If the start of your year has largely involved picking over the remains of 2010, you’d better stop soon or it’ll be 2012 before you know it.

2010 is done. Over with. Finished. Completely finished over done with.

Short of picking up an old DeLorean and building a flux capacitor out of your Christmas lights and turkey carcass, there’s nothing you can do about it.  Feel free to review the year and look at what you can learn or do differently in 2011, but if you’re keeping those details close to you in the hope that you can understand or fix what didn’t’ go to plan, you couldn’t be heading down a wronger road.

It can be reassuring to keep the detail and drama of the past closeby.  It’s familiar and known.  It reminds you of what a tough year you had and how hard done by you were.

But it’s all false.

It’s just your brain trying to make things right by reinforcing what it knows and establishing itself as “right”, even if it hurts you.  Clutching those things close to you will keep you focused on the things you can’t change, and it ensures you don’t risk making mistakes again (what a clever old brain).

But your 2011 depends on you getting out there and making mistakes.  It needs you to make mistakes.  That’s the confident thing to do.

So ask yourself what you’d love to be saying to yourself on December 31^st 2011 about the year you’ve just had.

Let go of what your clutching close, and open yourself up to what your 2011 could be.

PS: If you haven’t got your free “No-Goal Guide to an Extraordinary 2011” yet, click here for your copy.

The word confidence comes from Latin, as does spumy and nymph.  But let’s not go there.

Confidence is derived from “con fides”, meaning “with faith”.  I give you the language lesson because I only recently found this out, and it chimes perfectly with my understanding of confidence.

With faith.  With.  Faith.

Faith is a belief in something for which there’s no evidence, or a belief in something real that has no real basis – faith in God, faith in hope, faith in mankind for example.  Confidence then, is being with a belief of something for which there’s no evidence.

Now, I’m pretty sure you exist.  It wouldn’t be difficult to amass a wealth of evidence to prove your existence, even if part of that evidence involves bouncing a doughnut off your noggin.  No noggin and that doughnut would sail right through.  (That’s my litmus test for proving things exist, by the way, it even works for litmus paper).

So we can be pretty sure you exist.  But your confidence?  That’s harder to spot.  You can’t bounce a doughnut off it.

My approach to building confidence arms you with a weight of evidence in your own capability and gives you tools to convert that into self-confidence, but even so, there are moments when you have to make a leap of faith – a split second when you either make a choice to step forwards into the unknown, or you don’t.

Even with no evidence to tell you what’s going to happen, you make a decision to take yourself beyond what you know and embrace what you don’t.  You take one step, but it feels like a thousand.  Your only ally in those moments is faith.  Faith in yourself.

No matter how good you are or how confident you are, and no matter what you’ve achieved or proved to yourself –  faith in yourself is the only way to get through those moments that demand a leap of faith.  And taking leaps of faith is the only way to experience the extraordinary.

No faith, no leap. No confidence, no extraordinary.

So the question for you is, do you believe?

Before I was laid off, back in 2001, I was sprinting so fast to stay still that I never saw my breakdown coming.

I was successful in my IT career, travelling the world in First Class and living like a King.  But I was stalled, stuck and stymied and was having to sprint as fast as I could just so I could stay where I was and not fall down.

I never noticed the massive amounts of energy it was taking for me to stay still, and I never opened my eyes to how much I hated what I was doing.  I never had the balls to admit to myself that I was somewhere in life that I didn’t like or recognise, and I ended up paying a hefty price.

I tell you this because I know that fearing the wrong thing will land you in trouble.

You can’t stand still, because nothing in nature does that.  Everything grows and fades, nature is full of beginnings and endings.  Nature is cyclical.  So are you.

Fear of failure is all too common, but it’s the wrong thing to be scared about.  How about the fear that you can go after what you want most in the world, and then not get it?  Okay, that’s closer, but it’s still the wrong thing to be scared about.

You should be scared about not trying to go after what you want most in the world.  You should be scared of not listening to what really matters to you.

