There are numerous instances of fears that keep people from getting what they want every day. A guy, who wants to be a race car driver, watches all the nascar and formula 1 race and never misses one, but is afraid of accidents. A guy standing next to a girl who likes him but he’s afraid of asking out. So he walks away, leaving himself and the girl disappointed. A person who wants to start a business but sees all the problems before they even manifest. Ultimately, he decides against it because these problems seem so insurmountable, leaving himself and his potential clients unhappy. Every day, many people are prevented from accomplishing their dreams due to these imaginary obstacles.

If you would make a list of things that you didn’t do coz you can’t handle failure, you can have hundreds of such events in your life. You have taken the decision based upon your fear and have lost the game without even playing the game. You didn’t give yourself a chance to find out your true potential. Without self-confidence, we have a tendency to make poor decisions. If you lack confidence, you might fill your life with self-destructive behaviour. You might work at a job you hate. You may allow yourself to get deep in debt. You may find yourself moving from one bad relationship to another. Without confidence, you don’t allow yourself to pursue your dreams.

Remember when you are doing something for the first time, there are quite a few chances of your failure. It’s normal; nobody can become perfect at the first time. When you fail for the first time you have made yourself closer to your goal. How? You have strike out the one of the possibilities of failure and you won’t repeat it again. When you pursue your dream to achieve your goal despite the failures, there will be a time when you don’t have ways left out for failure and finally you achieve the success you have always dreamed of.

My goal is to continually improve myself, to become better than I am today. One way to do that is to do the things that scare me, to take them on as challenges, and to learn from them even if I fail.

“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be”. - Lao Tzu

Recognize Your Fears - First, you need to recognize that this is indeed one of the fears you have. If you already accept this particular fear as the absolute truth, then there is no need to face that particular fear and hence no need to overcome it. Write down the reasons you have and the fears associated with those reasons.

Once you have recognized your fears, you can now work towards defeating them. These are the things that are holding you back from exploring more possibilities and limiting your growth as a person.

If your fear is truly dangerous, find a way to treat it. I wouldn’t recommend doing previous step in this situation. Although, you can find some safety rules and put yourself in a condition where you can be safe even if the fear is in front of you. Other most important rule here is not to panic. Just act cool and assure yourself that as long as you follow the safety guidelines, your fear is harmless and nothing to be afraid of.

Understanding The Root Of Your Fears - With your list of fears that are holding you back, you can now try to figure out where these fears come from. For each item on the list, examine whether this fear is the result of some other fears. Your goal is to consolidate your list to as few fears as possible, so that you can better understand where the root of all your fears are coming from.

When you start this exercise, your list will probably grow bigger and bigger as you discover more and more of your fears. However, like finding bugs in software engineering (and then fixing them), you eventually will hit a peak and the number on that list will start to decrease. Try to find as many common base fears as possible, so that you have a smaller number of fears to work on. I have also found this exercise really helpful in knowing myself better.

Don’t dwell on failures. Draw from the things you’ve done right.

Do not procrastinate. Procrastination promotes fear. When you’re afraid, thinking is your enemy. Act. Do what you think is best, and do it quickly. The longer you take to act, the more time you have to talk yourself out of it, the longer you have to imagine the things that might go wrong. It’s not enough to hope. Take action.

Look sharp. A lot of us experience poor self-esteem because we don’t like the way we look. But we exacerbate the problem when we dress sloppily or are not well-groomed.

Don’t compare yourself to others. Be yourself. I’ll tell you a secret. There are a lot of personal finance blogs out there. I don’t get to read them as often as I used to, but I do try to make the rounds once every week. Sometimes when I do this, I feel like giving up. I feel like quitting. I lose confidence. I can’t write that well, I think. Comparing myself to others is counter-productive. It only makes me feel inadequate. Who cares what other people write, or how well? What’s important is simply producing the best work I can. All I can be is myself.

Change the way you think and you change the way you act. You can control your thoughts. Since you’re only able to consciously think about one thing at a time, only allow positive thoughts to go through your mind. Whenever a negative thought or fear enters, simply choose to stop it right in its tracks and immediately change that thought to something positive.

Overcoming Your Fears - Fear, as far as I can tell, is the result of uncertainty about a situation. We fear death because we don’t know what happens after it. We fear losing our jobs because we don’t know if there is another way we’ll be able to support ourselves. We fear asking a person out on a date because we don’t know what the other person’s expectations are and whether they would say yes or no. In all of these instances, fear comes from not knowing what we would do if some particular situation happens.

To get rid of the fear, simply figure out what you will do in each of these possible scenarios.

When you have a definite purpose that encompasses all situations, then you will always have something fall back on if you don’t know exactly what to do.

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate and hate leads to suffering.  – Yoda

Figure out your purpose and fear will never control you!

There are hundreds of thousand people who face difficult in starting a conversation with a stranger and keep it going. Few years back I was one of them. Whenever I came across a stranger I always use to get confused where and how to start a conversation. My mind always used to get filled with lot of questions. How should I approach? What should I ask first? What if that person gives me a cold shoulder? What if they avoid talking to me? What will they think of me if I will take the initiative of going and talking to them? These are few of the questions that use to bother me a lot back then. For this reason I was not able to talk to people and I don’t have many friends due to this. Then I started to recognize my problems and decided to find out the solution for it. Now I don’t give a second thought before starting a conversation with a complete stranger, now I have lot of friends which I never thought I will have. So now I am giving away the steps I followed to overcome my shyness, start a healthy conversation and make lot friends.

