Confidence breeds successful people, it creates an umbrella of security in knowing that whatever challenges you face in life, you have the drive and the confidence to overcome it.

 

People are drawn to a self-confident person like they are drawn to other positive mindset characteristics such as optimism, energy, decisiveness, leadership...

 

When you have the quality of confidence, others can sense it in your body language, in your manner, in your self-assuredness, and they will be attracted to you, either to work and collaborate, or to shelter under your umbrella.

 

In this article I won't waste your time with ten empty calorie little confidence tips, you can get those with any internet search. Instead, I will give you the roadmap to confidence itself, with the only three steps you will ever need to know, in order to build your confidence day by day.

 

British scientists were recently able to reconstruct the body of a man that lived ten thousand years ago. They promptly called him Cheddar man - after the place where his bones were discovered. Through DNA mapping, they could determine his, and his ancestor’s origins. Even his skin colour.

 

Did Cheddar man ever in his life imagine himself getting reconstructed ten thousand years in the future? Probably not, he would have been too preoccupied with the immediacy of survival and comfort. He probably wouldn't have been concerned about a little embarrassment.

 

If generations ten thousand years from now dig up your body, and read your DNA like a book of your life, what will it tell them? You still have the power to decide...

 

My point is, all beliefs about yourself aside, if this is our one shot at life on earth, why are any of us wasting time handcuffing ourselves to limiting self-beliefs, and hiding our personality from others opinions?

 

While our memory, or mind, may not be a lump of clay with grooves in it as Socrates once believed, it IS made up of neural pathways - created by the beliefs we have formed from our past experiences.

 

When we have a bad experience, such as being humiliated in a social setting, it causes a memory to form with extra layers of negative emotion, so it stands out in our memory as a warning – just like if you burnt yourself on an iron, you would instinctively make avoidance behaviours around irons in the future.

 

Now the brain has a learning point, and a learned strategy for dealing with all future similar situations - for the rest of your life.

 

 

Imagine you had an accident on stage during a school play, and the whole school laughed. Twenty, thirty years later, your brain is still using that childhood experience to create avoidance behaviours in important adult situations.

 

Like a well-trodden path through a forest, it is the neural pathways your brain repeatedly uses to access memories like these, that makes them more and more deeply defined with each use.

 

What is most important to accept is that all those default behaviours, these 'lack of confidence' labels people give you such as quiet, shy, weak, a pushover, boring etc. all originate with those events and learning points that took place in the past.

 

Your brain created a strategy to protect you at the time when you were a child, but your brain is still using that strategy in the adult world which will no longer be appropriate, and even detrimental to your progression in life.

 

What you can start doing for yourself today, is challenging the advice echoed in your negative self-talk, the feelings, and the impulse messages your mind and body are sending to you in times where it would be to your advantage to speak up, or grasp an opportunity, rather than decline it.

 

Over-ride those impulses, speak up, and to hell with the imagined consequences. Start small and condition yourself to going against the grain of your fear thoughts. This will be expanded in step two.

 

When I was still a school boy, one of my friends was extremely clever with numbers. He was the best in our year with numbers, and perhaps the whole school, but he was shy and meek in character.

 

We eventually lost touch before making contact again more than twenty years later. He was now living a single life, and working in a bank, as we both had always assumed he would. However, he was not the bank manager, nor was he working a position that anywhere near befitted his numerical intelligence.

 

This likely came down to him standing back, while more outgoing characters took the prize roles and promotions. He was in the right environment, but he had let life dictate his standing within it. He was and is, living at effect, where his life is effected by, and shaped by what is or isn't given to him.

 

If he had lived at cause, he would have taken more responsibility for his life, pro-actively stood up for himself, put himself forward for roles and promotions, made more effort to be noticed, and caused good fortune to happen by his own deliberate actions.

 

The message here is that you simply have to embrace all the little daily opportunities to grow in confidence, and condition yourself to being a little bit more visible in every scenario. These can be the little things such: as:

 

 

 

Maybe we are wrong about Cheddar man, and perhaps he did think about the future. Not ten thousand years into the future, but to the next day, the next week or month.

 

Before we learned to harvest wheat, man hunted for his food, so Cheddar man would have hoped for continued good health and a good or prominent standing within his group or community - if he was part of one...

 

Imagining a better future for ourselves is a form of future pacing. Creating a vision board is another method. If you have heard of these things, but dismissed them, let's get clear on what future pacing is, and WHY you will definitely want to do it...

 

First of all, future pacing is the concept of visualising your future self, the way you want to be today. If you are a shy person today, but you want to become a much more confident and outgoing person, then you imagine your future self acting confidently.

 

That may sound nice, but it's just an exercise of the imagination and won't change anything in reality right? Well that depends on how well you do it, and with how much conviction.

 

The answer all comes down to your brain. Your conscious mind, otherwise called the neo-cortex, is fully capable of lying, and does so on a regular basis. The subconscious however, is vastly more powerful than the conscious mind, but it doesn't have the ability to make judgments.

 

The subconscious is the home of your beliefs. It carries out instructions, and runs programs like a computer. New programs can be created, and old programs can be changed, not only through the persuasion of others, but by your own persuasion.

 

That's why future pacing is a great strategy if done correctly, because you can literally persuade your own mind that you are more confident than you currently are. To be successful at this, you first need to believe that future pacing can work.

 

If you can accept that you can change your own mind, now you need to create a very specific vision of who you want to become. Within that vision of your future self - see, hear, and feel yourself acting, dressing, behaving confidently.

 

If you want to be more confident, then the best way to begin this strategy is by closely studying someone else who is confident. Maybe this will be a friend, or videos of a confident person on youtube. Now you instill that vision of your future self with all those confidence qualities you observed, and you step into that vision.

 

Be the vision, embrace it, and experience it with all your senses. It will take time to persuade your subconscious that the visions you are showing it, are based on reality, and not just some fantasy that you yourself don't believe in.

 

Persist, and the seeds of change you are planting in your mind will grow and blossom. If your inner voice tries to talk you out of a confidence building action, challenge it and explain that it's just 10% more than before.

 

 

These three confidence steps represent the past, the present, and the future...

 

The Past step one is where your inner critic advisor is pulling its child like, fear-driven, advice from. It fears the unknown, and will at all times be urgently coaching you out of taking a risk, and putting yourself out there.

 

Be resolute with this step. Question and challenge the relevance of every fear thought, every delaying tactic, then build on it with step two.

 

The Present step two is about moving the dial of your life further away from living at effect, and more towards cause. Little actions taken, in spite of your negative self-talk, will condition you gradually toward a positive new normal.

 

Be committed with this step. When your inner voice is saying no, placate it and tell it that it's just 10% more than before.

 

The Future step three is a counter to the past step one. This step replaces shyness avoidance behaviours with a vision of confidence, and confident body language. Negative self talk with positive self talk.

 

By bringing all your senses into creating a confident vision of who you desire to be, who you fully intend to become, perhaps one year from now, you are coaching yourself more and more to a life of cause.

 

Be specific with this step. See, hear, and feel everything you will be able to do, see, and feel once you are that confident person - and put a specific date on when you will arrive.