You’re a Genius
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid” - Albert Einstein
Image by mansionwb via Flickr
If you had to write out a list of the most confident people you know, how long would your list be? If you lack confidence, you probably believe that everyone you know is more confident than you. Chances are, you also believe that they are all just naturally confident and that they never doubt themselves. But, is that really the case?
Einstein also once said, “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” You don’t have to believe yourself to be a genius to be confident and being confident is not about believing yourself to be incapable of making a mistake either. The confident people you know probably do appear to get things right more often than not but that doesn’t mean they’re never wrong. Confident people are not confident because they’re always right, they’re confident because they’re not afraid of being wrong – they accept that being wrong is a possibility but they choose to go ahead anyway and that’s a very important difference.
When you have confidence, you have a positive outlook on life and you expect things to work out. However, even with a positive approach, you can’t guarantee that things will always work out the way you expected! But, because of your positive outlook, you are always able to find the positives in any outcome; you’re able to learn from your experiences and take what you learn forwards with you. Of course, it’s important to remember that lessons can be learned from success as well as failure and it’s remaining open to learning that allows your confidence to grow.
The more you learn and know about yourself, the more confidence you can have in yourself and your abilities. The more confidence you have, the more willing you are to embrace new challenges, allowing you to discover even more about yourself and what you’re capable of achieving. Confident people don’t believe themselves to be capable of everything, they know their limitations but they’re not born with that knowledge, they learn by challenging themselves. And that, unfortunately, creates a snag! If you lack confidence, you will be unwilling to take on any kind of challenge, you will prefer to play it safe. This means that what you believe to be your limitations are not based on any real experience, they exist only in your head. Of course, you believe them to be real, therefore you’re unable to grow beyond them. You are held back by perceived limitations.
Nobody is born confident. You too can be as confident as the people on your list if you challenge yourself to take on the challenge of challenging your beliefs. Too challenging? Only if you’re a fish trying to climb a tree!
© Copyright Don MacNauhgton 20011, All Rights Reserved
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Related articles
- Growing Confidence From Doubt (sportspsychology2.com)
- How Confident Are You? (donmacnaughton.org)
- Confidence and The Enemy Within (donmacnaughton.org)
Copyright © 2009-2010. Don MacNaughton. All Rights Reserved. No reproduction without written permission.
Confidence: How Do You Stack Up?
.
“It took a long time not to judge
myself through someone else’s eyes”
- Sally Field
Confident people share a number of common traits. Take a look at the list below and see how you stack up.
Confident people…
…accept that mistakes are just a part of life; they learn and they move on.
…know that you can’t please all of the people all of the time, so they please themselves.
…always maintain a positive outlook.
…have a ‘can do’ attitude.
…are comfortable in their own skin.
If you’re a confident person, you’ll recognise those traits in yourself but if you lack confidence in yourself, you will believe that none of them apply to you. Ironically, seeing how you ‘stack up’ in comparison to other people is something you will be in the habit of doing and you will always find yourself to be inferior or lacking in some way.
People who lack confidence also share a number of common traits.
People who lack confidence…
…work hard to cover up mistakes, in the hope of fixing them before they’re found out.
…continually look for the approval of others and are overly concerned by what others think of them.
…have a negative outlook and tend to fear the worst.
…focus on what they can’t do, never on what they can do.
…often have a low opinion of themselves and their abilities.
If you’re someone who lacks confidence, you’ll recognise those traits but you won’t necessarily recognise them in yourself, that’s the most ironic thing about a lack of self-confidence. You’re so busy comparing yourself to others and finding fault with yourself that you no longer know who you actually are. You know who you’re not and you know how poorly you believe yourself to stack up against others but you’re unable to see yourself from anything other than a totally negative viewpoint.
When you lack self-confidence, it’s easy to slip into believing that the confident people you see around you were born with that confidence and you just weren’t! This means that before you can begin the process of building your confidence, you must believe that change is possible. When you understand that confidence is not just something you’re born with, you understand that self-confidence is something that can be grown and developed and that you can make positive changes to the level of confidence you have at any point in your life.
The fundamental change that you must make to grow into a more confident person is to change the way you think. Clearly, this is not a change that can be given a ‘quick fix’ treatment, it’s a change that is going to take time and dedicated effort. Of course, effort requires motivation and when you’re feeling down on yourself it’s difficult to motivate yourself to do anything, let alone make changes! However,achievement through action is a powerful motivator and small achievements can lead to big changes in the way you think about yourself. The way forward is to set yourself some goals. Your ultimate goal is to become a confident person but make it more specific and relevant to your life. What would being more confident allow you to do that you believe you can’t do now?
