You increase your personal and professional self-image by consciously choosing an attitude of courage. Courage is the state or quality of mind or spirit that enables one to face threatening situations with self assurance and self-reliance.
Courage is bravery and valor; it is the quality that athletes sometimes call “heart.” Courage is inner strength, moral stamina, and the inherent capacity for rising to a challenge with steadfastness of purpose. Courage is faith in oneself. Courage is self-confidence! Great thinkers from all areas of life and all eras have recognized the power of attitudes. Karl Menninger, the celebrated psychiatrist, said, “Attitudes are more important than facts.” William James, the noted psychologist, said, “The greatest discovery in our generation is that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change all the outer aspects of their lives.” Lord Byron, the great English poet, said, “We can choose our attitude in any set of circumstances.”
The process of improving your self-image, like the process of setting and achieving any other goal, is quite simple to understand yet extremely effective. Once you make a commitment to adopt the winning attitudes of selfconfidence and courage, you see appreciable improvements almost immediately. The biggest surge of courage necessary for remarkable outcomes is simply the courage to overcome inertia and to get started. A law of physics states that a body at rest tends to stay at rest.
More energy and more power are required to start a car or a plane than to keep it going. More force and power are required to change directions than to keep moving in a straight line. Courage is the fuel that supplies the extra surge of energy needed to initiate change. It takes courage to change—to change your attitudes, to change the way you organize your time, to change relationships, to change who and what you are. Once you begin, momentum keeps you moving. That is the other side of that law of physics:
A body in motion tends to stay in motion. Once started, you enjoy even greater self-confidence and courage, for nothing breeds success like success. You find that when you claim for yourself the self-confidence and courage you were intended to have, these attitudes compound just as interest on a savings account
Source LMI, Curated by Bizwiz Learning