It’s drummed into you, over and over. It’s such an accepted wisdom amongst writers that the truth of it is never questioned. So why do best selling writers continually ignore this one cardinal rule?

Good fiction is immediate. You must drag your reader into the story and don’t give them a chance to let go – or break the fictive dream.

Using a “passive voice” is often seen as somehow less immediate. Compare the following two scenes:

“Peter was riding his bike down the steep hill road. The chain got caught in his trousers and he fell off, hurting himself.”

Hmm, perhaps a little bland – how about:

“Down the steep hill road, Peter rode his bike. Without warning, the chain caught in his trousers. His right leg slammed hard against the back wheel. The bike careened sideways for a split second and quickly overturned. Peter hit the ground, slid against the tarmac, grazing the skin from his hands and face…”

Obviously, the second is more graphic. The technique of removing qualifiers like “was” and “got” forces the reader (and the writer!) to see the scene in a different way. Generalities become specifics. Passive becomes active. This is good when you want to create exciting and engaging prose.

But what if that’s not your intention?

What if you have two ‘action’ scenes you want to get across, one in the past, one in the present? Is it still appropriate to use an active voice – for both?

Take a look at this:

“Bob sneered at the big man with the knife. His mind considered the possibilities. Attack. Back away. Turn and run. No, never. Bob would not be broken.

Since the accident, he was too strong for that.

Metal screeched as Bob forced the cutter into the car door. Orange sparks filled the night air. “Not long now,” he muttered as he caught sight of Annabel’s frightened face behind the windscreen.

The worst happened. Bob’s grip slipped and the cutter’s blade bounced off the glass, shattering it. Annabel howled as slivers and shards blew into the car. The baby in her arms wailed. His baby.

Bob lurched forward. With both hands, he caught the big man’s wrist, whose eyes enlarged with surprise. Bob twisted and the big man yelped. He dropped the knife and Bob kicked it away before he let the big man go and jumped back.”

Confusing, isn’t it? You have two equally immediate pieces of action, both vying for your attention. In this case it might be better to put some distance on the prior event so that it’s still THERE, in Bob’s consciousness, but not actually being played out.

In many novels, good authors spend time giving the reader “back-story”. This is information that’s used to set the scene before the action starts. It’s not a sin to do this. Sometimes it’s important for pace.

For example:

“Father Duncan was a bad man. It was common knowledge amongst his parishioners. His drinking was legendary, as was his foul tongue. Dirk stood at the bar and watched him, wondering whether the other stories were true – the ones whispered by the adults, behind his back.

“What you looking at?” the priest growled and Dirk’s gaze hardened. “Never seen a priest take a drink before?”

The first paragraph appears to break the rules – it’s all telling. But this is a totally acceptable technique in this context. It’s a kind of shorthand – it would take several pages to get the same information across if you stopped the action to show it in real time.

So don’t always believe those purists and writing teachers that say, “Show don’t tell.”

Too MUCH showing and you can lose depth and originality – and end up with the equivalent of TV melodrama. Good literary fiction has always had a liberal dash of telling, even in a ‘passive’ voice.

It is imperative in developing self-esteem and inner empowerment that you have goals for your life. Goals are the driving force for success. It is difficult to feel good about yourself if your life is constantly drifting, and your future is at the mercy of fate.

With life goals, you know where you are going and can work consistently to get there. In itself, this is a tremendous boost to your self-esteem. It gives your life a direction and a meaning. In particular, you should make sure that your goals are congruent with your major definite purpose; the one overall purpose which you have decided to achieve in your life.

Creating goals is not hard. The best way to work with goals is to actually write them out. You can use it to create your written goals and put them into practise straight away.

What do you do with this new definition that you have written for yourself?

First of all, read it when you awaken in the morning, read it at mid-day, and read it before you go to sleep at night. This will deeply drive the ideas into your subconscious. In addition, use the affirmations you have created as often as possible throughout the day. Remember to repeat them often AND with tremendous positive enthusiasm.

Second, start putting your new persona into practice. Literally act out your new self. At first, it may seem absurd and awkward. “This isn’t me” you may think to yourself. Of course, it may feel strange. That’s quite normal. However, remember this. When actors are called to play a new role, they may feel awkward in it when they first commence rehearsals. However, once they have performed the part several times, they get so “into the role” that they almost come to believe that they are the person they are acting.

