Lack of confidence and low self-esteem can be very distressing and disempowering. It might affect just one area of your life, perhaps in difficulties with public speaking or talking to members of the opposite sex.

Or it may be that it affects more than one area, and actually interferes with your daily activities and what you want to achieve in life. In this case it probable that, even though they may not have appeared until later life, these problems originated from events in your childhood. In my practice, it is a regular thing for my clients, under hypnosis, to recall being publicly "put on the spot" when at school in a very frightening and embarrassing way. They say, "I wanted to ground to open up and swallow me". This, I am sorry to say, used to be a common teaching strategy. Today it is no longer acceptable to use humiliation as a teaching tool, although I suspect it does still happen. Episodes like this can be so painful that the mind tucks them away in an inaccessible place, where they sit and fester and influence our feelings, reactions and beliefs.

It is also a sad fact that parents often trigger this process too. Many peoples' parents are over-exacting in their demands for good behaviour and over-ambitious for their child's performance. If the child is already distressed or frightened by the situation, a simple statement like "You are useless" can be internalised and lay the foundations for a belief that he will always fail. And believing that ensures that it will happen.

Many hypnotherapists automatically use suggestion therapy for confidence problems. My experience has been that this is in many cases too superficial to produce a lasting result. So I tend to use hypnoanalysis.