It’s easy to compare ourselves to others when you’re feeling insecure about our own selves or situations. When we get into comparing ourselves to others, we get into a never-ending cycle of wishing and wanting, and not feeling good enough about our own selves or our own performance.

When we’re feeling low, the natural tendency to start to want to be someone else or have what someone else has is natural. Our minds start to generate a lot of fantasies and wishes to be “the next guy.” we may want what we perceive they have: a nice car, a better marriage, more confidence, or whatever. The reality is, we really just don’t know what they have and what they don’t have, because other men display their social personalities which may be a lot different from what’s actually happening inside of them. When we compare ourselves to them (or what we think is them), we are actually comparing ourselves to our fantasies of what we think they are or what it is that they have. The fact is, we really don’t know, and we end up comparing ourselves to something that might be more of an illusion then reality.

When we get into comparing ourselves with others, it’s more of a reflection about how we are feeling down about ourselves. If we can learn how to deal with ourselves instead of seeking out fulfillment from other people, by striving to be what it is that we think that they are, we can learn to stop the cycle of suffering and striving, and start to deal with our own unhappiness or self image.

This is really hard to do, because we exist in a culture that thrives on comparing ourselves to other people. If we don’t have the right job, where the right close, have the right mate or live a certain lifestyle, we are not as worthy, according to our culture. Consumerism is based on us striving and not being content with what we have, and so we get predisposed at an early age to compare ourselves to others, or even ourselves, about what we need to own, need to be, or need to think. This is a black hole that is never-ending, and it doesn’t produce ultimate satisfaction and positive self-esteem.

Even comparing ourselves to ourselves is a problem. Often times, our inner dialogue is dominated by our self critic, which shames us and blames us for not being good enough, not having enough, and not doing enough. A lot of men struggle with shame as a result, and tend to be depressed, anxious, or generally withdrawal from others as a result of struggling with their inner critic. Comparing ourselves to others is merely a symptom of comparing ourselves to ourselves, and we can start to deal with our self critic or the voice inside of us that negates us and says “we’re not enough,” we can start to take a hard look at that which generates our unhappiness.

Here are some things to think about when comparing ourselves to others, or even ourselves:

• Try to reframe your comparisons to others: question your comparison to others, and consider that your comparison may not be accurate; the reality may be more than meets the eye.
• Try fantasizing about what would happen if you were to actually gain or attain that which are striving to get. What would that look like? instead of spending summers mental energy fantasizing about what you don’t have, what you’re not, and what you’d like to be, actually create a mental projection of how it would be to actually be that way/own that thing/act in that way. What would life be like when you were to be at that point? Would you be happy then?
• Shift the ” locus of evaluation” from outside to inside: instead of comparing yourselves others outside of yourself, try turning the conversation inwards. try to look at the comparisons that you make against yourself, and start to make note of those things. Try writing the comparisons down in a journal, or talking about it with your mate or spouse.
• Usually our comparisons and strivings are a mental game we play with ourselves. If you can sit back, relax, and sink into the felt sense your body, behind the mental comparisons, how does that feel? if you’re struggling with a feeling of “not good enough”, let that sensation, inside of your body, maybe in your heart, shoulders, or stomach. A lot of times, we just don’t tune into what our body is telling us, and instead let our minds drive us on autopilot. We convince ourselves that the mental comparisons are reality, and in fact, they are not.

These are just a couple of things to think about to help you reduce your energy investment in comparison to other people. As long as were caught in this never-ending cycle of comparing ourselves to other people, ourselves, or external situations, we will never be ultimately happy because were going to keep striving and not reach the finish line.

Defining personal success sometimes is difficult. It’s pretty easy to buy into the social, cultural, and family messages about what makes for success, but it’s a little bit more difficult to listen to ourselves to guide us towards our own version of personal success. Let me explain.

Growing up, we have many messages about how to be successful, or how not to be unsuccessful, given to us at an early age from parents, religious institutions, school, and television. It’s easy to grow up and not have to question some of these messages, especially if we’ve been given them from an early age and they been repeated over and over again. For example, our parent’s definition of personal success may have been integrated from such an early age, and we never got around to challenging or questioning those definitions of personal success. They may have, over time, developed to be very different from those things that we would identify as successful for ourselves if it was just up to us.

