In a recent post I recommended that if you want your confidence to grow more quickly, it’s worth developing the habit of [intlink id=”1761″ type=”post”]sharing your successes with other people[/intlink]. In response I got an email asking:
What do you do if you haven’t any success?
OK, great question. It may seem hard to celebrate something that you don’t already have. So here’s my suggestion on how to handle it:
Allow Yourself To Feel The Pain
We live in a society that systematically denies and suppresses emotional pain. Most of us have been taught to hide how we feel both from ourselves and from other people. Having a lack of success in life is painful for a man. For me, it brings up feelings of sadness, rejection, hopelessness, despair and anger.
These feelings are painful, but allowing ourselves to feel them activates the grieving process which takes us back to a clean slate where we can start creating what we want in life. Skipping this step leaves us building on a foundation of pain, which lays dormant ready to undermine our future progress whenever one of these painful emotions is triggered again.
Since most of us guys have been trained to suppress our pain, this may not come naturally. Grab a journal and start writing about how you feel around not having the success in life that you want. Be specific about what it is that you’re missing: relationships with women, money, sex, power, health. Whatever upsets you, write about it. Allow yourself to dwell on the emotions rather than the thoughts that you have about it. Dwelling on negative thoughts creates more negativity, whereas dwelling on unpleasant emotions allows them to dissipate. If you want to feeling really gutsy, share what you discover with someone else you trust, or do it anonymously on the forum.
