Confidence and Self Esteem

How come some people have it and some don't?
We carry lots of beliefs and decisions about ourselves. Some are very positive and helpful, some are negative and limiting. We also have the power to change them.

Sometimes when you see somebody brimming with confidence it looks like that's all they need to get on in life.  So what is it that makes the difference?
As we grow up we have a phenominal capability for learning.  A childs mind is like a sponge (just try swearing in front of a two year old and you'll see how fast learning can be!) and we maintain much of that ability for most of our lives.
The bad news is that we're not always that good at figuring out which bits to learn and which bits to ignore (back to the two year old) and we learn bad stuff as well as good, very often completely out of context.

I'll give you a simple exampleof how it can sometimes happen:
A three year old boy is trying to help his dad clean the car, drops the sponge on the gravel drive, picks it up and continues to scrub away with it, leaving a nice set of scratches.  Dad, quite reasonably, sends the boy in to stay with his mother, out of harms way. Mother comes out and asks what's wrong, "He's only trying to help" she says,  "well he can't", says Dad, "he just makes things worse".
Nothing nasty, nothing cruel, nobody has done anything wrong, but there's a chance that what the boy learns is that he can't help and he just makes things worse. Now he has a belief about himself which limits his life. Because his unconscious mind believes it, it will make it true and limit his ability to what he believes he's capable of. 
He won't  remember where it came from, or possibly even that he even has it, but it's there in his unconscious.  It's not the parents fault, it's not his, it's just what happens to us.

Fortunately there's plenty we can do about it.  Using NLP and modern analysis it's not too hard to spot a limiting belief or decision.  Once we do so we can Use Time Line Therapy TM  to go back and look at (but not experience, since it could be something unpleasant) where it came from. 
The clever bit is that we do so as an adult.  Anybody watching that scene would instantly realise that it's not a problem with the person, just that they were three.  So by using the knowledge that you have now on the incidents that happened then you can re-educate your unconscious mind.

Of course that's only one example and things can be more complicated than that. If it is more complicated it just means that we have more to do.

I got an email last week from a lady who three months ago was absolutely terrified of public speaking. She's just opened in her first  play for her local amateur dramatic society and is over the moon.   The change only took a few hours of work to achieve.