How Stress Gives Your Confidence A Boost

You're stuck in traffic, late for work and invading your thoughts is the threat of losing your job.

Clear across town, a high school math teacher is having difficulty managing an over-packed class of forty-two 11th graders that constantly challenge his authority.

Further downtown, the parents of a special needs child are making their 4th trip to the neurologist to try and figure out why their child is having an increase in seizure activity.

Defining Stress

Stress is defined in Webster's II New Riverside Dictionary as mental, emotional or physical tension, strain or distress; subject to pressure.

Every challenge and triumph in life has it's beginning in some form of stress. It doesn't matter if you are having a tough time or if you're living a life with confidence. Stress had a hand in your life at one point in time.

A high powered exec experiences just as a mother who is unable to feed her children. The difference is the type of stress each one experiences.

Not All Stress Is Negative

While stressful situations can be viewed as negative, not all stress is such. Thanks to many researchers, we can now actually view some stress as a benefit and use it to improve our lives.

It's a similar rationale like the rationale like that of the popular quote, "An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty."

You can view stress as a total negative and let it take you out re-channel your stress and use it for something positive. The choice is yours.
Twisted Logic
Often in life we are to accept, "What will be will be" and “If you can't change your circumstances accept them.”

Such acceptance enforces a defeatist attitude. If you think that using your stress positively is twisted thinking, what do you call accepting defeat?

Living Life With Confidence

If you face a stressful situation and handle it successfully, you'll not only feel a sense of accomplishment, you'll feel a great boost of self confidence.

Knowing that you were able to handle a situation that would have nearly immobilized others, leaves you feeling better about yourself and paves the way for you to live life with confidence. The key is to push past your comfort zone.

Steadfastness and determination takes your stress and uses it for you, to boost your confidence instead of it working against you.

How else could parents ignore their own exhaustion and press forward to get answers for their sickly child? How else could a disrespected teacher continue teaching a class of future engineers and architects (unbeknownst to him) who don't seem to want to be taught?

"Quitters never win and winners never quit." This is an appropriate quote to close out this article.

Keep pushing past whatever is causing you the greatest stress. When you taste the other side of victory, your confidence will soar.