Personal success is not exactly what culture, society, or our parents might have us expect. Sure, there our many things that we can all agree defined personal success: finding a good job that we like, making good money, finding a great mate, developing a happy marriage, having a healthy family, and the list goes on. Those are the kind of universally accepted definitions of what it means to be successful in our culture.

But, even reaching those peaks and gaining the culturally sanctioned versions of personal success doesn’t always bring happiness. In fact, many men still deal with depression, anxiety, low self-confidence, and the like. Take Tiger Woods for example. He was the most famous and richest golfer in the world, had a beautiful wife, and seemed to define for millions of men what it means to be successful personally. And one day in November of last year, it all started to unravel. It was discovered that he had a sex addiction and had been sleeping with lots of women on the side. My sense is that Tiger, inside of himself, doesn’t feel very successful at all. He may have all of the trappings that exude personal success, from a cultural point of view. But, it may be a very different story inside of his mind.

We have to define personal success as men in a number of ways, and not just subscribed to the universal definitions of personal success given to us by our parents, our culture, media, and our peers. Personal success goes a lot deeper.

Here are some things to think about when defining personal success for yourself:

1. What are my values? If I were to list my values, and rank them in order importance, how are my behaviors in the world representative of those values? Are my own personal values being lifted up to in my day-to-day actions? for example, if I aspire to be a good husband or father, what do I do in the day-to-day to adhere to that value? If I want to be healthy physically, and that’s my value, what do I do in the day-to-day to live that value? I think the closer you can match your own personal values to the actions that you perform in your day-to-day life, that is a mark of personal success.
2. Try challenging some of your own ideas of personal success. Are your ideas of personal success different or the same from those that you received from growing up, from your parents, from other influential sources? are there versions of success that you are finding your life that deviate from some of those messages that were given to long-ago?
3. How do you experience personal success on a day-to-day basis? what are those ” little victories” that you experience all the time? They may not be having sixpack abs or a six-figure salary, but they may be significant when you put your every day up to a microscope.

Men should challenge the very idea of what it means to be successful, and challenge the inner self critic that berates and defeats them while they’re striving for more success. Often times, we strive for achievement of personal success based on outside opinion, whether from peers, family members, our spouse, or the media. Learning to challenge those definitions of personal success, and learning to turn inward and define ourselves as successful in whatever way is right for us will make a difference in how we define ourselves as successful.

For men, it’s difficult to work up the courage to do a lot of things in life: asking women out on dates, asking for a raise, or asking for what they need and want in general. Guys struggle a lot with self-confidence issues, and working up the courage to confront fear or fearful situations goes along with developing one’s self-confidence.

There’s a lot to be fearful of in the world, and when we succumb to our fear, we’re usually succumbing to negative experiences that we’ve had in the past. When we tried something and failed, or it hasn’t produced the result that we would’ve wanted, that experience gets branded in our psyches and cripples us from moving forward. Instead of being able to work up the courage to get to our final destination, whether that be getting out of a bad job or working up the courage to ask out the woman you’ve had your eye on, we succumbed to the overwhelming negative messages and beliefs that prevent us from our success.

The idea of “feel the fear and do it anyway” is popular in some circles, but the fear that debilitates us from summoning up the strength to deal with a situation with courage takes a keener eye to see. If we can look inside of ourselves, and investigate the fear ourselves, we can begin to dissolve the fear at its root. Instead of the male friendly way of “pushing through the fear,” which is one way to go, we turn in words and tried to develop our relationship with fear at its root. This way, if situations arise in the future that provoke our fear, we don’t have to get into a habit of just “pushing through it” to create a positive result.

Courage is the modus operandi of good self-confidence. We use courage to propel us into success in our lives. If there are blocks to our self-confidence, it may be that we are stuck in some kind of fear or negative self messages or beliefs that keep us in place. Here are some tips to help you work up the courage to situation that seems difficult:

• Ask yourself, “what is the worst possible outcome if I act on my fear? If I succumb to it?”
• help yourself understand if there have been situations in the past that have scarred you or hinder your ability to be courageous today.
• Try to identify if there are negative self messages that have come from your family background that keep you from using encourage. Oftentimes, we integrate family messages around fear, risk taking, and success.
• When you think of a situation that requires employing courage, what feelings come up for you? Try to check in physically with your body, and with the sensations that arise when you think of the fearful situation that would need your courage. What is the felt sense that you experience–in your heart, in your shoulders, in your neck, etc.?
• Try not to beat yourself into submitting to the potentially scarier risky event, because you’ll just make it worse. Instead, try to understand what is holding you back instead of trying to just “push through” the situation.

