5 Great Steps To Building Self-Confidence & Becoming Popular

How would you like to become more popular and welcomed by people in your social or business circles?

Well, you can be, by learning how to be more charming in every interaction with others.

The deepest human need is the desire to feel important. When you go through life building self-confidence and making other people feel important and valuable, they will like you, welcome you, and open every door for you. This is how to become popular both professionally and personally.

If you are in business, becoming a charming person, making others feel important, will help you in every business situation, from negotiating terms to borrowing money to influencing key customers.

If you are in sales, the way customers feel about you, and feel when they are with you, will determine your level of sales and referrals more than any other factor.

In your personal, family and social life, learning to be more charming will make you more popular, desirable, influential and persuasive than any other quality.

How do you become a genuinely charming person? Here are five behaviors you can practice with every person to make him or her feel more important:

1. Smile In Every Interaction

Each person has a deep-down need to be accepted unconditionally by other people, without judgment or criticism.

And how to express this “unconditional positive regard?” Simple! Just smile. An open, honest, happy-to-see-you smile warms people’s hearts, makes them feel important, and causes them unconsciously to like you from the first moment.

2. Say “Thank You” Early And Often

Everyone loves to be appreciated for something, anything they have done for someone else.

When you say the magic words “Thank you” early and often, you make people feel important and happy, raise their self-esteem and increase their desire to help you and do things for you.

3. Give Genuine Compliments

Whenever you admire the possessions, traits or accomplishments of others, they automatically feel more important and valuable! As Abraham Lincoln said, “Everybody likes a compliment.”

Admire people’s choices in clothing, hairstyles, cars, briefcases, purses or office layout. Admire their homes or apartments. Admire their degrees or certificates. Whenever you compliment a person on something he or she has obviously invested time and emotion in achieving, you boost their self-image and build high self-esteem. As a result, they find you to be “charming.”

4. Give Praise And Approval Often

Give praise and approval generously, for both small and large accomplishments. Whenever anyone does anything worthwhile, tell them how good they are, and what a fine job they’ve done, building self-confidence and high self-esteem.

One definition of self-esteem is: How much a person feels praiseworthy.

When you praise your spouse and children, your staff and coworkers, your customers and suppliers, you make them feel more important, and cause them to see you as “charming.”

5. Give Them Your Full Attention

People feel valuable and important to the degree to which they are listened to and respected.

Whenever you listen closely to another person when he is talking, his self-esteem goes up. His brain releases endorphins, nature’s “happy drug,” and he feels good about being in your presence.

You always “pay value” to a person by listening attentively, by hanging on every word. When you do, he or she warms up to you and begins to find you “charming.”

Go through life looking for little opportunities to make people feel valuable and special. Smile at them as if you are glad to see them. Thank them regularly. Compliment them sincerely. Praise them lavishly. And listen to them when they speak building self-confidence and promoting high self-esteem.

Soon, almost without effort on your part, everyone will be talking about “what a charming person you are.”

Thank you for reading this article on how to become popular through unconditional positive regard, building self-confidence and promoting high self-esteem. Please share and comment below!

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5 Bulletproof Ways to Deal With Haters

Haters. They come in all shapes and sizes, with vocabularies that range from the grunting of cave-dwellers to the bombastic spewing of wanna-be intelligentsia’s.

No matter what form they take, dealing with them can be frustrating and demoralizing. And no matter what you do, what you create, or where you work, they are out there.

5 Bulletproof Ways to Deal With Haters

There’s no way to avoid them, so the best thing to do is be prepared to deal with haters. Luckily, there’s plenty of ways to help you do this for anybody who’s struggling. It’s easy to let haters get to you…

Here are five steps that will help you become completely bulletproof to haters:


1. Determine if the Person Really is a ‘Hater’

Repeat after me: Not everyone who disagrees with you is a hater. To properly deal with a hater, you first need to know whether someone is actually a hater or whether they are simply disagreeing with you.

Perceiving every uncomfortable comment as ‘hate’ makes for a miserable existence, especially if you’re trying to share something online. Being overly sensitive to feedback and criticism will also prevent you from ever improving yourself or your work.

People who challenge your thinking, who engage in debate, who recommend improvements to your content, or who offer an opposing point of view are often friends in disguise (even if they are a bit abrasive).

These people can help you expand, improve, and hone your ideas or your art. The ideas and discussions they generate can be even more useful to you than the approval and compliments of your dedicated fans.

Haters, on the other hand, offer you nothing of value. They don’t give suggestions, nor do they explain their opinion in any useful way. They aren’t interested in conversation, engagement, or discussion. That is the key difference between a hater and a critic.

Comments like “You are a complete waste of space” or “Yeah, this is total crap,” or“How cute, you’re pretending that you have something to say!” are completely unhelpful. But if the comment is useless or is only meant to make you feel bad, than you can be fairly certain that you are dealing with a hater.

