“At work, every time I have to speak at meetings, I get so stressed.”

“I’m taking a class and I’m always afraid to raise my hand and ask a question.”

“I’m fine one to one, but as soon as I get into a group, I’m so tense I can hardly stand it.”

“I’m totally relaxed with my women friends, but as soon as I’m with a guy I like, I can’t be myself.”

Each of these people are anxious and stressed because they want to get approval and avoid disapproval. What are they telling themselves that is causing their anxiety?

“Oh God, I better not forget what I want to say and make a fool of myself.”

“The teacher might think the question I want to ask is a dumb one.”

“If I say the wrong thing no one will like me.”

“I better not say something completely stupid.”

Each of these people are telling themselves things that are causing anxiety, and underneath these self-judgmental statements is a deeper belief:

“If I say or do something wrong or stupid, they won’t like me and that means I am not okay.”

The need for approval and the fear of disapproval comes from the belief that others are responsible for your worth. If they like you, you are okay, and if they don’t like you, you are not okay.

If you are a person who seeks others’ approval, then you have made others responsible for sense of worth.

Imagine that you have a child, and instead of loving this child, you keep giving the child away to others to define. You keep saying to this child, “You better do it right because you if they don’t like you, then you are not okay.” The result would be that the child would feel very insecure and unlovable, because you kept giving him or her away to others for approval.

When you make others responsible for your sense of worth, you are doing the same thing on the inner level – giving away your own inner child. Instead of defining your own worth, you are making others responsible for this.

This is a very hard way to live. You have to constantly try to figure out what someone else wants of you to get approval and avoid disapproval. Your good and bad feelings are dependent upon how you look and how you perform, so you have to be constantly on your toes.

What if you were to take on the responsibility of defining your own worth? How would you go about doing this?

One of the problems in defining your own worth is that you may have been programmed to see yourself through the eyes of your parents, teachers, siblings and peers. If, when you were growing up, you got judged, criticized, rejected or ridiculed, you may have incorporated others’ images of you into your own mind. So you can’t define your own worth and lovability from your wounded self – your programmed ego mind. You need to define yourself through the eyes of love, not the eyes of judgment.

Start with imagining an older, wiser part of you, or imagine a person from your childhood who really loved you. Imagine that you can see yourself as a child through the eyes of this other person or through the older part of you. What do you see? Can you see your innocence, your lovingness, your sense of wonder, your creativity, your aliveness? Open to seeing who you are in your essence – your true Self.

If you were to practice seeing who you really are – not who you are in your wounded programmed self, but who you are in your essence Self – you would start to value your own beautiful essence. As you value your essence, you would start to treat yourself in kinder, more loving ways.

The more you practice doing this, the better you will feel about yourself and the less you will seek approval from others. In time and with practice, you will find yourself feeling so much happier and more peaceful!

Are you about to venture into the world of wearing contacts? Many people in need of corrective lenses choose to wear contact lenses because of the comfort and an aversion to looking awful with glasses. Glasses slip down your nose, weight on your ears and nose, and have glare problems with light. You also have to have special lenses or an extra pair to keep the sun from blinding you when wearing glasses. A contact lens allows you to get rid of this paraphernalia and simply have corrected vision. Most individuals won’t even realize you are wearing a contact lens because they are virtually impossible to see in your eye.

Contact lenses have changed since the 50’s. A hard contact lens was the first lens to be made. This type of contact lens was made of a glass material making it very rigid and very uncomfortable for your eye. Most individuals felt glasses were the only way to go because of the uncomfortable material and expense. After all it was very easy to scratch your eye with a hard contact lens when trying to get it out because of the rigidity of the material. Soon glass material was replaced with a polymer based product making contact lenses a little more comfortable; however the restricted oxygen flow to the cornea was causing eye sight problems like blindness in individuals who wore contacts for several years.

