Confidence is something we all experience at some time or other but if we don’t have it we can all too easily be overcome with nerves which stop us from achieving what we want in life or even being truly happy and free in the world.
We all know people who are confident, who know how to be cool, how to be funny, how to be popular and sometimes the gap between us and them can feel huge and leave us wondering just what is self confidence.
The questions ‘what is confidence?’ is a good place to start. Think about it for a few moments…. When you were last truly confident, what did you feel? What pictures went through your mind, what did you hear yourself saying to yourself? How did the world sound to you at that point? Think about it now, can you see it through your own eyes or do you see yourself as an outsider? Which gives you the strangest response.
Our confidence is constructed internally and is our own creation, yet for all of us at sometime or other will experience incidents where our confidence deserts us.
We experience confidence in different ways some us have a feeling, others have images, others have positive self-talk and so on. We construct or own experience of confidence which is right for us. It has a huge effect on our being – it affects how beautiful we feel, how attractive we feel and how successful we feel we will be.
Our self esteem is linked to our confidence and this is constructed internally on the basis of our experience in the world. Early relationships and family experience can be important factors here and have lasting impact on our selfesteem for many years.
The answer to the questions what is self esteem lies in many areas of our values, beliefs and experiences and it impacts on our wider beliefs about ourselves. Our self esteem impacts on our relationships, Careers creativity health and well being. People with high confidence and self esteem seem to know how to be outgoing, how to be confident, and instinctively how to be more popular. The advantages of high self confidence and self esteem cannot be underrated.
How can we improve our self esteem and confidence?
The self help industry is a valuable source of support with confidence and self esteem issues. Its not just about positive thinking about yourself or improving your levels of assertiveness, confidence affects every area of your life in a virtuous cycle.
Affirmations, Meditations, Self Hypnosis Personal development seminars are all useful ways we can boost our self confidence. And lead to much confidence building, improved self belief.
If you think about it for a minute you have had experiences where you experienced confidence. Just for a moment recall these times. Where were you? How did it feel? Bring those feelings back to you right now. As you intensify those feelings start to make a fist and squeeze it – squeeze it tighter and tighter as the feelings intensify – make the sensations stronger and more intense as you do – when it’s too much to bear just let go of the fist and relax. Now imagine a context where you would like this confidence – imagine yourself into it and as you do start to squeeze your fist to bring back the feeling of confidence you worked on a few minutes earlier. Now you have a new way of being confident – using confidence from other contexts in one where you want more confidence – this is called anchoring and is a well known NLP technique.
So how do confident people think and what do they believe about themselves that we can learn from?
Confident people don’t think that they have too much confidence and they have an expectation that they will be OK in any situation. They don’t expect difficult or unpleasant things to happen and even if they do it won’t matter to them in a way which damages their confidence. The have what we call self belief – they believe that they will be safe and able to cope no matter what. The know that there may be consequences to situations but they can distance themselves from any negative consequences that people with low self esteem may not be able to. In short its just that they put a different frame on their experience – one important frame which supports good, healthy, self confidence and self esteem but believing that there s no such thing as failure, only feedback. The see and receive the same responses to their actions but the responses are not seen as good or bad – just feedback. This has an automatic confidence building impact in that one sees responses to our actions simply as things to learn from.
