Would you like to build your self confidence? Among the shortest paths to achieving that goal is to make an effort to start feeling your feelings.

This may odd, but many folks who must develop confidence in their own emotions before they can begin feeling better about themselves. Perhaps you have sunk a huge amount of time in learning to deny and sit on your deepest feelings. If this is the case, then you definitely have some de-programming to accomplish.

Can you recall when you were a youngster, having fun on the playground, when a bully ran up and shoved you off the slide? If something like that never actually happened to you, ipicture it in your mind’s eye. How would you (or did you) feel about it? I would wager that your emotions in that moment were sharp and crystal clear — and you probably had absolutely no ambivalence in expressing them, whether through wailing or crying, or even chasing down the mean kid and attempting to wallop him in retaliation.

I am in no way recommending striking out physically at do things you don’t like, but short of that, what is wrong about acknowledging your true emotions in every situation, the mad and sad ones as well as the happy and cheerful ones?

Unfortunately, adults in this culture have been conditioned to not only suppress their emotional reactions, but to believe that some feelings are bad. Some people have absorbed this lesson so thoroughly that they no longer know what they are truly feeling in any given moment. Directly feeling your feelings is really important wish to experience a boost in self confidence.

When a person accepts his or her feelings, that person does so simply by acknowledging them. From now on, give yourself the freedom to experience every emotion that wells up inside. Don’t suppress it!

Whenever you find yourself watching a sad or depressing television program, let yourself cry. If you witness some incident that strikes you as tremendously humorous, let yourself have a good belly laugh, even if you are in public and people look at you curiously. Yell about the person who just swerved ahead of you on the expressway, and keep yelling until the anger passes or just naturally dies away.

Owning your feelings, without condemining yourself for them, will free your true self simply as a result of squarely facing what is happening for you at any given instant. And freeing that real self that you have kept bottled up all these years is guaranteed to turbo charge your self confidence.