Mind Over Fear: How To Squash Your Fears, Overcome Anxiety, and Boost Your Self-Esteem In Just 30 Days by Victor L. Fox Read Free Book Online

conversationalists are impulsive and say whatever feels right at the moment. Self-confidence will help you stop over thinking and just speak what’s on your mind without worrying about how it will be perceived by others.
    Before I can give you the steps to gaining self-confidence you must understand one simple thing. You are not anxiety and there is nothing wrong with you. Allow me to explain, many anxiety sufferers believe that anxiety is actually a part of their personality; therefore, it is a part of them, but this is absolutely, categorically not true. Again, you have to be very careful who you listen to and what you believe.  
    The truth is that anxiety is simply a word that represent sensations you experience in certain situations. These sensations in your body can be considered a part of your personality; however, your personality has nothing to do with who you truly are. The word personality comes from the Greek word “persona,” which means mask. To be more specific, this word was used to represent the masks performers would wear in the early days of theatre in ancient Greece during the fifth century B.C.
    This means all of your current believes compose a mask that you are now permanently wearing. Just because society forced this mask on you doesn’t mean that this is who you are. The word personality is just another way to make sure that you see the world from a perspective of “what you see is what you get, and you can’t do anything about it.”  
    Before you can eliminate anxiety, you must first drop any current beliefs about who you truly are and what you are capable of. I suggest that you find a quiet place and take at least 5 - 10 minutes to really look deep inside your heart and soul to find out who you really are and what you stand for.  
    What are your true dreams and desires? Make sure they are not based on what others want and expect from you, but that they are truly yours. One of the best ways to determine whether you really want something or not is by asking, “why do I want this?” or ”why is this important to me?” Dig deeper and deeper using these questions until you hit something solid.
    Just to give you a little more motivation, I would like to share with you something that a woman who worked in palliative care shared with the world. This woman spent many years of her life caring for patents that had gone home to die. With her patients she would usually spend somewhere between the last three to twelve weeks of their lives. She says that when her patients were questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, she would always hear a variation of the following five responses.  
    “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” She says this was the most common regret of all. When a dying person realizes that his or her life is almost over and they look back on their lives it became very clear to them that almost half of their dreams were unfulfilled.
    “I wish I didn't work so hard.” They would regret not spending enough time with the people they loved.
    “I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.” Suppressing their feeling kept them from reaching their true potential and experiencing a better quality of life. Many of them even developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they kept inside.
    “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.” She says that many of her patients become so caught up in their own lives that they had let great friendships slip by. Every single one of them was missing their friends when they were on their death beads.
    “I wish that I had let myself be happier.” They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. She says that when you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind, and most of her patients wished they didn’t care so much about what others thought of them when they still had time.

Self-Confidence