How to Be Confident
How to Be Confident
A lack of confidence will get in the way of every aspect of your life. You’ll have trouble finding work, keeping work, getting raises, and getting respect from co-workers. You will have great difficulty flirting and talking to members of the opposite sex, and you’ll have even more trouble keeping them around. People who lack confidence often have mental health issues like anxiety and depression. Lacking confidence is bad new all around.
Luckily, learning to be confident is really a matter of convincing yourself that you’re confident. Like most things in life, confidence is a commodity that can be faked until it is achieved.
Affirmations
That little monologue that runs in your head all day? That’s you talking to yourself. Without getting deep into the psychiatric mumbo-jumbo, the things you say to yourself determine your state of mind. Your state of mind then determines the way you behave, how you respond to stressors, etc. Without being glib it is safe to say that your internal monologue has more control over you than any other force in the world.
If you want to gain confidence, start practicing some confident daily affirmations. Come up with a sentence that is easy to remember and repeat and say it several times a day. Wake up and tell yourself “I will act with confidence today”, then say it to yourself in the mirror, in the shower, in your head on your commute, etc. You’ll be amazed what a little bit of positive thought can do for you. The key to making these affirmations work is to say them regularly and repeat them the same way every time.
Think of it like tricking your brain to work for you.
Act As If
On my first sales job I was told that same aphorism that many salesman hear — that I should “act as if”. Act as if I just earned a huge commission, act as is I was the hottest guy in the room, act as if I could sell porn to a preacher. The idea is that eventually you’ll “act as if” so much that you’ll actually become what you want.
This is a different kind of affirmation really — one that takes place in the body rather than in the mind. If you go about your day acting like a person with confidence, you’ll find those confident behaviors and attitudes start to work for you in a way you never imagined they could.
Last-ditch
If you don’t find either of these tactics working for you, there are some desperate moves you can make at the last minute to force confidence.
Try surrounding yourself with people who are either way less confident and attractive than you are or people who are way out of your league. The former works because you’ll look confident by associating with lame people . . . this is a cruel and very junior high dance kind of tactic, but it may work short term. The second part works because people who reek of confidence can’t help but share some of their mojo with you when you hang out with them.
Having confidence is the difference between landing the job you always wanted and continuing to slave away selling sunglasses at the mall. The good news is you don’t have to become a confident person over time — you can amp up your confidence in a matter of days by using the above tactics.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.