Confidence

The thing to bear in mind about confidence is, we are all born with confidence, but for one reason or another it can get eroded. Often we put ourselves down and wear our own confidence away.

People use two main mental processes to put themselves down:

  • Hearing an internal critical voice reminding them of what they are doing or about to do wrong.
  • Making internal pictures of failure.

We can become our own worst enemy and set ourselves up to fail.

Critical Voices

If you hear an internal voice which is wearing your confidence down, think back to a specific occasion when that internal voice was present, being critical or making disparaging comments:

  1. Put yourself back into the situation and relive it.
  2. Pay attention to the voice and take note of the tonality and tempo. (Is it loud, soft, fast, slow, sarcastic, or strident?)
  3. Is it your voice, or someone else's?
  4. Take note of your emotional response.
  5. Experiment with altering the voice and apply different vocal effects. Speed the voice up, slow it down, make it sound like a cartoon character, change the quality, but keep the words the same.

Unconscious Positive Intention (UPI)

  1. Ask the voice what it's trying to achieve? Have a conversation with the voice and ask it, 'What's your intention..? What are you trying to accomplish?'
  2. Listen for the answer.
  3. Drill down with your answers, 'What does that do for/to me? And what else?'

Even if the response is to punish you in some way, stick with the questioning to get to the UPI for you.

Thank your critical voice for its UPI; you are now working together. You can work out why the voice is commenting in a nagging and critical way.

Negotiating With Your Critical Voice

Now you and your critical voice both agree on a positive intention you can explore effective ways of getting the results you both want.

  1. Ask, 'If there were more effective ways of achieving a good result would you be prepared to try them out'? Ask why if there's resistance. Wait for agreement.
  2. Ask the creative part of you to generate lots of possible alternative behaviours and new ways of behaving that might build self confidence. Come up with at least three and attempt to agree on the best one.
  3. Imagine carrying each of them out to see if they will work effectively for you.
  4. Ask the voice if it will be willing to work with the suggested new option.

Further tips

Negotiate a more agreeable tone of voice, by simply telling it you are more likely to listen if it is amicable.

If the voice comments on mistakes after you've made them, ask if it would be willing to prompt before they are made.

  

 

 

Improving the Choice of Words Used

If someone says don't think about a purple elephant, you are compelled to think about a purple elephant and so comments you may make to yourself like, 'You mustn't think about performing badly in the meeting,' are likely to lead you to perform badly in the meeting.

Alter the comment to a positive statement and alter 'you' to 'I'. It's more personal and likely to make you feel like the comment has come from yourself and will make you feel like you are more in control of the situation. Try: 'I wonder how well I'll perform in the meeting.' This presumes you will do well, but how well is up to you!

Generalisations

Comments like, 'I never do anything right' you could challenge with, 'What, I never do anything right?! What specifically did I do that didn't turn out right'?

You might then start to think of the times when you did do things right and identify the one or two times where you didn't. You can then learn from the mistakes.

Finding Affirmations to Suit You

More action and energy is created by adding 'ing' to the end of your word so for example, 'I feel good' changes to 'I am feeling good'. If there is an associated picture conjured up in the brain, it can be altered from a still picture to a moving one with more information contained within.

Check your reaction to an affirmation and see if there's resistance. If you use one that does not ring true alter it. For example, if you say, 'I am an honest person' and you have recently told a white lie, the affirmation may not be any good for you. Try instead, 'I am learning to be honest'.

Ask yourself who you want to become and build affirmations around that. Check for resistance from your internal critical voice however, it may respond to an affirmation by saying, 'Yeah right'! The resistance may make the situation worse rather than better as evidence is thrown up to contradict your good intentions.

As before, you can always ask the critical voice for more information and create a more suitable affirmation that doesn't meet with scorn.

Visualisations

Turning a previously occurring un-resourceful situation around:

  • Identify a situation in the past where you didn't perform as well as you could have.
  • Become aware of the feelings associated and name them.
  • Detach from the situation and watch yourself as if it were a film.
  • What would you have liked to have felt?
  • Run the film again with these emotions included.
  • Step into the film, becoming one with you in the situation and run the film through using each resource in turn.
  • Assess your reaction to each version. Which works best?
Think of an external cue to trigger your chosen response and use it whenever you would like to be more effective.

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