Once you know where you’re going, you can begin to take action to get there. Your focus must change from what you believe you can’t do, to what you can do. What small step could you take today to begin your journey towards self-confidence? Every positive step you take, no matter how small, becomes an achievement, and each one boosts your motivation to take the next step. Each small achievement represents something that you can do, so step-by-step you begin to see yourself and your life from a much more positive viewpoint. How you stack up compared to others will no longer concern you; you know who you are and you know how you stack up on your journey towards becoming your best self.
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Self-Confidence – Say It, Do It, Believe It
“Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence
like accomplishment”
- Thomas Caryle
Self-confidence is feeling confident in yourself. This may seem like an obvious statement but think about it for a moment. Have you ever met someone with a very confident outward appearance but, as you get to know them better, you discover their level of inner confidence doesn’t match their outward appearance? Self-confidence has nothing to do with how confident you look, it’s all about how confident you feel.
Self-confidence and self-esteem are inextricably linked and influence how likely you are to be successful in life. Self-confidence is knowing that you have the capacity and the ability to succeed. Self-confidence allows you to believe in yourself but it’s self-esteem that allows you to like yourself and to value yourself, irrespective of whether or not you achieve success. It’s having a healthy level of self-esteem that allows you to like yourself for just being who you are and to have the confidence to just be yourself. True self-confidence comes from knowing who you are, believing in who you are, being comfortable with who you are and also liking who you are, not just from knowing what you’re capable of doing.
If you lack confidence, you probably beat yourself up about it. You already feel bad about yourself but you continue to give yourself a hard time over it, figure that out! Well, it’s all just part and parcel of low self-esteem. If you’re struggling to like yourself, you’re always going to find it easier to pick fault than to give praise, so treating yourself badly is just something you’re going to do. In fact, you’re so down on yourself that even if you do succeed in something, you’ll struggle to accept any kind of personal responsibility for that success, you’ll put it down to luck or to the efforts of someone else.
An important element of building self-confidence and self-esteem is learning to think positively and optimistically. Clearly, without developing a positive view of yourself and your abilities, moving forwards becomes impossible, but if your confidence is low, having someone tell you how great you are is not going to be enough on its own to generate a change in your thinking. They can tell you how fantastic you are until they’re blue in the face but you’re not going to let go of your long held belief that you’re not at all fantastic on the strength of what someone else says, are you? The same can be said of using positive affirmations to tell yourself how great you are. There’s no magic ‘positive thinking stick’ that can be used to beat out your negative thoughts, only you can change the way you think. It’s not what you hear or say that matters, it’s what you choose to believe and what you choose to ignore.
However, positive self-talk can become very effective when backed up by positive ‘proof’ that you can believe in the words you are saying. That positive proof comes in the form of taking positive action by setting yourself some manageable goals. If you tell yourself, “I can do this” and then you actually do it, your negative thoughts get well and truly beaten back. With each positive achievement, your confidence and your belief in yourself grows and you begin to make positive changes in the way you think. You gradually begin to trust in yourself and have faith in your abilities and you become confident in who you are. You develop self-confidence.
To Learn more about how to think effectively check out Zoned In Performance’s latest NLP Diploma http://www.donmacnaughton.org/services/nlp-training/nlp-fd/
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Related articles
- Inner Confidence (zonedinperformance.com)
- Where’s Your Head At? (donmacnaughton.org)
- Be a Confident Team Player (sportspsychology2.com)
Copyright © 2009-2010. Don MacNaughton. All Rights Reserved. No reproduction without written permission.
Barbra Streisand, Confidence Lost and Found!
“If you doubt yourself,
then indeed you stand
on shaky ground”
- Henrik Ibson
Performing on stage in front of a crowd of 135 000 fans, Barbra Streisand forgot the words to one of her songs. The result? She didn’t perform on stage again for another 27 years. She says, “I forgot the words and it sorted of triggered this feeling that I would forget the words…I didn’t perform again until they discovered teleprompters.”