Ask yourself if there is something in there that you could learn from, or a new viewpoint you could consider. Don’t be swayed by verbosity or cutesy emoticons. Some haters disguise themselves with huge words, long-winded rants, or smiley emoticons.

Focus on an objective evaluation of the actual meaning of their comment or statement. If it contains nothing but bile, or if the person refuses to engage in any kind of productive discussion with you, then you know you are dealing with a hater.


2. Remind Yourself that Haters Are Not Your Target Audience


When you put yourself out there, you will be seen by your target audience, your expanded audience, and people who aren’t part of your audience at all.

Your job is not to appeal to everyone, or even to most people. it’s to appeal to those who are (or might be) interested in what you have to share. That is your audience.

Haters never were and will never be part of your target or expanded audience, because they aren’t interested in seeing or even considering your work or ideas. When members of your audience dislike something you put out, they’ll engage in more meaningful criticism or disagreement.

These are the people you should pay attention to and make improvements for. Haters, on the other hand, only provide useless, pointless snark. Don’t try to appeal to them, because you’ll never be able to.


3. Give the Hater a Hearty Mental Send-off

It’s impossible to pretend that haters or their comments don’t exist.

Their comments scream out to us, drawing our attention like a moth to a flame. No amount of covering your ears and saying “la la la, I can’t hear you!” will make them disappear. And trying to do so takes a huge amount of emotional energy and willpower.

A better tactic is to let yourself feel that momentary blaze of anger, then square your shoulders, look directly at the hater or their comment, and give them a strong and simple mental send-off.

Don’t overthink this send-off – it shouldn’t be a long rebuttal or elaborate come-back.

Keep it simple: a firmly extended middle finger or hearty “well f*@% you too” (done physically and out loud if you are at the computer or mentally if you are dealing with someone in person) treats a hater’s comments with the degree of eloquence and attention they deserve.

If you aren’t a fan of cussing, whatever simple mental send-off you prefer. What you do doesn’t matter, as long as the send-off is simple and firm.

Standing or sitting upright, squaring your shoulders, and confronting the person or comment by looking at it directly gives you a little hit of testosterone. Which will boost your feeling of power and confidence.

The send-off itself gives you an emotional release. This combination will help you push aside the hater and move on with a bit more ease. This process might feel hollow or insincere at first, but keep using it – as with most things, you’ll improve with practice.

And a very important thing to note: once you’ve given the hater a mental send-off, don’t pay any more attention to them. Don’t return or re-read their comments and don’t give them any more of your time.


4. Immediately Move on to the Next Comment or Productive Activity

Switching your focus to something positive or productive helps you avoid wallowing in your own anger or misery.

Once you’ve given your hater a mental send-off, redirect your attention to other comments, other questions, or other follow-up activities. Our brains have evolved to pay attention to negative input, a phenomenon known as negativity bias.

It’s important that you pull your attention away from the negative stimulus quickly, as forward momentum becomes more difficult the longer your pity-party goes on for.

But trying to ‘move on’ by just telling yourself to ignore a hater isn’t enough – you need to take positive action. What you want is a rush of dopamine, which is exactly what you’ll get by doing something positive or productive.

Responding to helpful comments, engaging with someone genuinely interested in discussion, or applying someone’s recommendations will give you a hit of dopamine, which helps you to overcome self-doubt or procrastination (dopamine-reducing feelings that can be brought on by a hater’s negativity).

Get a bit of dopamine flowing, and you’ll be able to bask in the glow of accomplishment or feel the excitement of growth and development.


5. Put Yourself out there Again… and Again… and Again

A big part of effectively dealing with haters is being willing to continue sharing your ideas, your content, or your art regardless what the haters say.

Building up a body of work and putting it out there helps you develop a thicker skin and more resilience to any nastiness you inevitably encounter. The more you share with others, the lower the stakes will be on any one piece of work.

This helps spread around the risk of rejection; if one of your posts or videos attracts a disproportionate amount of hate, so what?

Those three other posts or videos you put out earlier attracted some attention and some great comments, and you are fixing that weird lighting and backdrop in your next video.

A couple of nasty comments on one post means a lot less when you have 200 other posts out there for people to read.

Continuing to create and share also dissuades haters from repeatedly coming at you. They lose interest in their attempts at bullying when you continue to share your work and ideas despite their comments.

Trying to tear down a persistent optimist is dull work, and nothing demonstrates how few craps someone gives about a hater than the fact that they continue to share their ideas.


Summary

Here’s a short recap on the 5 bulletproof ways to deal with haters:
Determine if the person really is a ‘hater’
Remind yourself that haters are not your target audience
Give the hater a hearty mental send-off
Immediately move on to the next comment or productive activity
Put yourself out there again… and again… and again

These steps work best when done together, in order. It doesn’t take long, and regular practice and repetition are key. Over time, you will build up resilience to haters and never let their garbage distract you from your work.

How do you deal with haters? Leave a comment below.

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