SELF CONFIDENCE AND HOW INNER TALK OF THE MIND AFFECTS PERFORMANCE WHAT YOU THINK AND SELF CONFIDENCE AND SELF ESTEEM

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It is true that self confidence is crucial to success. What we believe we can do, our self confidence, has a lot to do with our achievements. In Zen and the Art of Archery and the Inner Game of Tennis,we learn how the constant inner chatter that goes on in our minds interferes with our self confidence, with our inner peace and our outer performance. An article in the New York Times illustrates how this lesson about thinking and self confidence is being applied at school.



"With the sound of their new school bell, the fifth graders at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School here closed their eyes and focused on their breathing, as they tried to imagine “loving kindness” on the playground.





















“I was losing at baseball and I was about to throw a bat,” Alex Menton, 11, reported to his classmates the next day. “The mindfulness really helped.”"

In The Classroom Quieting the Mind :Teaching Mindfulness In School



"Dr. Amy Saltzman, a physician in Palo Alto, Calif., who started the Association for Mindfulness in Education three years ago, thinks of mindfulness education as “talk yoga.” Practitioners tend to use sticky-mat buzzwords like “being present” and “cultivating compassion,” while avoiding anything spiritual.



Dr. Saltzman, co-director of the mindfulness study at Stanford, said the initial findings showed increased control of attention and “less negative internal chatter — what one girl described as ‘the gossip inside my head: I’m stupid, I’m fat or I’m going to fail math,’ ” Dr. Saltzman said"

Contemplation and Education

Association for Mindfulness in Education