Can you really make it happen?
Are People Born With Self-Confidence?
Developing self-confidence is nowhere as easy as the pretenders make it out to be.
Don’t be fooled. Self-confidence doesn’t “just happen.” It’s not genetic. It is a completely learned trait that can be acquired and developed at any age. The problem is that developing self-confidence is not a “snap of the fingers phenomenon.”
I’ve promised you for over one year that I would release my work in developing lasting self-confidence. In the next few weeks, we’re going to do just that.
In this article I want to share with you some of the very counter-intuitive facts I’ve discovered about building a driving self-confidence.
There are dozens of approaches that simply haven’t panned out in attempting to build self-confidence.
Confidence Crushers
Confidence is eroded in several ways.
The most common confidence crushers are:
- Failing
- Missing the target
- Failing far more often at tasks than the norm
- Listening when people tell you that you are poor at something (whether you are or not)
- Being put under the microscope when performing
All of these things shatter the mirror of the self that was confident, if indeed there ever was confidence in the first place.
Breaking through one or many of these very tall barriers is not to be underestimated. If you find yourself in situations where you lack self-confidence, realize that you are not alone.
KEY POINT: The VAST majority of people feel a general lack of self-confidence and almost everyone feels a significant absence of self-confidence in some settings…sometimes so paralyzing that it manifests as fear, or worse.
KEY TECHNIQUE: One powerful step toward building self-confidence that anyone can do immediately is to take an action to it’s completion on small parts of a task… until that small part is achieved.
Example:
If someone were not confident they could walk 10 miles, they would go walk 1 mile today. The very action itself begins to reprogram the brain that their belief (which is not as powerful as the action itself) is wrong.
How Do You Develop Unshakable Self-Confidence?
KEY DISCOVERY: Reality takes over beliefs in the brain as actions become replicable AND ARE REPLICATED. And the repetition of the action(s) is crucial. In fact, you could argue, and generally win, that without repeated actions there will be no unshakable self-confidence.
“Belief” or “visualization” without replication is like thinking a cake will be made in the oven…but you never actually made the cake.
I’ve told this story before, but it’s to the point!
I remember watching my daughter ice skate…one evening. It’s like watching Michelle Kwan…or anyone else who is graceful on the ice. I also remember her prodding me onto the ice so that I would come skate with her.
I don’t ice skate but am almost always game to try something new.
Within four steps on the ice, I was flat on my back with no interest to experience that again. All of the visualizing in the world won’t cause you to successfully skate…nor will that visualizing convince your brain that you can “do it.” Your brain is quite good at discerning truth and fiction.
Had I gotten back up and skated through dozens of falls over hours and hours of attempts until I was able to move on the blades, I would have begun to develop that self-confidence, but that was not the case.
I haven’t attempted to skate since and don’t see it in the future!
So how would you take this poor man’s lack of self-confidence and make it unshakable?
You find the best skates, the rink with the fewest or no critics nearby and teach the brain and body to experience various parts of ice skating. You would have the sad rookie (me) stand on the ice then be pulled for 100 feet by an experienced skater. This proves to the body that this can actually happen in real life. You don’t simply have a cognitive “belief.” That’s nice but almost meaningless. One can believe the airplane won’t fly and it generally will in spite of their belief.
KEY DISCOVERY 2: The body has to be able to FEEL the action.
Once an action has been successfully completed, then it has been proven that using visualization or self-hypnosis techniques can be very helpful in causing positive results which lead to even greater self-confidence.
What About Past Confidence?
Reclaiming the Past:
Part of self-confidence is regaining feelings of certainty or possibility that we once had but no longer experience.
Examples:
- You got fired from a job.
- You got divorced.
- You failed a test.
At one time perhaps you were happily and productively employed, happily married or doing well in some way in school, learning or achieving something. Then all of a sudden, you lost a job, got a divorce or failed some kind of test. What once was a sense of certainty in yourself and/or a relationship of some kind now has evaporated into doubt, fear, worry and anxiety.
If this sounds like you, welcome to the shoes that every human has walked in.
Certainty and self-confidence are not the same, and an important distinction can and probably should be made.
Attitude and Certainty
KEY POINT: You should never attempt to be absolutely certain that you WILL achieve a specific result.
Even if you achieve some kind of result 98% of the time, and are one of the best performers in some area, it still benefits you long-term to only be certain that you will perform as good or as well as anyone else can.
So, if you get fired from a job, which means that there are some elements of control you do NOT possess, you will not personalize the feelings of loss of confidence that so many others do. There are a lot of reasons people lose jobs, including personal issues. If you were absolutely certain that you could never be fired and then got fired, you would logically and reasonably lose not only your confidence in your ability to perform but also your ability to be able to direct and plan your future…and of course lose confidence in yourself.
Worse? You would lose confidence in your personal judgment! Don’t do it! This is not the time or place for certainty!
What would the right approach have been? Had you known that you would do your absolute best, succeed or fail, then you would not lose confidence in your self if you got fired or had some kind of random mishap.
Your specific attitude is crucial not only to your confidence but every other aspect of your long-term emotional and mental health. You should be confident of things that you see consistent evidence for, like the sun rising and setting, and, you should be confident of those things which you have consistently done or achieved in the past. Here you can be confident of acquiring and achieving a result. But when taking on something that you haven’t done, you must be careful of what happens when you fail and how you interpret the meaning of those future experiences.
Remember the Parachute
KEY POINT: People who try to talk themselves into self-confidence are destined for long-term failure.
Someone can talk themselves into jumping out of an airplane, but if they neglect the reality of putting on a parachute, all the self-confidence in the world is meaningless.
Being self-confident in your jump because you have checked and double checked your parachutes, having learned everything there is to know about jumping and then to jump is very different, of course.
Imagined positive results must match the reality that they are imaged from in order to permanently wire into the neurology of the brain. If it were any other way, people would walk around delusional and OVER confident, which is never a good thing.
More is coming about self confidence!
If you are excited about the idea of taking control of your destiny, you will want:
A Course in Metaphors: Introduction to Advanced Metaphor Mastery with Kevin Hogan
An advanced home study program in changing behavior, learning and reprogramming minds.
3CDs:
- Volume 1 – Making Metaphors That Captivate Them
- Volume 2 – The Secret Code to Making Magic Happen with Words
- Volume 3 – Hypnotic Metaphor of Attraction
Who will benefit from this?
- Therapists
- Salespeople
- Marketing People
- People in Relationships
- Anyone who needs to gain compliance in any situation
This course in utilizing metaphors includes almost all new information to you and is nothing like you have ever thought of or learned before. Better: You’re going to see why most people teaching and using metaphor are ineffective (whether in selling, therapy or relationships) and how to avoid the same mistakes they make. Then you are going to learn to elicit, construct and communicate metaphors that will literally begin to reformat the hardware of their minds.
You haven’t learned anything like this from Bandler, Robbins or even Milton Erickson. They all had pieces to the puzzle. By the time you are done with all the CD’s in this series you will be a master at understanding and communicating in metaphor.
Learn more about metaphors or to order
