The definition of success is very subjective but there are certain personal characteristics which are common to most successful people. They refer to self-esteem, assertiveness and emotional intelligence.
Self-esteem refers to your confidence in your own worth or abilities. It is related to the way you think about yourself and how you believe other people think about you.
A person who has low self-esteem has a low regard for themselves, which is often associated with depression anxiety or other psychological problems.
Self-esteem develops in childhood and adolescence and whether you have low or high self-esteem depends on what kind of experiences you have had in life and on the way you were treated by your parents, teachers and colleagues.
Your experiences, especially those that have been created when you were young,lead to the beliefs you have about yourself and, once developed, they influence every area of your life.
Having low self-esteem can affect personal relationships, your work, the way you treat yourself and what you think you can have or achieve in life. Therefore if you want to be successful and have the things you want to have it is important that you have a good and well-adjusted opinion of yourself.
Psychological treatment approaches that have proved to be successful in overcoming problems of low self-esteem focus on changing the way you think about yourself, help you to challenge your negative beliefs and replace them with new beliefs that will give you better chances of being successful and happy. Such treatments include Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Energy Psychology (EP) and Clinical Hypnotherapy.
Assertiveness refers to being able to stand up for your right to be treated fairly but also to express your opinions and feelings without hurting the opinions or feelings of others.
Examples of assertive behaviour include the ability to say ‘no’, initiating or ending a conversation, making requests or asking for favours, questioning rules that do not make sense to you, and addressing problems that are bothering you.
Assertiveness is not only about protecting yourself from being mistreated;it is also about expressing positive feelings, paying compliments to others or expressing appreciation towards others.
Assertiveness is closely related to self-esteem and those who have low self-esteem tend to have poor assertiveness skills. This is because those who have poor view of themselves often worry that if they say ‘no’ or express their opinion they will be rejected or disliked by others.
Assertiveness is therefore a very important social skill and since it is a learned behaviour it can be taught within the context of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT) or a combination of CBT and Energy Psychology (EP).
Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognise your own and other people’s emotions, to differentiate between feelings and to use them to guide your thinking and behaviour.
People with high EI are mentally healthier, and are often more successful in personal relationships and job performance.They also often make better leaders.
There are number of characteristics that are associated with EI that have been quoted by Daniel Goleman, who introduced his model of emotional intelligence. They include:
People have different levels of emotional intelligence and some people are more naturally predisposed to understand their own as well as other people’s feelings and emotions, but independently of your psychological make-up, emotional intelligence can be learned and improved.
There are various ways in which EI can be improved including Energy Psychology (EP) techniques combined with social skills training.
