Misery loves company, it is a way for it to validate itself. Most of the time, you will find that if you try to talk to someone about your low self-esteem, lack of self confidence or miserable situation, they will simply commiserate or empathise with you, citing their own situation as an example, rather than get you to turn your opinion of yourself around. Before you know it, you are both crying in your coffee together about what losers you have turned out to be. So now you both have a shoulder to cry on, been validated and can feel a certain smug satisfaction that you are not alone in your misery, and so the process goes on and on.

There are those that listen to your misery and do their best to turn your low opinion of yourself on it’s head. However you have an arsenal of reasons why it doesn’t apply to you. Most of the time you shoot any suggestions down. After all you’ve tried that before once and it didn’t work, or you couldn’t possibly, what would other people think and all the other excuses you can rapidly call upon to remain within the comforting boundaries of your misery. So the listener gives up and leaves well enough alone, again validating your misery.

For some to really validate their misery they set up “support” groups. These are set up with the best of intentions after all they are formed to be supportive of the miserable people who join, and who better to know about misery than a fellow sufferer. What often happens is people wallow in self-pity, the emphasis is usually on confronting the misery, getting comfortable with the misery and then, maybe then, make some changes to lessen the misery. They help somewhat, however they don’t solve the problem completely.

Part of the reason these things don’t work is you are looking in the wrong places for the solutions to overcoming your misery. Usually the people you are going to for help are family, friends and colleagues, most of whom are part of the problem causing your misery, so of little help. Their perspective is different and the solutions offered are solutions they would require, not necessarily solutions you require. Or they simply don’t have the training and skills necessary to be able to dig into your processes, get frustrated and annoyed at not being effective with the help they have offered.

What you require is qualified help. By qualified I mean someone who has learnt the skills to dig deep into your processes, find the patterns you use to reinforce your misery, then help you delete them and install new patterns that have you living a happier life. When you get sick you visit a doctor, when you want to learn a new skill you go to school or college, so when you want to get off your particular misery-go-round go to an NLP Practitioner. Mairad Kelly of Encouraging Excellence is one such practitoner with both the skills and experience to help you and do it in just ten hours.