Tag: confidence

HOW TO WIN AN ARGUMENT

Arguments, whether they are interpersonal or professional, are essential. Be it a constructive or non-beneficial disagreement, we engage in it more frequently than we plan to in our regular lifestyle.

Nobody can win an argument against you unless you give the opportunity to.

Even if this isn’t your strongest suit, there are a few straightforward strategies you may use to quickly and easily win. To assist you, here are a few of them:

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1. Do your research – In a professional setting when you know you’re likely to have to get into an argument, prepare yourself beforehand with all the information and facts so that you have an upper hand in the discussion

2. When it’s unlikely – Sometimes you could encounter yourself in a heated argument in an unusual situation, caught off guard and unsure of what to say. It’s typically best to try to reason with the other person so that you can depart the argument quickly.

3. Calm down – The most important thing to remember when in an argument is to keep your composure and maintain decorum, especially if your parents are on the other side. However, this is true for practically all contentious discussions.

4. Don’t raise your voice – Being ear-splittingly loud won’t help you win, instead strengthen your case. Maintaining your mental fortitude will help you make your point to the opposing side as effectively as you can.

5. Decapitate them delicately – Be gentle and kind! Talk calm and pleasant until your generosity and encouraging words cause the opposition’s rage to subside. In between disputes, you must remind the other person of the good in you in case they have forgotten. This works!

6. Be reasonable – Avoid making assumptions just to justify your assertions. Provide evidence to back up your claims so the opposite side won’t have a chance to refute the information.

7. Choose your next word carefully- Remember in an argument the point is not just winning but also successfully winning at it. So communicating the issue that you’re debating about is also vital because that is the reason it happened in the first place. In doing so,  be careful how you choose your words.

8. Don’t rush— Time may not always be to your advantage, so consider whether it is the appropriate time to protest before you start the conversation. Better to steer clear of it for a while if not. Additionally, it will offer both parties a chance to think things through.

9. Listen!- If you aren’t willing to listen and consider the opposing viewpoint, how can you expect others to? It’s crucial to hear what the opposing side has to say because a one-sided discussion is not an argument.

10. Make believe – when you really want to win and your case isn’t solid enough, make the opposition believe that your perspective is stronger and their claim needs to be reevaluated. Even if you’re wrong, trick them into thinking otherwise.

You’ll master the art of argumentation in no time, just follow these simple methods and the win is yours.

HUSTLE CULTURE A TREND OR TRENDING PROBLEM FOR THE YOUTH?

Clothing you wear and its affect on your self-perception and performance

Did you know that not only the way you think about yourself but also your performance in your studies, work etc. somehow depends on the clothing you wear? Yes, this might seem a little vague and you might say that the interdependence is very trivial.

But, research shows that the clothes you wear can actually change the way you perform.

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This can be elucidated by the example of a play. The stage actors of the play rehearse on random clothes that they are comfortable wearing. But, when they rehearse with their costumes on, you get to see a stark difference in their performance. In comparison to all their previous rehearsals, this time you will see a slight confidence boost throughout the duration of their performance. This is because they experience the character or better yet they get into character more deeper than ever before for the role.

Apparel and presentation communicates volumes about you as a person. The question is not whether you care about fashion, it’s more about what you’re communicating intentionally or unconsciously through your fashion choices. You should be conscious about what you wear and don’t just like you are conscious about what you eat and what you don’t. This includes ignoring the fashion trends that do not fit you or does not make you comfortable just like the way you say no to the food that you are allergic or just intolerant to.

When you’re dressing or grooming, consider what it says about you and whether it’s in line with the message you want to communicate. There’s no right or wrong. It’s all about context. A tie can make you look reliable and rooted in tradition. This might be important at an investment firm, where clients want to know that you’re serious about stewarding their capital. But it can also come off as stuffy and resistant to change, which may be inappropriate for a tech startup.

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Of course, dressing smart is also important for your confidence and sense of self-empowerment. But your style does more than just send messages, to your mind or to others. New research study shows it actually impacts how you think.

“The formality of clothing might not only influence the way others perceive a person, and how people perceive themselves, but could influence decision making in important ways through its influence on processing style” the study says.

The psychology behind is totally subconscious. A gut feeling, commonly called intuition or a first impression, is really part of the very fast-paced mental process of thin-slicing, which is when our brain process visual details instantaneously.

It’s how we continually judge books by their covers, all day, every day.

