Guest Post by M.Farouk Radwan: Practical steps to more self-confidence. The road of success is full of criticism, rejections and down times. We all know that one of the essential ingredients required for success is believing in ourselves.

Here’s the thing: If you can use the pain to do good, to save someone from having to experience the same pain, then the pain is graced, if you will, with something noble. The ugliness behind the pain isn’t meaningful, but the pain will have led to something that is deeply and even profoundly meaningful.

Through gasps of tear-filled pain, of an intensity that was heart-breaking, she told me how wonderfully things were going … externally. As she cried, she told me about the turmoil she feels at missing a family that doesn’t deserve to be missed and about external circumstances that really were pretty wonderful, all the while feeling utterly sad and empty