In one theory put forward by sociobiologist Edward O Wilson, stage fright is basically a fear of being eaten! In nature, being singled out and closely scrutinised is historically a prelude to being eaten by a predator so our human ancestors developed a strong fear response to being separated from the protection of the group. Wilson’s theory is that stage fright is an example of that response. Shara Sand, clinical assistant professor of psychology at the Yeshiva University in New York explains it this way; “What primitively is going on is that there’s a kind of exposure and vulnerability, and even though there isn’t any real danger, it can feel like there is.”
Stage fright is just one example of the potentially debilitating effects of a loss of confidence. The key point is that there isn’t any real danger but the sufferer experiences a sense of fear that feels very real to them. It seems incredible that someone who has performed on stage countless times could suddenly, as a result of just one isolated incident, find themselves stripped of all confidence and afraid to do what they already know they’re capable of doing. However, Streisand is not alone. A great many famous performers admit to having experienced stage fright at some point in their career and in everyday life, a great many ordinary people find their lives turned upside down when, for no apparent reason, their confidence in themselves appears to vanish into thin air.
John drove articulated lorries all over the UK for 12 years and then one day found himself feeling so panic stricken at just the thought of going to work and climbing into the cab that he had to phone in sick. To him, it felt like he’d lost all confidence in his driving ability overnight. Linda worked as a horse-riding instructor for over 20 years and then one day discovered she was experiencing a fear of horses! Again, to her, it felt like her confidence had vanished overnight but is that really what happened?
Self-confidence is the trust or faith you have in yourself and your abilities but having confidence doesn’t mean that you never have doubts. With self-confidence, you have a positive view of yourself and of what you’re capable of doing but it’s also a realistic view. Confidence allows you to take on realistic challenges but it also allows you to have the courage to admit your limitations. When you lose confidence, your view of yourself and your abilities becomes a negative one. What you once saw as an acceptable challenge, you now see as completely beyond your abilities – you see only your limitations. Your doubts take on such unrealistic proportions that they effectively crush your confidence. But here’s the thing, your abilities haven’t actually changed, only your belief of what you’re capable of has changed.
The good news is that confidence lost can become confidence found – confidence can be regained. Streisand faced her fear, albeit 27 years after the event, but she faced it by identifying what her fear really was. She realised that she wasn’t simply afraid of forgetting her words – or of being eaten – she was afraid of letting her fans down. Facing it meant accepting that the response of her fans was in fact out with her control and she overcame it by changing her thinking. To regain his driving confidence, John had to question why he was doubting his driving ability. He had to identify the cause of his self-doubt and the ‘reason’ for his negative view of himself and his abilities. To regain her confidence around horses, Linda had to question why she was feeling fearful and identify what it was she was really fearing. You have to know what it is you’re afraid of before you can take positive steps to face it and once you know, you can begin to look for ways to overcome it.
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Where’s Your Head At?
“Nobody Can Make You Feel Inferior Without Your Consent”
- Eleanor Roosevelt
In the dictionary, confidence is defined as “the belief that one can have faith in or rely on someone or something, or a feeling of self-assurance arising from an appreciation of one’s abilities.” I’d like to suggest an alternative definition, and that is that confidence is a state of mind, your mind.
If you have self-confidence, you believe in yourself; the someone or something you can put your faith into and rely on is you. Your inner confidence comes from self-belief and that self-belief comes from being sure of who you are and from knowing your own mind.
Confident people are able to inspire confidence in others. A confident team leader, for example, can inspire confidence in a business team to meet an ambitious target or deadline: a confident sports coach can inspire confidence in his players, and a confident school teacher can inspire confidence in her pupils. However, confident people are also able to influence the thoughts and actions of other people and the power of influence is not always a positive thing.
How many times have you heard stories of famous, successful people having been told by a school teacher that they would amount to nothing in life? Clearly, the individuals concerned already had enough confidence in themselves not to be influenced by such negativity but how many other, less confident individuals took on board what they were being repeatedly told and accepted ‘amounting to nothing’ as their fate?
If you lack self-confidence, it’s quite possible that your everyday thoughts and actions continue to be influenced by a negative voice but it’s not an external voice, it’s the voice inside your head. Your thoughts and actions are being influenced by your own negative self-talk. You tell yourself that you’re never going to amount to anything! The more you hear those words, the more you believe them. The more you believe them, the more confident your negative voice becomes and the more power it has to influence everything you think, say, and do. When you lack self-confidence, any tiny positive thought that creeps into your mind is instantly obliterated by the sheer power of your well practiced negative self-talk but it’s never too late to begin fighting back.