So choose your personal presentation with care. Presentation includes not only your clothes, but your accessories, hairstyle, fragrance, posture, body language, tone of voice, and the level of energy with which you move and speak. Think of the person that you need to be in any particular situation. Then dress, groom, and accessorize in a way that helps you mentally step into that personality.

How to rebuild your confidence?

Building and rebuilding confidence

Rebuilding confidence is not the same as building confidence.

  • When building confidence, you’re trying to do something you’re not sure you can do.
  • However, rebuilding confidence means you used to be good but failed at some point. Getting back is much harder to do.
Confidence is essentially about expectations

You think you’ll excel, but considering the probability of success and feeling confident is not that easy.
Framing effects happen when the same thing looks different when the context change. If you’re a good student in a mediocre class, you feel smarter than if you’re a good student in an elite class.

Relearning confidence

When practising a skill that you have forgotten, you may lack the confidence to pick it up again.
However, those doubts are exaggerated. Not remembering is normal, and relearning happens faster than you may expect. Yet, you may still lack self-confidence, which will undermine your self-image and motivation.

Play over Performance

When we improve in a skill, our mindset will start to shift from play to performance. Rebuilding confidence requires you to relive that initial play mindset.

  • Make failures painless. Your first practice should have zero consequences. Do warm-up exercises for low stakes before you put on pressure to perform. However, if you review your skill but continue to get everything wrong, it is a signal to stop.
  • Expect frustration and failure. When you expect failure, it won’t bother you so much when performance suffers. Set the bar lower.
  • Trust the rebuilding process. You don’t need confidence that you will excel, just confidence that you’ll eventually rebuild your confidence.
  • Reframe your expectations. You have no responsibility to live up to other people’s expectations of you.
reference

https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2020/07/20/rebuild-confidence/

How to boost your self-esteem?

Self-esteem is basically the overall opinion about yourself, how you feel about yourself which includes your abilities and limitations. Everyone lack confidence at some point of time in different situations which is temporary but having low self-esteem leads to unsatisfied and unhappy with themselves for most of the time. Generally people who are having low self-esteem are:-

  • Critical about their own personality
  • Ignores their positive qualities or aspects
  • Uses negative or cuss words to describe themselves
  • While having self-talk with themselves, they are always negative or self-blaming.
  • Doesn’t believe if someone compliments them.
  • When things go wrong they always blame themselves for the failure instead of considering other things in account such as actions of other Individual or some crisis externally.

With these things in low self-esteem person, it reduces the quality of life which often leads to:-

Fear of Trying – The person who has low self-esteem will always doubt themselves in terms of their abilities, worth and challenges to experience something new in their life.

Fear of getting judged – People with low self-esteem may avoid the social gathering or some activity based on a group of people, just because they are afraid of being judged on negative basis.

Self-care – People with low self-esteem lacks in taking care of their self as they neglect themselves.

Negativity – Person with low self-esteem constantly abuses or neglects themselves which leads to attracting negative feeling which eventually causes anxiety, sadness, depression, shame or guilt.

Self-harming behaviors – Person with low self-esteem always puts themselves in a situations where they are at increased risk of harming themselves. For e.g. – Drug abuse, eating disorder or suicide.

There are many causes of low self-esteem like unhappy childhood, relationship break ups, low performance in academics, ongoing medical problem or Mental illness. But there are simple ways to boost your self-esteem and that are:-

Record your story

recording your life story is a fun and therapeutic strategy that countless people have used not only does it help you remember what you love about yourself but telling your story also motivates you to maintain that positivity in the future but it’s not just about reflection the fact that you’re writing down your story plays an important role because when you write something down you have to be clear you have to be concrete you’re forcing yourself to be specific about who you are so if you’re feeling confused your story can give you the clarity that you’re looking for.

A Point to Pride

Instead of looking back in time you can also boost your self-esteem by setting goals for the future for example, you’re an aspiring author but you’ve never actually written a book before you’ve written plenty of short stories but you’ve always been too scared to try something bigger maybe you’re worried you’re going to fail or you’re just feeling overwhelmed and you don’t have enough faith in yourself to take on the challenge how can you build the self-esteem you need to accomplish your dreams try setting something called a point of pride a point of pride is one specific goal that you accomplish in order to prove something to yourself.