Constant repetition of any skill makes it your own. Likewise, living out your new persona immediately will drive it forcefully into your consciousness.

Third, visualize being your persona as often as possible. See, hear, smell, taste and touch your new future. You are achieving your goals and displaying high self-esteem, which shows itself in tremendous self-confidence and empowerment. This leads to respect from all who know you, and takes you to the places in life that you have always dreamed of.

Now, you may think that you cannot visualize anything. Do not let this stop you. People’s brains function differently. Not everyone is primarily visual in their way of processing information coming into them through their senses. If you are simply able to answer the question, “What color is your front door?”, you can visualize. To have answered this goal, you would have had to have seen, in your mind’s eye, your front door. It does NOT have to have been vivid like a 3-D movie. Just an impression is quite enough.

If you work with these three steps consistently, you are well on the way to developing the empowerment, self-esteem and self-confidence that you deserve to enjoy. Remember that persistence is key. Since all this is so strange and seemingly threatening to your subconscious, there will be frequent temptations to give up. Stick with it! Even if it seems ridiculous to you, keep at it for the rewards will manifest themselves in the end.

Once again, you are really doing nothing more than you have already been doing all your life long. To get where you are, you have been visualizing, affirming, and thereby driving beliefs deep into yourself with emotion. All we are doing now is taking conscious control of the process to direct your inner mind to create the life you most desire to create, and to bring into being the person you most desire to be.

You can use the affirmation technique to help you with this exercise. Go through the areas of your life, and create an affirmation for each. For instance, you might create one that says “I go the extra mile in my work and attain excellence in my field, respected by my colleagues.” If it is your income, you might say “I earn $X,000 a year”, and so on.

The key is to make your affirmations

(1) Positive
(2) Personal (i.e. use the word “I”);
(3) Present Tense.

For instance do not create an affirmation that says “I will NOT be angry”. This actually has the exact opposite effect because the subconscious does not register the word “Not”. Instead, the affirmation seems to read “I will be angry”. This is the reason why affirmations must always be positive expressions, and not negative ones.

They must also be present tense. If they are not, the subconscious will accept that you want this to be true at some unspecified time in the future, and will not do much to bring it about. However, if the affirmation is present tense, the subconscious realizes that it is NOT in fact true, that you do not have this reality in your life at present, and will immediately go to work to bring it about as soon as possible.

Many people fail with affirmations because they do not realize this important truth. In order to work, affirmations must be invested with plenty of emotional energy. If they are not, they will not impact at a deep subconscious level. Remember that you already have plenty of emotional energy invested in the negative beliefs imbedded in your inner psyche. How did they get there? Simple. You repeated them over and over again, with plenty of negative energy invested. In order to replace them, your affirmations must be similarly invested with energy, and repeated over and over.

The subconscious is uncritical of what you feed it. That is how it willingly took all your negative suggestions on board in the first place. It will therefore just as willingly accept positive affirmations as long as they are provided in the right way.

You can add the affirmations you create to the new definition of yourself that you are writing. In addition, if you write these affirmations onto 3×5 cards, you can carry them around with you throughout the day and repeat them to yourself silently whenever you have the opportunity.

In order to make real progress in this process of developing self-esteem and self-confidence, you need to take a good hard look at yourself as you are right now, as well as how you would like to be.

Take a sheet of paper and write about yourself as if you were an objective observer, viewing you from the outside. Be honest about your strengths, AND the areas where you could do with improvement. How do you perform in all areas of your life; family, career, education, financial, recreation, and so on? Try to be perfectly honest with yourself. Do not con yourself, or there is no point to the exercise. In any case, no one else is going to see this write-up unless you leave it lying around!

Once you are done, what you see may surprise you. If you have been willing, perhaps for the first time, to be ruthlessly honest with yourself and reveal yourself as you really are, you may not like what you see.

However, do not be condemnatory about it. Instead, get to work with a sheet of paper once more. This time, design the person you would like to be. Describe that person down to the finest detail. What does that person look like? What job does that person do and what salary does it bring in? How is he/she as a family member? Make the blueprint for the new you as real and detailed as you can. Literally design your future.

Once you are done, you have a valuable blueprint for yourself. You have something concrete you can work on. After all, an architect does not build a skyscraper without detailed plans. Why should it be any different in your life?

