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Others can hurt our feelings and wound our pride, but it is our own inner voice which is most often responsible for wielding the fatal blow that kills our self confidence.

Sometimes our inner dialogue is riddled with skewed self perception. In some cases it is the echoes of haunting, critical voices from our past.

The negative thoughts swirling around inside our minds will do us in faster than any criticism from an exterior source. We will bully ourselves and discount our worth without even being aware of the damage we are wreaking on our own self confidence.

Motivated by fear of failure, our inner voice will argue us out of achieving any modicum of success. The moment we verbally express an intention to act, the phrases, "I can't" and "But, what if?" begin a mental tangent of self doubting dialogue designed to thwart our efforts and paralyze us into inactivity.

One of the most lethal negative thoughts is, "What will "they" think?" Worrying excessively about the impression we are making on others is a side effect of the "Comparing Syndrome." We mentally pit our value and performance against others and the voices in our head convince us we cannot compete or measure up.

We do not have to surrender to the slaughter of our confidence. We can take affirmative action to silence the voices, or dub over them with more appropriate thoughts.

We can use the following techniques to silence our critical inner voice:

* Thinking positive

Replace negative thoughts with positive affirmations and behave like the self confident person we desire to become. We can stand tall, smile and be well groomed to illustrate to the world and ourselves that we are worthy of serious consideration. We can act like what we want to be and soon we will become our aspiration. In the words of famous artist, Vincent Van Gogh, "If you hear a voice within you say, "You cannot paint," then by all means, paint, and the voice will be silenced."

* Practice self awareness

By examining our conscience we can discover where the inner dialogue originated. Often when we are victims of criticism or verbal abuse in our formative years, we naively accept the negative assessment as truth and assign it to "automatic record" to be played back over and over in our mind. It takes keen self awareness and concentrated, determined effort to stop beating ourselves up with internal negative discourse learned in the past and habitually repeated in the present.

Keeping a journal of gratitude documenting our blessings and accomplishments

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