Self-evaluation

You can boost your self-esteem by changing basic things like the way you speak for example you might be using self-critical language you undercut your own success you belittle your own accomplishments and you overrate the value of the people around you. The problem is you probably don’t even realize that you’re doing it it’s become almost automatic for you so how do you change something that you don’t even think about try studying the way you speak every time you undermine your own achievements go and write it down that way you can focus your attention on your harmful language and gradually change it for the better you may not notice a difference at first but over time this simple strategy you can use it to make a huge impact on your self-esteem.

Self-compassion

One of the hardest things of building self-esteem is learning how to forgive your own mistakes you want to be perfect, you want to be respected and successful so whenever that doesn’t happen you either pretend that nothing happened or you become your own worst enemy you criticize yourself and you hold a grudge but both of these approaches have the same fundamental problem they’re focused on preserving the good you’re trying to maintain this fragile image of yourself you expect to be that perfect successful person so you react negatively every time that doesn’t happen you either ignore your mistakes or you tear yourself down and slowly but surely you chip away at your self-esteem so what should you do instead the real secret behind your self-esteem has nothing to do with preserving the good it’s about forgiving the bad you’ll spend the rest of your life making mistakes we all do there’s just no way around it so before you can believe in yourself you have to learn to live with those failures little by little you can boost your self-esteem by actively forgiving yourself each time you say something stupid or make a careless error just take a minute to acknowledge what you did wrong.

When a person is having a high self-esteem then they appreciate themselves and others too, they see the world from the positive light and also understands other people’s problem. Their relationships are loving and calm full and also they speak up calmly and tell other their opinion towards and topic freely.

Interpersonal Skills-A Way to Success

“To open the doors of success,

Get out of the pleasing fake bubble,

And meet the harsh real world.“

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There are 3 basic questions that arise in the minds of each individual when thinking about their interpersonal skills:

  • What are interpersonal skills?
  • Why is there a need to absorb these skills?
  • How to identify and improve them?

MEANING

Interpersonal skills are the skills that a person uses to interact with others. They are also referred as social skills, which helps you to interact , communicate & collaborate with others effectively. Some examples of such skills are:

  • Self confidence
  • Positive attitude
  • Empathy
  • Listening skills
  • Controlling your emotions
  • Communication skills

COMMUNICATION SKILLS

In today’s world the most important interpersonal skill is the communication skill. For an effective interaction and good relations, we need to posess and polish our communication skills. It is divided into 3 divisions:

  1. Verbal communication– To convey our thoughts and ideas to the other person, it is very important to express them clearly and precisely, either verbally or through written mediums(letters, reports, etc.)
  2. Non-Verbal communication– Not all conversations are verbal, some are also carried by non-verbal components like when we express our opinion by our gestures or body language.
  3. Effective listening– Yes, listening is also a part of communication. Only a good listener can be a good speaker, as to make others understand your viewpoint, you need to first listen theirs.

WHY TO ABSORB THEM?

We often come across various people for different purposes but our relation with them depends on our ability to handle them. The key role, here, is played by our interpersonal skills. As we grow, we possess some of these skills unconsciously while some of these has to be assimilated.

For a successful career we need to have good relations with others. A student having good social skills has many opportunity doors opened and can explore different areas. A person seeking job needs to first pass the interview round(in almost every paid job)where his interpersonal skills are tested. Even in a business, good social relations increases the chances of a longer and successful business.

Not only for our career but social skills are also important for a good personal life. Whether it is our friends, family, relatives or partners, each of them is to be handled with care by using your skills. These skills also enhances your overall personality, boosts your confidence and makes you a better person. Also some people may wonder that such skills are present in every human being by birth but that’s not true, each individual is different and such skills comes with experience. As we grow, we tend to develop them, but to make them useful you need to polish them as well.

HOW TO IDENTIFY AND IMPROVE?

By now, you may have identified some of the social skills you have. To identify these skills, the most effective way is to interact with more &more people(known and unknown)as this will help you spot your strengths and weaknesses. After doing so just pick out your strengths and practice them daily and use them to overpower you weakness. In due course of time you will see that your polished strengths have reduced and ultimately removed your weaknesses.

So just focus on your skills, improve them and conquer your dreams….

THE ART OF LOVING THYSELF .

