Life goes by fast, and if you don’t pay attention to the way it shapes you, you may wake up one day feeling like a human pincushion.  This is equally true for both men and women; that life experiences can have a negative affect on the self esteem.  This is not how it should be.  In order to live a life that you enjoy to the fullest, you want to learn ways to increase your strength and confidence through every experience you have.

 The way to begin making changes in your life is to first realize they are necessary.  Reaching for a more confident you doesn’t make you selfish, and won’t turn you into a braggart who is arrogant and no fun to be around.  The beauty of life is that you get to create the story and the characteristics you will possess as the hero or heroin of that story. 

 While there are little ways you can improve your confidence and gain strength; there is one that beats out just about everything; and that is to learn self defense.  Not only do you gain great knowledge by engaging in self defense training (sometimes spelled self defence training); but you also gain such personal power that you will never be the same person again.

 How you learn self defense tactics is up to you.   You could enroll in an ongoing class that consists of martial arts training; or you can even learn moves from a self defense video.  The goal is to put yourself in the position of learning something new.  This alone will increase your self esteem.  But, while you could do this by taking cooking lessons or something mundane like that; self defense is unique in that it reaches inside of you and pulls out all that is tough – all that says “ you can’t hurt me”.

 There is no faster way to gain confidence and become stronger than to face something that may be scary.  Violence is scary, folks.  While you do not face real danger in a class of other students learning self defense, you become aware of the fact that violence exists.  To employ the moves that increase your personal safety takes effort and in this way you also add physical strength to your personal toolbox. 

 You learn many things at once in one simple training program of self defense.  You learn to protect yourself.  You gain personal insight into the strong person you really are.  You gain an awareness of yourself and your surroundings.  You learn necessary tools for safety.  And most of all you make a statement by learning self defense that says “I will not be a victim”.  Although initially that statement refers to crime; it has a way of bleeding into other areas of your life.  Self defense teaches you that you are not to be a victim; and when you learn that, you will not be a victim of any sort of injustice. 

With a stronger, more confident self image, you have the power to take your life down a completely different path.