Maintaining Mental Health - Maintaining self-confidence

Maintaining self-confidence. Perhaps the most important sign of your mental health is your self-confidence. Young people often become discour­aged and feel that they are failures. There are some good ways to help you avoid these periods of discouragement.

Being realistic. You need to set reasonable goals for yourself and then do your best to achieve them. For ex­ample, if one school subject seems more difficult than others, you may have to work diligently to keep up with the class in that subject. In spite of all that you can do, however, there may be times when you do not succeed in what you planned to do. This happens to everyone. But through your own ef­forts you can be successful most of the time.

Success can come only when you aim for what you can do, no more and no less. Your successes may not be great enough to put you at the top, but they will certainly give you a sense of satisfaction and help to give you a feeling of self-confidence.

Being realistic about what you are capable of doing does not mean, how­ever, that you should feel satisfied with yourself and your accomplish­ments all the time. Most people do not work up to the level of their abilities. As you achieve each of your goals, keep moving each succeeding one farther and farther ahead. It is only in this way that you can improve your per­formance and achieve higher goals.

Think for Yourself
In what areas has it been easy to achieve the goals you set for yourself? In what areas has it been difficult?

Making an effort. Setting your goals will not insure your success; nothing can do that. Setting your goals is the first step to self-confidence. Making an effort is the second. If you allow discouragement or fear of failure to keep you from trying, you will never feel confident of your abilities. When you can continue to make an effort in the face of failure, you will find you have won respect for yourself and have gained self-confidence.

Personality Traits

Knowing yourself. As you wrote your list of personality traits, you may have noticed that some of your personal qualities are more outstanding than others. Everyone has some traits which are less desirable than others. Being able to judge your own personality traits is an important asset. When you know yourself, you can begin eliminating the undesirable traits and adding others that are more desirable.

Changing traits. Once you know what you would like to improve, you can make an effort to acquire the new habits and attitudes that you find worthwhile. The first step in this process is making an effort to acquire new traits. If you find that thoughtfulness is a trait you want to develop, you can begin by making an effort to be thoughtful of others. You can try to be aware of the wishes of others at all times. As thinking of others becomes a habit, you will find you have developed the trait of thoughtfulness.

In your effort to acquire new traits, you must make and effort to be sincere. There is a difference between appearing thoughtful and being thoughtful. In the first instance the person is being dishonest with those about him. He is pretending to be something he is not. This lack of sincerity is easily sensed by one’s friends. They do not respect a person who is “putting on” a trait only for his own gain. It is only by being sincere in your effort to change some of your personality traits that you can make any change in your personality.