POTENTIAL 2 SUCCESS - Build Confidence in Anything

Build Confidence in Anything

© 2007 Ralph Jean-Paul Confidence is one of the most important traits a person can possess. Confidence is what followers admire in leaders, it’s what most women look for in a man, it’s even what enables you to get in your car every morning and go to work. The concept of confidence is easy to understand but the depth of its effects is amazing. Once you build a strong foundation of self confidence and confidence in your ability and purpose, things in your life start to fall into place.

The Foundation

How confident you are is completely depended upon what your confidence is based on. A person may be attractive and get a lot of attention because of the way they look. And looking good can give anyone a large amount of confidence. But what would happen when their looks start to fade? Well if they are only confident in their looks, their confidence fades too. What about someone who is rich and then looses all of their money, is the confidence still there? If you are someone with low confidence and self-esteem or you have confidence and want to increase it, make sure to look at what you are basing it on. The reason it is important to do so is because a large part of what defines you is based in what you put your confidence in.If you called yourself a Christian, then your confidence would be in God right? If you are a salesman, singer or athlete; your confidence is in your ability to sell, sing, or compete. What I’m trying to make you understand is that before you go looking to gain confidence, make sure that the foundation that it sits on is not a weak one. Look around you and decide how you want to define yourself not how others define you. Once you have a definition and begin to understand who you are, your confidence will begin to build itself.

Playing Games with Your Mind

The mind is the most complex and advanced computer the world has ever seen. It was created to do much more than just hold memories. I read recently that the biggest computers have a capacity of about 10,000,000,000,000 bytes.The brain has an unbelievable capacity of 10 followed by 8,432 noughts (zeros). You’ve probably heard that humans use only 10% of our brain. Well that has not been proven completely true. It’s more that we do not use all of our brain potential the same way we do not use all of our muscle potential. The percentage is not totally clear yet.Needless to say the mind is an incredible machine capable of doing a tremendous amount of work. But just like any computer it has to be programmed. You can’t expect your brain to allow you to do something that it was not programmed to do the same way you wouldn’t be able to burn a CD without having a CD burning program installed. Make sense? There are a number of things that you can do to program your mind to help build confidence, real confidence, in anything. Here are a few.

-Identify insecurities

-Affirmations *

-Create an image of how confident you want to be*

-Remind yourself of past victories

-Associate past success and apply them into the future*

-Observe and learn from other confident people.

-If all else fails, fake it ‘til you make it.

*These are so important that I will create a whole section on each in the near future.

What Confident People Do

Being confident is nothing more than being sure. Being sure of the foundation that your confidence is on and also being sure of yourself and your ability. It is true that the more you try to succeed the more obstacles you encounter. The thing is many of those obstacles are people. This is the reason that being sure of yourself and your ability is so important. You have to know and believe in the foundation that you set because as you gain confidence, and that confidence is applied into the different parts of your life, there are going to be things and people that you will come across that will attempt to shake you off that foundation. That is where confident people don’t care what others think. Let’s say you have a skill and you want to apply that skill and turn it into a career or use it to reach an accomplishment. As soon as you start to gain progress you will undoubtedly hear someone say something that will deter you. There is a great difference between someone offering you advice and someone trying to limit your success. It may be because that person is jealous of your accomplishment or not thinking of your best interest. A person may even have your best interest in mind but offers advice that is wrong. If you’re confident you’ll know the difference. I can remember struggling sometimes about a warning from someone on what I should and shouldn’t do. Ultimately the decision is mine and I have to live with it. If you are confident in your decision you’ll have no regrets whatever the outcome may be.

The root of the lack of confidence is a large amount of self-consciousness. Being self-conscious robs you from appearing and being confident. Whenever I tell someone for that I’m a public speaker I usually get a response like “I could never get in front of people and speak.” I would ask why not and they would reply with something like, “I get nervous with all of those people looking at me.” In that instance it is understandable why self-consciousness can exist. But there is no reason to walk around feeling like that all the time. If you are self-conscious then you are focusing on yourself, if you are confident then your focus is on others. Let’s say you are a horrible dancer. I mean so bad that people can’t figure out if you are dancing or in pain. And let’s say you know you’re a bad dancer. Well even if you are in a room with about 200 people you are going to think that everyone is staring at you when there may be another 50 people who are worse than you that are also dancing. But your self-consciousness will make you believe that all eyes are on you and that’s not going to make you a better dancer is it? Now let’s say that you are a great dancer. When you dance you will probably be focusing on the person you are dancing with not yourself. Why? Because if you have confidence in your dancing it will come naturally and that’s the way confidence should be applied in sports, school, social life, and your career. I think you get it.

Visit back for part two of Build Confidence in Anything. . Home