosity
Quick wittedness
Charisma
Sex appeal
Approachability
Popularity
Determination
And so on. I’m not just asking you to focus on your own present or even future qualities here, but just on the words. Take a few moments writing them down each day, then a few moments running your eyes up and down your list (it doesn’t matter if it’s a similar list each day). Really reflect upon what each word means to you.
You’ll be amazed how doing this will powerfully prime your unconscious mind.
Tip 5 – Be your own motivational coach
If you notice doubts rearing their ugly heads, imagine you (the clear-headed part of you) are the coach and the anxious part of you is the person you need to talk to.
Think what you’d say to someone you really believe in if they started showing doubts. Sit down and say those same things to yourself. So if you are about to go for a job interview and you ’hear yourself‘ starting to express doubts, take a few moments to sit down, close your eyes, and coach yourself:
“Look, you can do this! It’s natural to feel a little anxious, but that just means you care about what you’re doing! You’ve got all the relevant experience and qualifications! Now get in there and stop whinging! Even if you don’t get this job, you’re going to make me proud by giving it your best shot!”
Picture the decent, friendly, straight-talking coach in your mind. Is it someone you know or would like to know? Talking to yourself in these times as if you were another person (in the privacy of your mind J) can ramp up your confidence fast.
Tip 6 – Do ‘hero training’
Hero training is a great way to increase your own self-belief.
I once treated a young boy for emitaphobia – fear of, in his case, other people vomiting. He told me about a time his sister had been sick and how terrified he’d been. Later I discovered he loved Arnold Schwarzeneggermovies. We talked about how Arnie would have coped with his sister being sick and I got this little boy to hypnotically watch the Austrian muscle man heroically dealing with other people vomiting. I then got this little boy to strongly imagine that he was Arnie and what it was like to deal with sickness and so on.
He overcame what had been a severe phobia by ’borrowing‘ the traits of his hero and making them his own. It was easier for this little boy to believe in Arnie dealing with other people being sick than it was to imagine himself dealing with it.
Bit by bit, he transferred the cool, calm, collected, decisive action from his hero to himself.
Think of a situation in which lack of self-belief holds you back. Now think of your ’hero‘ – who could be a world leader, a movie hero, or the guy or gal down the street. Now close your eyes and strongly imagine them dealing with the situation ’heroically‘. Now imagine being them for a few moments, experiencing that time in their shoes. Keep doing this until you notice you can start to transfer a sense of their qualities to yourself.
Tip 7 – Create a powerful vision of yourself
Self-belief comes not just by trying to convince yourself you can do stuff. True self-belief actually comes from developing the vision that you can relax socially, start that business, write that book, or whatever it is you need to believe you can do or be.
Get into the habit of sitting down, closing your eyes, and watching yourself behaving decisively, calmly, and strongly. This powerful visualization exercise means you can learn from yourself how to be confident, have self-belief, and behave in ways which maximize chances of success. Imagine you are viewing yourself on a TV screen. The ‘you’ in the screen is showing the you watching how to act with self-belief. The more you do this, the more you’ll find that you’ll quite naturally start to become like the ’you‘ in the movie.
Or let me do it for you by clicking on the free audio link at the bottom of the page.
Self-belief doesn’t mean arrogance or blindness to one’s own shortcomings. Then again, it doesn’t mean believing that you are perfect as you are, either. Your self-belief really needs to be focused on what you will become. And an important part of self-belief comes from knowing your weaknesses and being relaxed about them.
Self-belief gives you the freedom to make mistakes and cope with setbacks by seeing them for what they are: temporary setbacks, not the end of the world. And something else you’ll notice: As your self-belief grows, people around you start to believe in you more, too. Because it really isn’t the feather – it’s you.
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"7 Steps to Self-Belief" courtesy of divemasterking2000
The crowd waits. Surely he’s going to die. How can he survive a dive from such a massive height into a tiny pool of water? But he can fly! – Only he doesn’t yet believe it. He’s been shunned all his life as a freak with gigantic ears. He’s lost his ’magic feather‘ and thinks that without it he can’t fly. Timothy mouse desperately, frantically tells him:
“It’s not the feather, it’s you! You can fly. Forget the feather. It’s time to dive.”
He falls. The crowd gasps. But just as he’s about to smash into the shallow water, Timothy’s words come back to him: “It’s you, Dumbo, not the feather!”
At last he flies! He doesn’t need the feather. Finally truly believing in himself, he escapes the captive circus.
This article is about your escape. How you can disregard ’magic feathers‘ and believe in yourself.
Why you need self-belief
Self-belief is vital. How many things have you not done or tried because you lacked belief in yourself?
Many fail to believe in themselves because others didn’t (take my friend Dumbo). But as Eleanor Roosevelt so deftly put it:
“Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
Yet self-doubts creep in, don’t they? Like unwelcome house guests that keep calling round simply because you played host to them before. Doubts such as:
Can I really do this?
Other people are better, smarter, more worthy than me.
What will other people think if I do/say this?
I can’t risk failure.
Success is for others but not for the likes of me!
If you sometimes have trouble believing in yourself then read, absorb, enjoy, and practice these self-belief tips.
Tip 1 – Remember self-belief is learnable
Your level of self-belief isn’t set in stone; not unalterable. We can all be flexible and change, even ’fly’. Remember you were born into this world with no sense of what you could or couldn’t do. Then, bit by bit, life started to teach you to limit yourself. A very young child never says: “I’m not the kind of person who could…” They haven’t yet learned to limit their own horizons or listened to people who leak pessimism.
One of the first steps is to re-examine and discard many of the limiting ideas you have about yourself; ideas that you’ve somehow collected along the way.
