The Peripatetic Philosopher shares an announcement:

Why Read Self-Confidence?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© November 12, 2015

 REFERENCE:

This is an essay that will precede the showing of my latest book, Self-Confidence: The Illusive Key to Health, Happiness & Emotional Survival.  The book is to be published in the Kindle Library of www.amazon.com in late November 2015.  This is my seventeenth book

Self-Confidence is about being in charge, taking control of one’s life.  It is not about how to win friends and influence others, but how to have that cache over oneself. 

Self-Confidence is a mindset, not a ballyhooed coping mechanism.  In other words, this is a different perspective than the reader is likely to be familiar. 

There is an excess of books on how to have “power” and/or “influence” over others, but an embarrassing shortage of books on how to have that over oneself. 

Such promises are empty if one is not in charge, has not taken control, is not comfortable in one’s own skin.  Moreover, the promise of “human potential,” which is another catch phrase, has little weight if one is not a happy camper.    

Science and technology have made the individual essentially an emotional bystander as if a laboratory specimen in an experimental maze.  Condensed to analytics and algorithms by economists and psychologists, the individual has become basically a collection of data or reduced to a set of numbers to be probed and bombarded with subliminal stimuli.   

We know this in our bones, but don’t know what to do about it.  Unwittingly, we have developed a herd mentality to the corporate mantra of “progress” at the expense of our internal governor of self-direction and control.

We have lost our moral compass and our way, and for this, we are not happy campers.  

“We have lost touch with touch.”  We have alienated ourselves from ourselves as individuals in the most intimate ways.  We have become an imitation of our authentic self at the heavy cost of stability and emotional survival. 

Self-Confidence deals with this artificial construct so that we can ride the tide of the good times and the bad times with confidence as we understand our situation and circumstances.

With Self-Confidence, self-assurance enables us to make good choices, and to understand others when they fail to do the same.  We are able to lead as well as prevail.  That is the mindset of Self-Confidence.   

With intrinsic self-awareness, the cognitive mind is now married to the intuitive mind in a common purpose moving past the conceit of a cognitive bias that attempts to solve problems only with the rational mind to embrace the intuitive or conceptual mind. 

Indeed, with Self-Confidence, we can change the daily headlines of print and electronic network news to an abundance of positive stories and experiences. 

The intuitive mind is prominent in Self-Confidence with its preference for cooperation as the perfect foil to the competitive combative cognitive mind.  With this, there is now room for our spiritual or non-quantitative side.

That said these are dangerous times.  We see this as we go blindly forward with anachronistic tools designed for another time along with atavistic thinking.  Danger is palpable.  We can encounter it by merely stepping out of the safety of our home.  It is a danger, however, we are equipped to handle but seemingly unaware.

We have a protective shield.  It is our reptilian brain that has been with us since the dawn of the Cro-Magnon man.  What is it?

It is the feeling we have being around certain people or in the climate of pressing danger.  Feelings calibrate a threatening situation long before the cognitive mind is engaged. 

Feelings trigger the prehensile reptilian brain to generate in a split second the appropriate response to personal discomfiture or a challenging physical situation.  The Fisher Paradigm©™ is presented here to illustrate how this mechanism works daily in everyone’s life. 

We all experience puzzling and contradictory moments.  The inclination is to wonder after the fact how we have survived such moments.  Often, we think it is luck when it is the unconscious -- the reptilian brain -- surfacing as if an angel on our shoulder telling us this is not right, this is not good, this is not what it seems, this is not for me. 

Self-Confidence focuses on this unchartered territory in an effort to reverse the incapacitating trend toward the pathology of normalcy, which finds us spectators to our own existence.  It is time to pursue our inalienable rights to happiness.