As much as you try to be and look successful, is there a part of your inner voice that says you’re a loser? Most guys deal with this inner critic, that undermines their real success in the world. Jason looks at this negative self-beliefs in this 2 1/2 min. video, Kicking the “Loser” Thinking, and gives you some tips to think about when confronting these negative self-beliefs.
Whether in relationships, at work, or with oneself, there are a multitude of ways to sabotage yourself from getting what you want in your life.
In undermining our own success, we set up scenarios in which we fail, or hold ourselves back unconsciously from what we really want, often out of negative emotions or beliefs that fail to hold up under scrutiny in the real world. In effect, we hold ourselves back, and often don’t know how we do.
If you think you self-sabotage yourself, might any of these things characterize your behavior?
Lacking in self-support and inner resources, those men who self-sabotage seem to constantly make decisions that are bad for them, or at the least, make them deviate from their own path to success in life.
What does self-sabotage look like?
People are attracted to those guys who are confident and not at war with themselves. Self-saboteurs are in a war with themselves, so it’s going to be difficult to attract healthy, growth-oriented people into the realm or the self-saboteur. Even if we say that we want them in our lives, we may be attracting the wrong kinds of people, whether those be women, jobs, friends or the like.
To want health is different from attracting health: if we’re still at war with ourselves, we end up attracting others (read: intimate partners) that conspire in our self-abuse. And that’s not what we want for ourselves. That’s not how we see our lives as healthy and growth-promoting.
What can you do to stop the saboteur in you?
You know how it goes: you set a goal, you start strong, and in two months, you stop. The initial burst of energy settles into complacency, and before you know it, you’re back to doing the status quo. What went wrong, you ask yourself? You really wanted to achieve (fill in the blanks), but you just lost steam by February.
New Year’s resolutions can set the goal maker up for failure. According to one New York Times article, four out of 5 people who create new years resolutions will end up breaking them. The article referenced a poll by time management firm Franklin Covey: will break the resolutions because they say they have too many other things to do, while 33% of respondents say they’re just not committed to the goal.
Maximizing your New Year’s resolutions means doing this year what didn’t work last year. According to experts, the real problem with making New Year’s resolutions is that people make the wrong resolutions. What people lack is a specific goal, instead of just a general desire to change.
Here’s some suggestions to help keep you on track when you set out to achieve your New Year’s resolutions:
New Year’s resolutions don’t have to be thrown by the wayside by February. If you truly value something, and want to see it appear as a change in your life, you can have it. If you want it bad enough, you can have it. Try to follow some of these steps to help support you in your journey, and see your goal become reality sooner than you think.
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:
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:
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 
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.
Unhappiness usually begins with ourselves. Other people may trigger us to feel negative or down, but were largely responsible for our own selves. How we communicate with ourselves is often an indicator of personal happiness. Self talk, or the inner dialogue that we have with ourselves, is something that people are not always aware of as it’s happening. We’re usually pretty reactive to people and situations, and tend to forget what’s happening behind the scenes, or how we’re talking to ourselves. The reality is that so often, we are wrapped up in negative self talk and verbal abuse towards ourselves. Being caught up in this kind of self talk makes it really difficult to connect with ourselves in a healthy way, and, consequently, to relate to others in a kinder, friendlier fashion.
Upon his first experience of Western self-criticism, the Dalai Lama was puzzled. In Tibet, where he’s from, there was no concept of a self critic. When I read this, I was impressed. As Americans, we’re so embroiled in negative self talk and beating up on ourselves, it never occurred to me that other cultures might find this a curiosity.
When we get into negative self talk, it’s usually centered around the idea that “I’m just not good enough.” we may have grown up with these messages, from our families of origin, and have been reinforced through other institutions, like school, church, and sports. We internalized these messages so many times, and after enough repetition, began to believe. So, as adults, we identify strongly with that negative inner critic. The problem is, we’re much more than that.
When you find yourself speaking harshly to yourself, beating up on or generally feeling negative towards yourself, remember that there are ways to deal with this. Here’s some important ideas to remember:
Dealing with our inner self critic is tricky. It’s easier sometimes to just say what’s wrong with other people, or put our problems on the world, but looking inward and seeing the inner mental chaos that often drives us, we see a different picture. Changing the nature of how we relate to and treat ourselves is the first step towards more happiness and personal freedom.