Consult this blueprint every day. Read it regularly and visualize that person. See yourself performing the actions, and demonstrating the confident successful air of that person you have imagined.

An excellent way to build your self-confidence is to record all the successes you have had in your life. Most people are surprisingly good at disparaging their achievements, and many feel they have nothing to be proud of at all.

However, this is quite untrue. You should record on a sheet of paper, or in your journal, all the things you can justifiably be proud of, and that you did well. They do not have to be extraordinary by anyone else’s judgment. Go back over your life and build up a list of these things. They can even include things you achieved as a child at school.

Once you have built up your list, review it often. Think how good you felt on each of these occasions. The great news about self-confidence is that you can build it up through recalling times when you expressed it in abundance. By dwelling on these times, and realizing that you ARE successful in many ways, you build up the confidence to act in the future.

Also, it is very helpful to create a Gratitude Journal. This is a little book where you record every day something for which you are thankful. It could be making a new friend. It could be being glad to be born in a country where you have freedom of speech. Indeed, it could even be something as simple as having air to breath.

Remember that what you focus upon multiples. If you harbor thoughts of restriction and negativity, you will manifest more of this in your life. If you are continually grateful, you open the doors of heaven to provide you with yet more.

Being grateful also takes the focus off YOU and your problems. Instead, it helps you see all the good things that have been given to you. When your focus is upon the good, and upon the gifts you have been given, you have less time to dwell upon perceived inferiorities, develop an attitude of blame, and fear, and let them affect the whole of your life. Rather, you develop the attitude of Abundance, and therefore joy, peace, self-esteem and confidence must surely fill your life.

In developing high self-esteem and empowering self-confidence, you need to give very serious thought to your line of employment.

The ideal vision for your working life is that you should be employed doing something that you truly love. If you are just working to pay the bills, and tolerating numerous indignities to do so, then it becomes very hard to retain much self-esteem. It will be constantly under attack, and your confidence in yourself must decline at the same time.

Interacting with your work colleagues fills so much of your day. Does it not make sense to find a vocation filled with people you would actually like to be with?!

The financial NEED to remain at a job, i.e. the “wage slavery” aspect of employment that most people succumb to, is one of the most disempowering things you can do to yourself. Whilst you remain in this trap, it is very hard to think positively about yourself or your future.

It was Joseph Campbell who said that you must “follow your bliss”. This means finding out what you most love to do in life, and then determining a way to do it for a living. This may sound easier said than done, but it IS possible if you are prepared to approach the matter with determination and persistence. Yes, it may take some sacrifices initially. However, in the end, the rewards of living life authentically will far exceed any perceived losses.

The first step involves determining what you would love to do for a living. An excellent question you could ask yourself in this respect is; “If I had all the money in the world, so that finances were no longer a concern, what would I do with my life?”.

“Spend the rest of my life on the beaches of Barbados” is NOT the answer! You will find that all the great successes in life were unstoppable. They would have done their work even if there was no money involved. Indeed, the classic proof of this is that those who do go on to make a lot of money continue tirelessly with their work. Indeed, they work far harder than their less successful colleagues. If money was the only issue, they would stop working once they had made enough. Hence, those people who ask why such a person keeps working, when he/she has made so much money already, have completely missed the point.

Determine your own answer to this question. What would YOU do if time and money were not an issue at all? What is the one thing you have always dreamed of doing or being? Then create a plan for how to make this come about. Most people cannot simply drop their jobs. However, everyone can start to save money. Through doing this for some time, you could eventually have six months, or even a year of salary, saved. Imagine what that alone would do for your self-esteem. Knowing you have money in the bank makes you far less susceptible to employer bullying than you would otherwise be.

Also, begin to study your new chosen field and investigate ways in which you can break into it. Remember this. Nothing succeeds like Persistence. There is always a way to achieve whatever you wish for in life, as long as you are determined.

If you are in a job that destroys your self-esteem and undermines your confidence, you want to trade it in as soon as possible for the job you desire the most. Give some serious thought to this. Freeing yourself from wage slavery is possibly the best thing you can ever do for yourself.