Because that’s what will really screw you up.  That’s what will really destroy you if you let yourself be led by those other fears.

3 years ago I started freelancing in addition to my coaching, and I was scared silly.  What will my peers think?  What if I end up back where I was in 2001?  What if I lose my faith and love of coaching?  What if I plain suck at being a Producer?  I was dripping in fear, but what I’d learned is that I couldn’t stay still and I couldn’t start running faster and faster to keep the equilibrium in place.

I made a choice to let go of my comfortable lifestyle because I wanted something more.  This year will also see some changes as I work on things that may well take me in a new direction.  I don’t know what’ll happen or whether things will work out, but that’s exactly why I’m going to find out.  I can’t not explore because I’m scared of getting lost.

Beginnings and endings.

Choose what you’re scared of.  Don’t be scared of failure.  Don’t be scared of beginning something.  Don’t be scared of letting go of something.

Only be scared of not trying and of not listening to what matters.

You scared yet?

There’s a major flaw with this confidence building stuff.

See, the more you go out of your comfort zone, take action and stretch your confidence muscle the more confident you become.  That extra confidence makes it easier for you to keep going out of your comfort zone and take challenging action.

It’s a circular thing, action breeds confidence breeds action.  Or, if you prefer, confidence breeds action breeds confidence.

Once you’re on that circle and aware of what’s happening it’s all good and the circle continues to turn, but how the hell do you break into that circle to begin with?  How the hell do you take action when you’re not feeling confident enough?

The answer to this catch-22 is simple.  You take a leap.

It’s like jumping onto a moving train or leaping onto a spinning carousel – it’s looks bloody difficult and you might fall on your arse, but if you don’t make that jump you’ll never know what experience you could have.

There’s a point in time, sometimes just a split second, where you have to make the choice to jump on.

If making that leap of faith is something you want to do, here are 3 ways to make it easier.

1. Are you both scared and excited?  Fear is pretty much guaranteed, but are you also feeling excited about what might happen?  Some of life’s best moments come with both fear and excitement attached – if both are there you gotta jump on.
2. You’ve fallen on your arse before.  You’ve screwed up and looked silly before, and while it probably wasn’t your best moment you’re still here and are still going strong.  What matters is picking yourself up, not falling down.
3. Remember what matters.  Taking a leap becomes easier if you’re completely aware of what you’re jumping towards.  If what you’re jumping onto means something to you and has a personal relevance, it becomes a no-brainer.

It’s not easy to take action when you’re not feeling confident enough to take action, but that’s no reason not to do it.

So tell me, what do you want to jump onto?

If I had a dime for everyone I’ve worked and talked with who’s scared of being truly confident, I’d have a good number of dimes.  I haven’t been counting; I don’t have the numbers in front of me, and a pile of dimes wouldn’t be much use to me in the UK anyway.  The point is that people are often scared of becoming confident, even to the point of sabotaging themselves.

Here’s why you might be scared too.

1. You’ll Become Someone You’re Not
   You’ve spent a long time being the person you are right now, so the idea of being a different version of you is a freaky thing to process.  What if you don’t like who you turn into?  What if you want to go back to the way you are now?  What if people hate the new you?

   All valid questions, and they all share the same answer.  It doesn’t matter.

   See, becoming truly confident is NOT changing who you are, and there is NO risk that you’ll become someone you’re not.  True confidence isn’t about contorting or twisting your personality into something it’s not, it’s about letting it shine.

   Simply, powerfully, quietly and brilliantly YOU.

2. You’ll Become Arrogant
   What if something goes wrong and you end up being the person who enters the room thinking that everyone owes it to you to listen to you because you’re right, and that you’re just that little bit better than they are because you’ve got this whole confidence thing going on.

   I’m always saying this, but I’ll say it again.  Arrogance is noisy, confidence is quiet.

