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How to Overcome Feelings of Inferiority

The first step to overcoming any challenge in your life, specifically your feelings of inferiority, is to acknowledge the challenge.

Growing up I had my own internal questions and body sensations that made me feel uneasy as I mentally battled within myself about my worthiness to be in the presence of certain people. I even experienced anxiety to go certain places knowing how I would feel when I got there.

In my book, There Is More Inside Personal Essentials to Living a Power-Packed Life I confessed, “I had my work cut out for me! I liked it when people told me how great I was—how talented, intelligent, and attractive I was. It gave me an external confidence, but inside I still didn’t own this belief myself. I would sabotage great opportunities and blame others when I ‘failed’. Deep within I doubted my abilities and, like most, questioned my existence.”

After doing my work and developing tools to help people to do their‘s, I offer you these starter questions:

  1. Together let’s agree that feeling inferior means that you believe the other person (or people) is more attractive, smarter, richer, or whatever you have told yourself and, therefore they have an advantage over you. Now ask yourself, what do you believe the other person (people) has that you don’t?
  2. Examine where that belief comes from. You believe what you believe based on what you’ve been told, accepted as true and what you have experienced. But is it true? When you don’t examine and challenge your beliefs they can hinder you from moving forward. Ask yourself, what do I believe about myself and others that is causing me to feel this way? And, why do I believe it?                                                                           
  3. Change your story. Now that you have discovered a new truth—own that truth. Change the story you tell yourself about yourself. When you give yourself the gift of a new narrative and different perspective, you’ll create new thoughts, feelings and ideas about yourself and others.

Copyright © 2018 S. Renee Smith.

 

 

How to Keep Conversation Going With a Guy

You don’t. Conversation is communication and communication is a sincere desire to engage with another person or people for the purpose of exchanging thoughts, beliefs and ideas.

If one person has to carry the weight and pressure of the conversation then it’s not a conversation at all. It’s an experience that causes you to feel the weight and worry of saying the right thing in order to keep the person engaged. That’s not conversation or communication, it’s fighting to be liked, accepted and needed.

Currently, I am married to a fabulous communicator. But when I was dating, there were men who just weren’t engaged. I could tell by how they interacted with me and communicated. In other words, I sensed they had other things and people that were more important and served as priorities.

As the author of the upcoming book, 5 Steps to Assertiveness : How to Communicate with Confidence and Get What You Want (Callisto Media, May 22, 2018), my best advice is to relax, enjoy listening and asking questions. If they engage back with you by asking you questions, you may have meet yourself an interesting friend.

Copyright © 2018 S. Renee Smith.

Can You Be Too Confident?

Living in a society that claims the lack of confidence is bad and encourages one to believe in themselves, but then accuses them of being arrogant or self-absorbed when they do, makes it difficult to know how much confidence is too much.

In my first book, There Is More Inside: Personal Essentials to Living Power-Packed Life I define confidence as “trusting your opinion of yourself more than you trust other people’s opinion about you.” Using this definition calls us to ask the question: can we trust our opinion of ourselves more than we trust other people’s opinion about us far too much?

I don’t believe so.

Getting to the point of fully trusting yourself is a lifelong journey. Yet, as we travel that path people will say things like “he thinks he’s all that” or “she thinks she thinks she’s cute.”
The reality of this assertion is the person making it thinks she thinks she thinks she’s cute. Did you get that? 🙂

Based on the definition shared above, that person’s opinion shouldn’t be in the equation so keep growing and trusting yourself, you’ll be glad you did.