The Confidence Guy

How do you stand up? How do you walk down the street? How do you make toast? Chances are the answers to those questions are pretty straightforward (unless you’re an A-List celeb in which case you’ll have people to do those things for you).

You stand up by using the muscles in your legs, using your abdominal muscles to stabilise you and sometimes using something solid nearby to lean against or use as a surface for leverage.

You make toast by putting bread in the toaster and pushing the handle down. Sometimes you even stand up and make toast at the same time (not for the faint-hearted).

There are things that you do all the time - everything you do, feel and think - that either work for you or don’t work for you. If I look at what I did, felt and thought back in 2001 to end up being made redundant and suffering from stress and depression I can see that I ignored the quiet little voice inside me that was telling me exactly what I needed to know, carried on acting like I was perfectly happy, drank as much alcohol as I could and switched into auto-pilot so that I didn’t have to think or feel.

If I look at what I do to make myself such a good dancer, I can see that I have natural rhythm and let my body take over. Just kidding on that last one. I dance like Ernest Borgnine.

If there are situations where you suffer from low confidence - job interviews, first date, networking, etc - knowing how that feeling of low confidence comes about can open up a whole world of possibility. So the question is, how do you do you low confidence?

Here’s something to try -

1. Imagine that you’re handing over to someone else for a day, someone who will step into your life and do everything in exactly the same way you do it, even down to how you think and feel. To let them experience things in the way you experience them you need to write down a step-by-step instruction manual for how you experience low confidence in that specific situation.
   
   Think about what happens to start you feeling ‘less-than’ or doubting yourself? What happens in your head? What do you tell yourself? What sensations do you feel in your body? What’s the next thing that you tell yourself, and the next thing you feel physically? Keep going, and write down every step you can think of that would allow someone to pick up the instruction manual and do exactly what you do.
2. That’s your personalised instruction manual for how you “do” low confidence, and you might already have written down something that’s surprised you or has you kicking yourself. What jumps out at you from your instruction manual?

3. Now try turning it round and creating an instruction manual for having bundles of confidence. For each step of your manual, write down the opposite action. If you’ve written -

   1. I tell myself that I really can’t do it.
   2. I tense up my shoulders and neck.

   then turn it into

   1. I’ve done bigger things than this, so I know that I’m perfectly capable of doing it.
   2. I consciously take a moment to relax my shoulders and take a deep breath.

When you know how you experience low confidence in a particular situation you no longer have to play it out in the same way. Just by knowing how, your instruction manual has already started to be re-written.

The benefits are there if you’re willing to open up and figure out what your instruction manual’s doing. This is all about giving you a choice to do things differently, and this kind of choice needs radical self-honesty and full disclosure.