Negative self-talk has power but positive self-talk has the potential to become even more powerful – you just have to learn how to use it. If the negative voice inside your head is saying, “You can’t do it. Don’t even try it, you’ll fail,” it’s time to let the positive voice inside your head have its say and it’s time to turn up the volume. Tell yourself, “You can do it. You have no reason not to try, you can succeed.” Just as before, the more you hear those words, the more you believe them, and the more you believe them, the more confident your positive voice becomes and the more power it has to influence everything you think, say, and do. Your thoughts about yourself and your life become your reality.
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Confidence and The Enemy Within
"It’s hard to fight an enemy who
has outposts in your head”
- Sally Kempton
The more self-confidence you have, the more likely you are to succeed in life. So, if you lack self-confidence, does that mean that failure is inevitable? Only you can answer that question. The bottom line is that if you believe that your lack of self-confidence makes your failure inevitable, you will inevitably fail.
Henry Ford once said, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” Think about that for a moment. Only you can decide the outcome of your life. The way you think affects every single aspect of your life. If you think you’re a failure, guess what? You are a failure – even when everyone around you tells you you’re a success. For example, a beautiful young woman can look in the mirror and see an ugly face looking back at her. Everyone tells her she’s beautiful but she tells herself she’s ugly – therefore she believes she is ugly.
A talented athlete can be preparing for a major event. His coach tells him he’s ready, his results in training are telling him he’s ready but he tells himself he’s not ready – therefore he believes he’s not ready.
In both cases, their beliefs are based on nothing real, in fact their thoughts are totally irrational, but because it’s what they believe to be real, it becomes their reality.
The negative voice inside the young woman’s head is the enemy within – she is effectively her own worst enemy. For as long as she chooses to listen to and believe what that negative voice is telling her, she is choosing to let negativity cloud her vision and her world. The same applies to the athlete. He is choosing to let the negative voice of self-doubt railroad his confidence into oblivion. What you think you are, you are. What you think you can or can’t do, you’re right!
However, going around shouting your mouth off about how great you think you are, doesn’t mean that you are great. You only need to watch an episode of ‘The Apprentice’ on TV to see ‘confidence’ personified but having the self-confidence to talk the talk does not in itself guarantee you success. Real confidence comes from within; it comes from knowing that you can also walk the walk. If you never doubt yourself, you’re not self-confident, you’re simply arrogant! Of course, being ‘quietly confident’ wouldn’t make great TV!
Genuine self-confidence comes from knowing who you are and knowing what you’re capable of achieving. That knowledge comes from challenging yourself and successfully meeting those challenges. If you lack self-confidence, your biggest challenge is to silence the negative voice of the enemy within. So, how do you fight an enemy with outposts in your head? The first step is to recognise that self-doubt is not something you have to accept. The negative voice in your head does not have all the answers – put it to the test.
Challenge your negative inner voice by developing a positive inner voice to question everything that is being said. Let’s say you’re the talented athlete. Your inner negative voice is saying, “You’re not ready.”
You don’t have to blindly accept that statement as fact, choose to challenge it instead. Ask why; what real reasons are there to believe that you’re not ready? Chances are, your negative voice will come up with a few ‘reasons’ but you are now in a much stronger position to challenge how real any of those reasons actually are. Don’t settle for thinking you’re not ready, take action. Question your thoughts and identify what it is you need to do to be able to believe that you are ready – then take steps to go and do it.
With every challenge you successfully meet, your confidence grows and your growing confidence keeps you battle ready for the next time your enemy within decides to pick a fight!
To Learn more about how to think effectively check out Zoned In Performance’s latest NLP Diploma http://www.donmacnaughton.org/services/nlp-training/nlp-fd/
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Related articles
- Self-Confidence – Say It, Do It, Believe It (donmacnaughton.org)
- Your Little Confidence Trickster (donmacnaughton.org)
- Confidence and Who’s Conning Who? (sportspsychology2.com)
Copyright © 2009-2010. Don MacNaughton. All Rights Reserved. No reproduction without written permission.
How Confident Are You?
How Would You Describe A Confident Person?
Someone who knows where they’re going in life; someone who knows their own mind; someone who is not afraid to go against the grain and stand up for what they believe in perhaps? Would you describe yourself as a confident person?
If you have self-confidence, you are comfortable in your own skin: you are someone who sticks with what you believe in and what you believe to be right, even if others try to persuade you otherwise or criticise you for your beliefs. You believe in yourself and you make your own decisions in life.
Does That Sound Like you?