Behind all this is what Napoleon Hill called a “definite major purpose”. You should give considerable time to finding one major aim to which you can dedicated your life. From this, your work should ultimately flow in a harmonious and congruous manner. Without this major purpose in the daily work you do, it is hard to remain happy in it. Of course, you can claim that your definite major purpose is to feed your family and keep a roof over their heads.

Yes, this is a major purpose, and it will doubtless keep you employed. However, it may not ultimately keep you happy at your job. If your job is not congruent with what you life is all about at its deepest level, if you secretly feel that you sold yourself out, it is nearly impossible to maintain high levels of self-esteem and inner confidence.

It is sadly all too often true that “birds of a feather flock together”. People with low self-esteem associate with other such people. Indeed, for such negative people, those of high self-esteem and confidence may even seem unbearable. After all, the latter make no excuses. They are going forward in life to where they want to go. They show up people who lack belief in themselves, and makes it hard for them to deal with the truth. Consequently, it is much easier to avoid this confrontation, associate with people of their own kind, and either pass off the great successes of others as “good luck”, or else find even more reason to blame their own circumstances.

As a person determined to improve your self-esteem and boost self-confidence, you want to start associating with people of like mind. Do a personal inventory of the people you “hang out” with and determine to minimize, or eliminate altogether, contact with people who are not taking you where you want to go. Instead, seek out people who are going places, with the sort of mental attitude you wish to see in yourself. Spend increasing amounts of time with such people. The influence will definitely rub off. If there are non in your immediate circle, find and join a club where you know such people may be found! Do whatever it takes to gain access to the positive energy of people who are filled with enthusiasm, positive thinking and confidence. It can only rub off on you in the end.

We are taught in our society that self love is a bad thing. It is implied that to love yourself is selfish. Instead, we are told we should love other people.

It is easy for people to not love themselves. Society teaches us that others matter more than we do. Yet, if we cannot love ourselves, then we are incapable of truly loving anyone else. It is the very people who judge themselves, and constantly find themselves wanting, who are always judging others and are bitter when others succeed.

How do you fare on the self-love test? If you really find you do not like yourself at all, one powerful way to change that is to use the affirmation:

“I like myself”

Personal Development Trainer, Brian Tracy, believes this to be one of the most powerful affirmations you could possibly use. If you repeat this affirmation often every day, with feeling, the effect it will have on your life can be tremendous.

The key is to say it with feeling and enthusiasm. At first, you may not believe it to be true. However, through constant use, you set up what is called cognitive dissonance in your brain. The latter cannot believe two contradictory notions at once. Moreover, it will lean towards the one which is invested with the more energy.

Thus, if you say this affirmation often enough and with enthusiasm, it will eventually displace the negative unloving feelings you have towards yourself. A new confident self-loving you will emerge. Moreover, in loving yourself more, you will find yourself better able to love others too. This will have a transformative impact upon all your relationships, and hence on your personal and professional life.

One of the key steps in redeeming your self-esteem from wherever it may have fallen, and in boosting your self-confidence, is to take responsibility for everything that happens to you in life.

This means that you stop blaming your employer, the government, your husband/wife, your parents, your lawyer/accountant, your financial situation, your racial background, or whatever else is your pet excuse for the way you have turned out.

Blaming others for your life is the most disempowering thing you can ever do. For in blaming externals for your situation, you give power away to those very externals you are blaming. When you give power away in one situation through blameful attitudes, it becomes easier to give it away in other areas too.

All the great successes in life take personal responsibility for every detail of how things turn out, even things you might think they cannot possibly be responsible for. By cultivating this attitude, you begin to become a creator of your life and not just a passive recipient of whatever the winds of fate may throw at you.

It is our thoughts that shape our future for better or worst. Someone who always makes excuses for why he/she has not succeeded as they might have hoped, and who blames others, guarantees that this situation is unlikely to ever change. The person who takes personal responsibility for the situation is in a place where it is possible to consider a more effective strategy than has been used in the past, and then go to work to put that strategy into effect.

Here is a useful affirmation to use throughout the day, and especially when your mind is about to go into its habitual cycle of blame:

“I am responsible”

Say this often, even when it does not seem clear how you could possibly BE responsible. Remember that you attract to yourself life circumstances in harmony with the thoughts you think most of the time. By adopting the attitude that you are responsible, and by putting definite plans into effect to bring what you desire into reality, you fast forward the tape of your life to put you into the place you most want to be.