• Introduce yourself and simply tell your name to the new person. Offer your hand to shake, upon his/her responding to you.
• Look around. See if there is anything worth pointing out. Sure, talking about the weather is a cliche, but if there’s something unusual about it, you’ve got a great topic of conversation. You need to have some idea of what is going on in the world. Also remember and plan to share anything you like, think is funny, or find intriguing. This is building up your own library of things that might be helpful to another person during a conversation someday. It will be amazing how you thread these interesting things when you least expect it, and make conversation an adventure instead of a dreadful task. If you take it to the next step and say things that you want the person to think of as adding value, and keep to yourself things that the person might not, you are actually honing your own personality to be appealing to the other person, and what is a greater act of kindness than that?
• Offer a compliment. Don’t lie and say you love someone’s hair when you think it’s revolting, but if you like his or her shoes, or a handbag, say so. A sincere compliment is a wonderful way to get someone to warm up to you. But be careful not to say something so personal that you scare the person off or make him or her feel uncomfortable. It is best not to compliment a person’s looks or body.
• Ask questions! Most people love to talk about themselves — get them going. “What classes are you taking this year?” but don’t talk about yourself too much that makes you seem full of yourself. “Have you seen (Insert-Something-Here)? What did you think of it?” Ask open ended questions that will get them talking. For example, a good question would be, “That’s a nice handbag, where did you get it?” and then they can talk about the day that they went shopping and all this funny stuff happened, as opposed to, “I like your handbag.” “Thank you.” and then it’s over. Again, keep the questions light and not invasive. Do not ask too many questions if he or she is not responsive to them.
• Jump on any conversation-starters he or she might offer; take something he or she has said and run with it. Agree, disagree, ask a question about it, or offer an opinion, just don’t let it go by without notice.
• Keep eye-contact, it engenders trust (but don’t stare). Also, use the person’s name a time or two during the conversation; it will help you remember the name, and will draw the person’s attention to what you are talking about. Smile a lot, and laugh when any quip is made by the other person.
• Smile and have fun with your conversation!
• Be yourself and ask the question that you would think be the right thing to say but, give yourself some time to think about what you say before you say it.
• Follow the lead that your listener is expressing. If he or she appears interested, then continue. If he or she is looking at a clock or watch, or worse, looking for an escape strategy, then you have been going on for too long.

Don’ts

• Don’t be overly invasive with questions.
• Don’t desperately ask personal questions.
• Don’t ever comment negatively on the person or someone else’s looks… you never know if they have a personal attachment to it or if they are friends with the person you are criticizing
• Never act arrogantly and pretend to be a Know It All when dealing with people
• Do not speak, behave or dress immaturely
• Never swear, insult, disrespect, use racial, religious, sexual orientation, and gender slurs in front of others (Unless you know who they are and if they have the same views on things as you.)
• Never ever interrupt a conversation between one or more people. Wait for the conversation to stop and then say something. Common courtesy goes a long way.
• Always say please, may I, thank you, could you when someone is nice to you and when you want something. Being polite shows maturity and intelligence
• Respect those around you
• Be neat, well dressed and groomed. Sloppiness, bad breath and body odor will get you nowhere.
• Sometimes when you start a conversation, the person you’re talking with might think you’re boring. But, it’s okay! Head onto someone else, because sometimes you can pick the wrong person.
• If you are talking to someone you have a “crush” on do not talk about their girlfriend/boyfriend or anything related to you liking them. Stick to what you know about them: if they are into sports talk about the most recent big game.

One last thing, it is important to practice getting conversations started. You may feel a little clumsy at first, but with practice it can become easy to start good conversations.

Have you ever thought of finding answer to all the above questions? I know you must have thought of the answer. So where did you land up in quest of your answer? There are a lot of them. Isn’t it? Let me cut this long story short. I am giving you the secrets that will lead you to success that you have waited for a very long time.

Self confidence is the key behind success of every successful person. Successful people believe in their dreams. They are always focused about their dreams. They fight to achieve those and fight really hard. To achieve success you must have dreams. Note down your dreams that you want to fulfill in piece of paper. Are you thinking of why you need to do that? Yes, you are. Aren’t you? Well, everyday our brain receives hundreds of different information. It’s natural that you forget some of the information as time passes by. Our brain has limit to store a certain amount of data and when amount of information starts to cross that limit we start to forget. To avoid this, note down your dreams in piece of paper. Everyday have look at it to remind yourself what you want to achieve and never lose focus on those.

2. Today is the tomorrow we thought about yesterday. Remember neither we can change the past nor we can control the future. What we have in our hand in the present and your have all the freedom to make choices that you want. Write down 10 positive things about yourself. Go through your list and look at all the positive things about yourself. These are the reasons you should love yourself and have high self-esteem and self-confidence in yourself. Give yourself credit for everything positive you have written about yourself. Remember, you are somebody very special.

3. You were born original; don’t die as a copy. Accept yourself and learn to love yourself for whom you are. Everyone has his or her own unique qualities and characteristics. We are all born different for a reason. Do not compare yourself to others.

4. Begin changing what you do not like about yourself. Confidence comes from within. You need to concentrate on the positive things about yourself.

5. Learn how to give and take. Confidence is being able to find a balance between extending help to people and accepting when we need help.

6. Don’t care what other people think. I know you may think “How am I supposed to do that?” Well, the fact is that you can’t change what others think. People care more about themselves than they care about you. So inevitably don’t care what other people think of you. You are not put on this planet to please all. It’s OK to fail, it’s OK to be different, it’s OK to do what you feel is right for you!

7. Have really strong beliefs. First you must get your beliefs in order; otherwise you will always have a doubt in your mind somewhere. People are experts at destroying their own beliefs by having negative thoughts. STOP negative thoughts now.

8. Be a winner. You are a winner because you know that if you set your mind to do something you will obtain this goal. You have done it before, every single time. You just don’t know it.

9. Keep Patience. Always remember when you want to give up the most; you know you are closest!