Confidence is one of the most powerful assets you have. You could be incredibly skilled and talented, but without confidence in your abilities, you will never use your full potential. But the sad thing I see, is that a lot of people seem to think that confidence is something you either you have or you don't. There are literally millions of people who think that they are "stuck" with the low self-esteem that they have right now. They couldn't be more wrong!

The fact is Confidence can be learned. But before we go into that a bit more, let's look at where your current levels of self-esteem come from.

A lot of our characteristics are inherited from our parents. If you see new born babies, they are not all the same in the way that they behave. Some babies are anxious while others are relaxed. Some babies are happy while others are irritable. These all reflect the babies' temperaments which are basically the characteristics they were born with. An anxious baby will likely grow up to be an anxious person. Anxious people are often less confident than calmer people. In this way a lot of our own personality (and therefore our self-confidence) is already there when we born.

But not all anxious babies become anxious adults. And not all happy babies become happy adults. This is because our inherited temperament isn't the only thing that determines how we turn out. Our childhood experiences also have an effect on how our personalities develop. If your live in a loving family where everyone treated you well, you were encouraged and people respected your talents you are more likely to grow up feeling confident. But this is not always the case. A lot of it depends on your childhood environment interacting with your pre-set temperament. Also, the particular experiences that you had can affect you in different ways. Some people with "healthy" upbringings could still end up with low self-esteem. While others with less supportive childhoods could still manage to end up with high self-confidence.

The third factor that affects your confidence is experiences you have as an adult. You might have a calm temperament and a great childhood, but a series of unfortunate incidents in your adult life (like relationship break ups or career problems) might easily knock your confidence and make you feel low about yourself.

If you look at the three factors that influence your self-confidence, genetics, childhood experiences and unfortunate incidents in your adult life, you can notice one common thread. You had little or no say in any of it! This could easily make you think that confidence is something that happens to you. You are a passive victim of circumstances!

But this is not true. You might be where you are now because of things that were out of your control, but that doesn't mean you can't make changes now to help you improve your self-confidence.

When we think of confidence, what we are looking at is a set of behaviors. A confident person acts, thinks, feels and reacts differently to a person who has low self-esteem. If you look at each of these 4 areas, you can see certain patterns in the way confident people behave. As with anything in life, if you copy what successful people do, you will be successful. So with confidence, if you can copy the way a confident person acts and thinks and also the way they feel and react, you will over time start to create the behaviors in yourself. And the best thing is , if you have consciously created those behaviors then you are in control. A person who is just naturally confident, may lose their confidence at any time and then not know what to do. If you have learned your confidence and built it up, then it's yours forever!

Remember, just because you have low confidence now, doesn't mean you are stuck with it forever. Confidence is a learnable skill.

Doctor K is the editor of the website: www.howtogainconfidence.net/ the home of Doctor K's 30 Day Confidence Builder Progam. It's a site where you can get confidence building tips and info on how to improve your self-esteem.