Try to use some of these tips to help you get through a situation that might need your courage. Oftentimes, because were stuck in our own fear and irrational fantasies and beliefs about how a situation is going to play out, we lose the sense of ourselves in the present moment. Because we’ve already shut down the outcome before we even started it, we deny ourselves a chance at success before we’re even out of the gates.

For the average guy, there are struggles to stay self-confident amidst a host of daily problems. It’s challenging to stay confident about our jobs, our friendships, our intimate relationships, and about ourselves, especially with so much insecurity in the world right now. There are many factors that chip away at our foundation, but if we can learn to keep that integrity of our foundation, we can learn how to deal with people and issues without letting them chip away at our self-confidence. Developing good self-confidence comes from the inside, as we’ll talk about.

Culturally, men are expected to be confident at all times. Culture expects that men (and women) have it all together, and display confidence in settings from the workroom to the bedroom.

But the reality to self-confidence is that most people struggle with it. Men struggling with self-confidence is generally not what you see in advertisements or popular culture, and if it is, it’s generally used to exploit men’s struggling self-confidence to buy their product or service. I think about the ads for Just for Men, Viagra or Men’s Health magazine, which try to get men to buy into what they’re selling to increase our experience of being a confident, always in control man. Self-confidence cannot be bought, now matter how much we convince ourselves that money, status and owning have something to do with it.

For many guys, the struggle with feeling okay about themselves is universal. It’s not just women. We struggle to be okay enough for others, for ourselves and for our families of origin. Men do indeed struggle with things like low self-esteem problems and feeling worthy enough for their wives and girlfriends. They worry about being competent enough employees or good enough fathers. These are what real guys worry about every day.

One thing to look out for when increasing self-confidence is the negative self critic. This self critic creates that negative inner dialog we experience in our minds, which feeds off off of self-abusive thinking, is the biggest challenge to increasing our self-confidence. If we can learn to deal with the negative self critic in a more positive way, self-confidence can increase on its own. Too many times, we are so caught up in a cycle of shaming and criticizing ourselves, that we fail to step back and see how we have damaged our self-confidence from the inside.

We also need to deal with the ingrained negative messages that we have around those areas where we feel lack of confidence, whether that’s with women, career, sex, money or any number of things. Dealing with those messages directly, we then take the steam out of them and stop them from running our negative self critic. We create a new type of script for ourselves, and instill self-confidence this way.

Taking calculated risks is another way that you can increase self-confidence. By creating small, attainable goals with some level of risk helps you to gradually move forward to attainment. Goals with some level of risk, whether that means disclosing something personal about yourself to your partner or signing up for a new class or hobby, provide the quickest and most realistic way to experience achievement. Men like to experience completion and success, and this has the net effect of gradually raising one’s self-esteem.

Validating and supporting yourself is a critical element to increasing good self-confidence. Many times men didn’t grow up in an environment that was supportive or validating of their aspirations, or of themselves. A lot of men don’t know how to validate or support themselves, or even know how to receive those things. Learning how to praise yourself, and give yourself kudos is extremely important to  help motivate you to greater success. This sounds like common sense, but too many guys just don’t know how to do it, and need to learn.

One last tip to increasing self-confidence lies in the domain of relationships. Sometimes men are still holding onto certain emotions about a failed relationship, divorce or just relationship problems that they’ve been apart of in the past. Self-confidence gets undermined when we are still holding onto the pain, hurt, shame, self-blame or anger associated with a failed relationship. We enter into new relationships with fear or lack of self-confidence because we’ve been burned before, and don’t want to risk opening up our hearts to trust someone else again. Self-confidence in relationships is about dealing with some of that old hurt in a way that can allow you to function with confidence in the present relationship you’re in.Counseling or therapy can help you work through some of those blocks that are below your radar of awareness.

Ultimately, self-confidence is an inside job. Too often we look to fill ourselves up with self-confidence from outside sources. Although we may need support or esteem from those sources, say from our wife or boss, ultimate self-confidence arises from inside ourselves. If we can learn to deal with the inner turmoil, including the negative messages we’ve learned and our self critic, we can learn to improve self-confidence and deal with those things in our lives that have traditionally eroded our confidence.