Despite what you might think most people have issues with their confidence and would like to be more assertive and care-free. In this article I write about how I gained more confidence and overcome some of the fears and phobias in my life. Growing up I felt very sorry for myself as I had many things which affected my confidence and made life a struggle. I had a severe stuttering problem, was quite short for a male at five foot four, I had a bald patch on my head and was also quite fat. I would appreciate if you stop laughing at this point, I have had that all my life. I was most desperate to overcome the stutter and aged twenty-two decided to try to achieve fluency. As well as looking into the physical aspects of speech such as breathing, I also studied the mental as I realised I needed to change the way I thought and my approach to life. I was someone who constantly worried about everything, I even had grey hair by the age of twenty-one. I read many books on the subjects of confidence, self esteem and positive thinking. In one of these books, I read a chapter which explained about the fact that we all have issues in life and things about our person that we would like to change. That was certainly me, so I continued to read. There are many things in life that we are not happy with, some we can change, some we can not. The things we are unable to change, we have to learn to live with and to accept and the things we can change, we have to change however hard that might be. I thought about this and because hair will never grow on the bald patch and the fact that I will never grow taller, these were two aspects of my life that I realised I would have to accept. The speech problem and weight were areas I could change. To lose the excess weight and to overcome the stutter were not easy and took a long time. This though has changed my life to such a degree, where as a career I now help other people to achieve fluency. |