In this fast pacing world with ever increasing competition , the struggle to be at the top , and everybody’s desire to become ‘successful’ , we are slowly becoming so very self critical and judgemental towards ourselves . We are so desperate to be the very best that we are blindly running in this rat race and not realising that we all have our own paths that we need to follow . We are slowing loathing ourselves for everything that we are not , instead of loving ourselves for all that we are . This constant comparison that we do with others is just not the healthy way of becoming a better version of ourselves . Here are a few points to remember before you start comparing and critiquing yourself:-

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EACH ONE OF US IS UNIQUE- We all have different sets of talents and things that we are good at , be it dancing , singing , writing , photography , or being academically gifted. We just need to find out what we are good at and what we like instead of comparing ourselves . You might have the qualities of becoming a great teacher and you might be unaware of it , or have an inclination towards cars or computers . Your likes and dislikes makes you more unique and more YOU , so embrace it and find your uniqueness. This will help you find your own path in life and automatically halt the comparisons .

DIVINE TIMING – We often want instant results and are impatient . Seeing our friends getting their dream jobs or succeeding makes us feel bad about ourself because we seem to be exactly where we were, despite the hardwork and dedication . This can be frustrating , but you will succeed when its your time to.This statement seems pretty phoney, but its not ,there is room for everyone to succeed , we just need. to be patient and continue to persevere. Our time will come .

WE ALL ARE ON DIFFERENT BOATS- Its true , we are all on different boats , with different sets of obstacles and challenges , so its not practical to compare each other . Every human is dealing with problems that differ from ours. We must understand this and realise that just like there is no comparing between the sun and moon , we humans can’t be compared either.

ITS IMPORTANT TO FAIL SOMETIMES – After failing a test or a job interview we tend to feel a deep sense of disappointment and tend to levitate towards self doubt and fall in the labyrinth of comparing ourselves . But it’s imperative to know that its okay to fail sometimes and its actually good . Failure is a good teacher and helps us understand the areas we need to work on . So next time you fail at something , try to learn from it instead of hating yourself.

HOW TO ACE YOUR INTERVIEW

Those who have given an interview in the past know how difficult it can be sometimes to ace an interview. Not everyone is born with confidence to impress someone with the first sentence they say. Some people like myself need a little help, research and motivation to prepare for the big moment. 

I will be sharing some of the tips that I came across on the internet, below. They might prove beneficial to you as well to pass your interview with flying colours. 

  1. Basic Research:

The first step is to run in-depth research about the organisation/ company you are applying to. You should be well aware of their background, values and culture. You should also know the latest news about the company. Checking the company’s social media accounts can also give you a lot of information. The interviewer might ask you questions like “when was the company formed?” or “how many divisions does the company have?”. You should be prepared with the answers to such questions. It will reflect your seriousness for the job.

  1. Review the job description:

Read the job description again and see if you are fit for the job or not. See if your experience, skills and accomplishments are enough for the job. You can also look into the hiring process of the company and prepare accordingly. Also, look into your qualifications and goals. You can tell the interviewer how your goals align with the company’s goals. 

  1. Practice answering questions:

Some of the questions are asked in almost all the interviews. Like “tell us about yourself” is the most common question. You should be well prepared for such questions. Don’t memorize the answers but do make bullet points. It will help you remember answers better and make it look natural. Your main focus should be on the company, the position, qualifications and goals. Stand in front of the mirror and practice these questions until your nervousness goes away.

  1. Crisp dressing: 

Believe it or not but dressing up nice gives you a different kind of confidence. You should always wear something formal or something that’s not inappropriate. It makes a good first impression on the interviewer as you walk in. Also, make sure your footwear is neat and clean. The best pick for an interview is usually pants and a formal shirt or a business suit. 

  1. Prepare questions to ask:

The best way to show your interest in the job is to ask the interviewer a few questions here and there. You can also reevaluate if the company’s goals, working environment and company culture are right for you. Prepare some questions that dig deeper into the company. This will show that you have done your homework.

  1. Keep the CV and other documents organised:

Keep your documents ready beforehand. This will not create chaos on the day of the interview. Also, keeping these things ready will reduce your burden a little and make you less nervous. A well-organised file speaks a lot about your work ethics to your interviewer. 

  1. Pay attention to your soft skills:

Your posture, handshake and attentiveness say a lot about your personality. Do not get aggressive during the interview and keep your volume low. Fiddling with your pen, tie or file can show the lack of confidence. Walk with confidence and try not to fiddle. Lastly, maintain eye-contact and a smile. It reflects a positive nature. 

Keeping in mind these few tips can make a huge difference during your interview. In the end, all that actually matters is your confidence.