How To Look More Confident - The Physiology of Confidence
Imagine a truly confident person standing with their hands on their hips, their head tilted up, strong voice, calm disposition, steady gaze, feet apart, relaxed yet powerful. these are the important physical changes hat you should make:
- Develop a powerful posture
- Use a strong clear voice
- Allow yourself to smile and laugh openly
- When you move do so positively and boldly. Do not skulk of walk with hunched shoulders.
- Remain calm and relaxed inside. Use the techniques outlined in the relxation pages to help you to remain stress free and to keep your heart rate steady.
You can copy the way that a confident person standa and moves. As the old adage goes: “fake it until you make it.” It may feel uncomfortable at first but like anything you will get used to it. After all you have an accent to the way you speak solely because of where you grew up and how people spoke at home. Human beings are very versatile creatures. You can change anything that you want.
- Do more physical exercise
- Develop your confident posture
- Work on your voice - take speach, elocution or acting classes if necessary.
What Happens In Your Mind To Improve Your Confidence - The Psychology
There are two main ways that you experience ‘thinking’.
- internal dialogue
- internal visualisations
How do you imagine a truly confident person experiences their thoughts? It appears that confident people hear a strong and powerful internal voice and the images they make are often very controlled by themselves. They see themselves planning the future, drawing good observations from past experiences and not dwelling on negative events. They do not let their thoughts wander but are focused on the task in hand or the good things that could happen in the future.
A way of thinking is just a habit and can be learnt
- Whenever you find yourself recalling bad past memories or unpleasant thoughts then stop yourself and make yourself think about something more uplifting.
- Consciously think about a specific task. Write it down in front of you if necessary and stay focused on it. If you find your thoughts wandering too far, then remind yourself what you should be thinking about. This is why making a list of things to do is so useful, as it trains your mind on specific tasks that you can get done one by one before moving onto the next. Lists are a great aid to organised thinking for people who are not naturally that way.
- When you imagine something try it and visualise it is something larger and more colourful than reality
- Try to make your internal voice sound like somebody very positive and that lifting may be your own voice or it may be that voice is somebody you know even a famous person. I often use Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice as it is so distinctive and powerful.
- Keep practising this every day. Habits are built through constant repetition.
Changing Your Emotional State - Changing How You Interpret Life's Events
The exact same thing can happen to two people and they can react completely differently because it is not what happens to us that matters but how we allow what happens to make us feel. You can learn to increase the control over how you feel and can choose to interpret many events positively rather than negatively.
You don’t have to react badly to other people’s unpleasant behaviour and hurtful comments. All you are doing is generating bad feeling within yourself while they remain unbothered. There is an old Zen story about a man who travels all across India for many months, just so that he can insult the Buddha where he is sitting at the top of a mountain. When he arrives and begins to insult him, Buddha turns to the man and says “Can I ask you one question. If somebody brings you a gift and you do not want it and refuse it, to whom does the gift belong”. The man thought for a moment and said “ I guess it would still belong to the person that brought it.” And the Buddha says to the man “then, I do not accept your insults.”
Even when something truly unfortunate happens then you can look upon it as a learning opportunity in life.
How To Be More Confident - The Ring of Confidence Technique
This technique builds on the idea that you can draw on your good past experiences to change your current state of mind.
The interesting development in recent years has been the increased understanding that we can deliberately change our mood or state of mind by calling upon the right memories or using our imagination to create empowering fantasies, something that actors have been doing for centuries.
You are going to create a physical space and give that space a special association so that every time you go there, your state of mind will change. The more you build up that expectation and the ability to recall positive memories or create powerful fantasies, then the more powerful it becomes.
- Choose a particular place, probably at home where it is convenient, but it could be a beautiful spot outside somewhere.
- Remember a time when you felt very happy, confident and optimistic for the future. If memories don’t come too easily then use a movie that you know well or just fantasize about it. You are going to create a happy positive, confident mood from your own thoughts.
- Really involve yourself in the experience, make the ideas stronger. If you visualize things, then see them brighter or more vivid. If you are more a feeling person then allow those feelings to grow and spread through you. Some people can hear things more easily and can recall a voice or the sound of a place so make it louder, give it a rich tone.
- As you notice the emotion growing, and it does take some practice, you can begin to imagine that there is a circle around you coming out of the ground and spreading upwards into a cylinder. This cylinder is all around you, perhaps it is glowing with light, perhaps it has a color, or a powerful sound like a hum, maybe just a powerful feeling all around you, flowing upwards from the ground.
- As the circle around you becomes stronger, you can allow your feelings to become stronger.
- Now move backwards out of the circle, and imagine all that energy there in front of you, still flowing up from the ground. All that confidence and expectation is still there flowing up from that circle.
- Now imagine a time in the future when you will need that confidence and strength. Imagine (see, hear or feel) what it will be like just before you need that confidence and strength. There may be some physical cue like a door you have to go through, or someone announcing your name, or you picking up the phone.
- As soon as you have that moment, then move forward into the circle and feel all those powerful confident, happy feelings return, stronger than ever. As you do so imagine that future event happening now, all the way through from start to finish, as fast as you like and all the time aware of those powerful feelings. Imagine everything happening successfully, just the way you want it to happen.
- Now step back out of the circle and notice that when you think of that future event those feelings remain with you.
You often see this same technique used by public speakers when they are standing and addressing the auditorium. They will select various spots on the floor that they will link to specific subject material, a particular emotional state either in themselves or in the audience or a particular type of communication. For example, they may use one spot on the floor to open themselves up to questions, another spot to emphasise very important points and perhaps another every time that they tell an anecdote.
Hypnosis CDs To Build Confidence
