Personality is the aggregate of our habits, physical, mental and emotional. Therefore, the problem of improving personality needs to be split down into the specific habits that require enrichment. Then, these habits should be tackled one at a time.

Imagine that you choose to concentrate on improving your confidence. In this session, we have taken confidence as an example. You can also select any other area where you want to improve yourself.

For example, do you remain cool in crisis? Do you avoid blaming others when things go wrong? When assigned a task will you be able to execute it to the satisfaction of your boss? Do you have reasonable faith in humanity? Do you show an interest in the interests of others? Do you take an active part in any organizations to which you belong?

According to the way in which you answer these and such similar questions, you will desire to aim at developing poise, responsibility, reliability, helpfulness, trust,
co-operativeness and so on.
But we will assume that you have selected confidence as the trait you want to develop. We make this assumption for the following reasons:
•   Many people who feel that they need to improve their personality feel they all could do with a bit more confidence
•   Confidence is basic to success in all human activities
•   Cultivating confidence will help self-improvement in other traits as well

Understand How You Came to be What You Are Now

Develop a fuller understanding of your motives. Study your childhood experiences to discover the causes of the trouble. Revive the original memories and re-evaluate them in the light of mature adult experience.

Lack of confidence may be caused by being born to parents who themselves lack confidence; feeling unloved and unwanted in childhood; being over protected, spoilt or pampered as a child; undergoing physic traumas or emotional shocks in childhood; and experiencing a mental conflict which leads to the repression of a strong desire.

To find out the reason, spend a few minutes regularly each day thinking about the events of your past life and reliving the feeling which you had at that time. Study your childhood memories with a particular event to any of the typical causes discussed above. When you recall an event or situation which helps you to see why you lack confidence, try to recall how you felt at that time when it occurred. Find some way of working off your feelings in direct useful physical activity for example gardening or chopping wood.

Go over each experience again and again in your mind working off the emotions concerned with it, until you can think about it without feeling disturbed about it.
The purpose of this exercise is to enable you to gain insight into the reasons why you lack confidence, and to release suppressed emotions which lie at the root of this problem. If you can succeed in accomplishing this task you will have gained a valuable piece of self knowledge.