The voices in our heads can be real buzz-kills. “I’m not whatever enough.” I should be (doing) X, I should be (doing) Y, I should be (doing) Z. Some call this voice “the gremlin” or saboteur. Others look at it is as a radio station that plays recurring tunes of self-limiting beliefs embedded into our subconscious minds.

Many talented and creative people report feeling incompetent, inadequate and having low self esteem at times. But there are ways to shift those feelings and build self confidence.

Self-centered, vain, conceited, egocentric - these are some of the variations on the idea of being narcissistic. We need a healthy degree of positive self-regard, of course, but when it becomes distorted, it is considered narcissism.

We tend to be attracted to confident, bold, defiant people in the world of art. Many times audacity can go further than even talent. The talented artist, writer, or musician who does not show belief and confidence can flounder, when someone less talented but with assertive belief can flourish. Being convinced in the merit of our work is an attractive energy that sells and magnetizes attention as much for the product as for the belief itself.

What is the key to developing the self-confidence? Authenticity, which you could consider the discovery of the awesome power you get from simply being YOU. Some personal development coaches subscribe to the belief that if you focus on self too much, you become selfish. I think that’s a counter productive way of looking at self.

It's no secret that self-confidence is very important to achieving success in any area of life. The thing about self-confidence is that it is very sensitive to our personal experience and is inherently instable. In other words, your self-confidence has a “snowball effect.” And it can snowball in a positive direction or it can snowball in a negative direction.

And so creative people tend to make the audience, a studio, their agent into a parent figure that they have to constantly appease or impress to maintain the connection, the emotional tie... You kind of do and you don’t [have to have a really big ego]... A friend of mine said, talking about writers, they’re egomaniacs with low self-esteem.

We tend to associate the word “grandeur” with events like royal weddings and sights like the Grand Canyon. Hotels are grand, canals are grand, and cruise ships are grand. But something about that way of thinking prevents us from demanding grandeur from the other stuff of existence, like an image that we craft, a jam that we jar, or a kiss that we give. For more reasons that we can count, grandeur isn’t very present in our daily lives.

What is the relationship between the criticism you receive and the criticism you inflict on yourself? Why do so many people inflict daily doses of self-criticism upon themselves in neurotic ways, that is, in ways that are patently unjustified, unhealthy and self-sabotaging? To what extent does a penchant for self-criticism turn uneventful episodes of minor criticism into toxic, wounding events?

The first step along the road to recovering your true Self is to recognize that you're not who you've thought you were. It's like you've gone through all your life thinking you were Bobbie Jones, the child of Mary and Bob Jones, then you find out on your sixteenth birthday that your real name is Dale Smith, and your parents are Cindy and Carl. But, in truth, the case of mistaken identity you've been living is even more dramatic than that.