We now have a silicon hydrogel contact. This is known as a soft contact lens. The material is like plastic and conforms to the eye easier than their counterparts. It is also thinner. This thinner material tends to tear easily, but gives more comfort to your eye. It is an almost weightless material so your eye will barely feel its presence.

With the introduction of the silicon hydrogel contact lens we also have the introduction of more color contact lenses available. You may have seen some one with violet, jade, yellow or red eyes. The color contact lenses are available to create whatever effect you wish to, however there are downsides. The color contact lens tends to restrict oxygen flow when you have these type of opaque lenses because the material is a little heavier to create the affect.

Your contact lens is created to fit your eye. An eye care specialist will measure your eye to get the correct lens ordered to fit your eye. This is why most individuals with higher prescriptions tend to wait a week or more for their contact lenses to arrive. You can also have corrective lenses for astigmatisms or bifocal contact lenses. The Toric lenses are weighted at the bottom to keep the contact on your eye and eliminate the blurriness created by the astigmatism. The bifocal contact lens is available for those who need an adjustment for near and farsightedness and don’t want glasses. Your eye care professional will make sure you have the right prescription for your contact lens.

One of the many reasons why people lose confidence and power in dealing with people is because they are too overly concerned with what other people think. They feel they won’t be liked if they said what was on their mind. What they are really saying is that they are trying to avoid conflict, when the conflict is the exact learning experience they need to provide the growth, knowledge and confidence for dealing with people in the first place.

Conflict management or managing the conflict of ideas and thoughts between two or more people can be an incredible learning experience for everyone involved, so much information is revealed in these intense periods that if we can learn to keep our integrity in tack during these short bursts of emotion, common ground can be quickly found.

However, if your confidence and power in dealing with people is somewhat watery at best, here are three tips to clarify your thinking and get you back on track.

1. What Do You Want Confidence And Power For?
We interact with different people on a daily basis, we need co-operation from these people because we know we cannot do it alone, we expect a certain amount of reciprocal behaviour to get to where we want to be, so it would be beneficial to know what our motives are for persuading people over to our way of thinking?

2. What Is Your Attitude Towards Conflict?
True self-confidence is developed from the act of carrying out a successful task that has an element of personal risk or challenge. Confidence is also about disagreeing or saying no without feeling guilty in situations where we have strong opinions, to stand up for one-self so to speak. So if someone violates your space in some way, do you take the courage or confidence to take responsibility for the situation and speak up or do you just ‘let it go’…again?

3. Preparation Is The Key
One of the key secrets to real confident behaviour is preparation, look at the words you are habitually using and prepare your speech in advance. Learn to be speak with authority, maybe even take a few singing lessons to develop vocal power. Develop a mental picture of your successful self, speaking confidently with the desired outcome.

Dealing with people effectively is a skill that can be learnt and developed over time, at some point, you will have to get started, you will have go up to someone and say your piece, even if you stand their dumb struck and your face turns crimson with embarrassment, the first step has to be taken. If you feel nervous or shaky about doing this, you need to feel the fear and do it anyway, if its on your mind, the time will come when you will have to act, go in, do it with the expectation you are going to get it all wrong, but it is never as bad as you think it is going to be. One thing is for sure, conflict is a learning experience, you will learn more about confidence in one session than a lifetime of reading books or articles on the subject.

Remember, confidence is an attitude, a skill set that is learnt and developed through application, a state of mind that can be achieved through deliberate consistent actions. You might be naturally shy or quiet and think real confidence is beyond you, but personal confidence can be one of your greatest assets. Learn to believe in yourself and your abilities, it is not easy, you will only gain power and the mental toughness needed through struggle, there is no short cut. You will only learn and grow through the challenge of getting started.

Make no mistake, to act with deliberate intention and say what needs to be said will require consistent effort on your part, you must rehearse what needs to be said, like a musician performing a great song, they had to rehearse once upon a time. Great speeches or monologues are not ‘winged,’ there is always great preparation that is goes unseen, which can give you the misconception of ‘they were born that way’, when this is in fact, far from the truth.