I remember helping a woman in the past who was going to Polytechnic and had some serious problems with her confidence. I was helping her gain confidence and courage to deal with life in general.
At the end of her Polytechnic course she told me that she was going to go out with her old friends and party for the Christmas season.

I asked her why and she told me that it was because “She deserved it!“

The “I deserve it!” excuse is simply an excuse to over indulge in something or to do something that is possibly bad for us with an excuse.

If we have a “reason” for doing something that is not good for us then we can make it seem logical or common sense in our mind and then go and do it.

She was intending on some heavy partying. This would have set her back in confidence. A person with low confidence needs to grow slowly and not put themselves into stressful situations.
Alcohol, drugs and false friendships seem to work in the short term and then when something goes wrong the persons walls of strength (which were never really there) come crashing down and they are back to where they started.

If we walk into a shop and see a cake and then choose the very fattening cake and say, “I have worked hard all morning, I deserve this!”
This is us telling ourself a lie because really we have a weakness that we cannot control but we want to hear a valid excuse for indulging in it. And the excuse is that we deserve to have it.

Advertisers have clicked to this and they will tell us that we should have their product because, “You deserve it!”

It is simply a way to trick us into buying something (that we normally would not buy because we don’t need it), and trying to make us believe that it will do us some good and that we (no matter who you are or what you have done) deserve the product, so they want you to part with your money because you deserve their products etc. Commercialism preys on your doubts about yourself, and causes you insecurity so that you will but things to make you pretend to yourself that if you have them the you will be more secure, happy and complete.

If we let other people tell us lies and we tell them to ourselves we are not living life as we really want to. Trying to fool our common sense into agreeing to something that is bad for us is not good for us at all – if we have doubts or feel some guilt then we should look more into what it is that we doubt or feel guilty about.

How can we grow in courage if we try to defeat our own common sense.
Our common sense is trying to protect us from foolish things that will do us harm.

We will never be who we really need to be if we are fooling our self.

There is no courage in weaknesses and no courage in lying to ourselves deliberately because we know that we have a willing weakness and we want to partake in it.

It is far better for our self confidence to tell those people to stop trying to advise us (and we have doubts about their advice) as we will stand up on our own two feet and we must stop telling ourself those lies because we really need to be at one with ourself and to tell ourself the truth all the time.

Be brave and be who you really are, be strong and say, “No!” to false advisers or people who give you advice that gives you doubts and guilt or people who try to convince you to do things that you feel uncomfortable with – be yourself.

There is no need to rush through life trying to satisfy other people while you need to grow more in tune with your own feelings and adjust to the changes that we go through as we grow and mature.

The same is if we have an issue that we need to deal with but we pretend to our self and to other people that we don’t have that issue – it will never go away if we don’t deal with it.

You will do you good, by being truthfully good to you.

Doing the best for ourself is being truthful to our self and doing what is really good for us and that is good healthy foods, good friendships, sharing your love, and learning to love and respect ourself.

All the best from
James M Sandbrook.
October 14, 2012 at 9:03 AM.