I'm Dr. David Thomas. I'm a practicing psychotherapist in Tampa, Florida with Whitford Thomas Group. Speaking to you today about improving self confidence. In my thinking, self confidence is synonymous with self acceptance. And what is self acceptance, self acceptance is the ability to unconditionally accept yourself with the poor behaviors, as well as the behaviors you consider to be good. In kind of the old Christian kind of view is damn the sin, but not the sinner. To be able to separate behavior, from people. To get rid of rating, rating yourself, and rating others. That's unfortunately what all the self esteem literature tends to imply, is that you know, how do you increase one's self esteem, or self confidence. You get them to focus on the positive aspects of what they do. For me, it's much better, to help people to develop a much more self acceptance of themselves. To be able to accept themselves unconditionally. Interestingly, also other unconditional, other acceptance, would also to do the same with other folks. So how do we improve self confidence? First we develop a more realistic view of ourself, recognizing that life is not a journey, but a progress. Now, when we're looking at self confidence, certainly one thing we want to begin to do is, along with changing the thinking, which helps you to develop a much better self acceptance, is to practice. So whatever the task may be, whether it be doing a better job at public speaking, whether it be to be doing a better job at sports, or different tasks at work, is to be willing to take risks, and to get out there and practice. Recognizing that you may not do very well at first, but with practice, and self acceptance, more than likely you'll eventually do much better. Will it be perfect, maybe not, but we don't need perfection. I'm Dr. David Thomas, talking to you about how to improve self confidence.
health section