If you lack self-confidence, the decisions you make in life will be influenced by the thoughts and actions of other people: you are someone who is concerned by what other people think of you and, as a consequence, you will change your own thoughts and actions accordingly. You choose to believe in others before yourself. Does that sound like you?
So What is Self-Confidence?
If you have it, where did you get it from and if you don’t have it, where can you get it from? Is self-confidence something you’re born with or is it something you can acquire? Self-confidence can be described as a positive mix of self-efficacy and self-esteem, and the good news is that everyone can acquire it.
Confidence Is A Mental Skill…
No one is born with skill, skills are things that can only be learned and developed through practice. Footballers don’t become skilled players without dedicated practice, musicians don’t become skilled performers without dedicated practice, and skilled cooks don’t become skilled in the kitchen without dedicated practice. Confidence is no exception; it’s a skill that can be learned but to master the skill takes dedicated practice. The first step towards building self-confidence is therefore to accept that it’s a process – and it’s not an overnight one!
The Next step Is To Set Yourself Some Goals In life
If it’s your goal to become more confident, why do you want to be more confident? What would self-confidence bring into your life? With specific goals in place, it then becomes possible to set smaller, achievable yet still challenging, and relevant stepping-stone goals in place to help keep you moving forwards on your journey towards your ultimate goal. Each time a stepping-stone goal is successfully achieved, your confidence receives a boost.
Ever heard the expression ‘success breeds success’? It basically means that achieving success at any level and in any area of life generally leads to achieving further success. Well, exactly the same applies in terms of confidence – confidence breeds confidence. Each boost in confidence you receive leads to the development of further confidence. Confidence grows. So, it’s not so much, “how confident are you?” it’s, “how confident do you want to be?” Go get it!
To Learn more about how to think effectively check out Zoned In Performance’s latest NLP Diploma http://www.donmacnaughton.org/services/nlp-training/nlp-fd/
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Copyright © 2009-2010. Don MacNaughton. All Rights Reserved. No reproduction without written permission.
Confidence vs Self Doubt as George Michael said “You Gotta Have Faith
“Faith and doubt go hand-in-hand, they are complementaries. One who never doubts will never truly believe”
- Hermann Hesse, German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter
Hermann Hesse was a prolific and extremely successful writer, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, so it’s hard to imagine that he ever experienced self-doubt. In fact, self-confidence is recognised as one of the character traits possessed by successful people, yet his belief that ‘faith and doubt go hand-in-hand’ suggests that he did doubt himself.
What we can all learn from Hesse’s story of success is that self-doubt does not need to hold you back in life. If you lack confidence in yourself, you probably put off taking action on your dreams and ambitions in life because you feel you’re not worthy in some way; you’re not ready; you’re not qualified enough; you’re not rich enough; you’re not educated enough; you’re not tall, short, fat, slim, fast, slow, funny, serious, or anything else you care to think of, enough! When you lack self-confidence, your list of ‘reasons’ to doubt yourself can become as long as your arm but by learning how to get doubt to hold hands with faith, you learn how to see a way over, around, or through obstacles. You also learn to recognise that many of the obstacles you believe yourself to be facing are in fact only perceived obstacles.
Everyone faces moments of doubt in life and the key to success is not found in never doubting yourself, it’s found in never allowing doubt to go unquestioned. For example, if you’re putting off making a career change because you’re doubting your qualifications, it’s time to question whether your qualifications, or lack of, really represent an obstacle or whether you perceive that to be the case. If you allow your belief to go unquestioned, you could be allowing an opportunity to pass you by for no real reason.
When you allow doubt and negative thinking to rule your inner world – your mind – you allow that doubt and negativity to rule your outer world – your reality. Until you know for sure what qualifications you need, you’re allowing your doubts and your negative beliefs to hold you back. Knowledge is power, and in this case, if you take positive action to find out what qualifications you need, you instantly take steps to increase your confidence in the process. Armed with the knowledge of what you need, you know what you need to do to succeed, and it’s knowing what you need to do that allows you to move on from negative self-doubt to positive self-confidence and to actually do it.
Hesse experienced self-doubt but he continued to move forwards by continuing to question why he was doubting himself and he found confidence in his answers. If you are experiencing self-doubt, question why. Are any of your reasons to doubt yourself real?
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To Learn more about how to think effectively check out Zoned In Performance’s latest NLP Diploma http://www.donmacnaughton.org/services/nlp-training/nlp-fd/
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