Tip 2 – Deal with the inner negative voice
When you start to doubt yourself listen, for a moment, to that little negative inner voice. Whose voice is it really? A parent’s, old school bullies? A collection of lots of different voices from different times and people? One thing’s for sure; that little inner self-critical voice wasn’t yours originally. It may masquerade as belonging to you now, but it doesn’t really.
Tell yourself: “This is not my true voice!” Then start to challenge it and also to just plain ignore it.
Tip 3 – Flip a weakness into a strength
Dumbo, our cartoon quadruped, was humiliated by his outsize ears. He hated them at first. But, through time, he came to use them, to fulfil his destiny even, by changing his attitude.
If we just focus on what is not right about ourselves rather than what is, then we miss opportunities for self-belief. We shouldn’t assume there’s nothing to improve about ourselves, but just focusing on perceived weaknesses without either a) taking steps to improve them or b) also giving fair focus toward our strengths gets us nowhere.
For example, if you know that you can be stubborn then find the positive in this. Stubbornness used well is called single-minded determination. If you worry a lot, know that the positive flipside of this is that you have a powerful imagination which, in the right context, can be put to good use.
Take any negative belief you have about yourself and creatively flip it so that it becomes, in its place, a positive resource (think: ’ears/Dumbo‘). You’ll find this exercise fun to do.
The next tip is a favourite of mine:
Tip 4 – Develop your ‘super powers’!
Think of the typical powers of the more popular superheroes and write them down before you start your day. They may be such things as super speed, the ability to climb walls, flight, x-ray vision…whatever. Why do I suggest this? Because ‘priming’ your mind with qualities and positive characteristics can actually determine your behaviour.
Not that you’ll start flying to the rescue of stranded citizens, but the pattern of superhero powers is one of ability, courage, and competence. In one study, people asked to write down as many super powers as they could think of were more likely to give to charity months afterwards. The pattern of giving to charity is that of being able. Prime your mind with ‘able words’ before you start each day.
As well as superhero powers, write all kinds of other positive characteristics (whether you think you have them or not). Do this before you go out. For example, I might write:
Strength
Dignity
Calm
Intelligence
Humour
Generosity
Quick wittedness
Charisma
Sex appeal
Approachability
Popularity
Determination
And so on. I’m not just asking you to focus on your own present or even future qualities here, but just on the words. Take a few moments writing them down each day, then a few moments running your eyes up and down your list (it doesn’t matter if it’s a similar list each day). Really reflect upon what each word means to you.
You’ll be amazed how doing this will powerfully prime your unconscious mind.
Tip 5 – Be your own motivational coach
If you notice doubts rearing their ugly heads, imagine you (the clear-headed part of you) are the coach and the anxious part of you is the person you need to talk to.
Think what you’d say to someone you really believe in if they started showing doubts. Sit down and say those same things to yourself. So if you are about to go for a job interview and you ’hear yourself‘ starting to express doubts, take a few moments to sit down, close your eyes, and coach yourself:
“Look, you can do this! It’s natural to feel a little anxious, but that just means you care about what you’re doing! You’ve got all the relevant experience and qualifications! Now get in there and stop whinging! Even if you don’t get this job, you’re going to make me proud by giving it your best shot!”
Picture the decent, friendly, straight-talking coach in your mind. Is it someone you know or would like to know? Talking to yourself in these times as if you were another person (in the privacy of your mind J) can ramp up your confidence fast.
Tip 6 – Do ‘hero training’
Hero training is a great way to increase your own self-belief.
I once treated a young boy for emitaphobia – fear of, in his case, other people vomiting. He told me about a time his sister had been sick and how terrified he’d been. Later I discovered he loved Arnold Schwarzeneggermovies. We talked about how Arnie would have coped with his sister being sick and I got this little boy to hypnotically watch the Austrian muscle man heroically dealing with other people vomiting. I then got this little boy to strongly imagine that he was Arnie and what it was like to deal with sickness and so on.
He overcame what had been a severe phobia by ’borrowing‘ the traits of his hero and making them his own. It was easier for this little boy to believe in Arnie dealing with other people being sick than it was to imagine himself dealing with it.
Bit by bit, he transferred the cool, calm, collected, decisive action from his hero to himself.
Think of a situation in which lack of self-belief holds you back. Now think of your ’hero‘ – who could be a world leader, a movie hero, or the guy or gal down the street. Now close your eyes and strongly imagine them dealing with the situation ’heroically‘. Now imagine being them for a few moments, experiencing that time in their shoes. Keep doing this until you notice you can start to transfer a sense of their qualities to yourself.
Tip 7 – Create a powerful vision of yourself
Self-belief comes not just by trying to convince yourself you can do stuff. True self-belief actually comes from developing the vision that you can relax socially, start that business, write that book, or whatever it is you need to believe you can do or be.
Get into the habit of sitting down, closing your eyes, and watching yourself behaving decisively, calmly, and strongly. This powerful visualization exercise means you can learn from yourself how to be confident, have self-belief, and behave in ways which maximize chances of success. Imagine you are viewing yourself on a TV screen. The ‘you’ in the screen is showing the you watching how to act with self-belief. The more you do this, the more you’ll find that you’ll quite naturally start to become like the ’you‘ in the movie.
Or let me do it for you by clicking on the free audio link at the bottom of the page.
Self-belief doesn’t mean arrogance or blindness to one’s own shortcomings. Then again, it doesn’t mean believing that you are perfect as you are, either. Your self-belief really needs to be focused on what you will become. And an important part of self-belief comes from knowing your weaknesses and being relaxed about them.
Self-belief gives you the freedom to make mistakes and cope with setbacks by seeing them for what they are: temporary setbacks, not the end of the world. And something else you’ll notice: As your self-belief grows, people around you start to believe in you more, too. Because it really isn’t the feather – it’s you.
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