   Arrogance is all about having people look at you, validate you and respect you based on nothing concrete.  Confidence is not needing people to look at you or validate you, and having respect for yourself because you know what really matters.

   There’s a gap wider than the Grand Canyon between confidence and arrogance.

3. You Might Be Successful
   “Holy crap” you think, “If I’m really that confident then what’s going to stop me going after the things I want?”

   That’s a great question.  Truth is, the fear of success is enough to put most people off.  What’s even more scary and heart-breaking is the fear of being confident and ready to go after what you really want, and then not getting it.

   I’ve seen a lot people try to sabotage their own self-confidence, people who hold back their confidence so they don’t have to face the possibility of success, or the possibility of failure in the face of success.

   The thing is, real confidence is knowing that you can deal with whatever life throws at you and come out the other side having grown.  Real confidence includes being open to risk, opportunity and possibility.  Some new guy on the personal development block recently tweeted this proverb:

   He might have a decent career in this business.

4. Your Relationships Will Change
   You’re scared that if you turn into this fully confident you, that your relationship with your partner will change.  Or your relationship with a best friend.  Or your Mum.  Or your kids.

   You know what, you’re probably right.  Those relationships probably will change.

   Gone will be the roles that you slip into based on what other people expect of you.  Gone will be the need to validate yourself by being a bottomless pit.  Gone will be the need to dance to other peoples’ tunes for fear of rocking the boat or upsetting them.  Gone will be the stuff that you silently put up with.

   In their place are relationships that are based on what really matters to you, based on what you need and what you love to give.  Simpler, more honest, more you.

5. You’ll Need to Let Go
   What about the stuff you’re holding close to yourself?  Those pangs of hurt.  Those secret vendetta’s.  The petty jealousies.  The habits that make you feel good on some level, no matter what the cost.

   True confidence brings with it radical self-honesty, the kind of honesty that many of us find hard to open up to.  That honesty might lead to some tough, important decisions about what you have in your life and how well those things serve you.  It may be that you reach the uneasy decision that you need to let go of some old stuff, stuff that’s been as safe and familiar as a warm blanket.

   That’s okay.  True confidence turns around the belief that letting go of these things will be painful and full of struggle, and replaces it with the quiet knowledge that letting go of the things that no longer serve you well is about freeing yourself up, lightening your load and opening up.

So tell me, what are you scared of?

Last time something scared the crap out of you, how did you react?  I don’t mean meeting a bad man in a dark alley or having your plane lose all power and plummet towards the Himalayas (in those cases you have my permission to go right ahead and crap yourself), but the things that happen or the things you want that threaten to rock you to your very core.

These are the things that might propel you forwards in life and bring about something amazing, or equally might be a huge screw up and leave you feeling like life has cast you in the role of “Biggest Dufus Ever”.

The good news is that there are things you can do to manage how you react in those moments, and there are strategies you can employ for building your confidence before you attempt something that scares the crap out of you. Here are just a handful…

Suck it in, then jump.

This is like the moment before you jump from a bungee platform.  There you are, standing right on the edge, nothing between you and gravity but the decision to step forwards.  The hairs on the back of your neck stand up, your stomach churns, your breath quickens and your mind is a thrashing din yelling “Stop!” at you.

Then what happens?

You pause.  You quiet your mind by focusing on your experience in that very moment in time.  You might decide to focus on how your breath feels in your mouth, your chest or your belly as you breathe it in and let it go.  You might decide to focus on the sensations in your feet on the platform and the tactile pressure on your heel, the sensations in your toes and the feeling of your shoes.  You might decide to open up to the sounds around you, letting each sound find you like a microphone picks up sounds as they happen.

What you need to do is to get out of the chaos of your automatic fear response; to create a gap between event and reaction where you can make a choice that serves you well.

You say to yourself “This is as scary as it gets, but it’s okay.  I’m here, and I’m okay.  I can do this, I really can.  I’ll be just fine, and it’ll be amazing.  Get ready for it, here I go.”

You ready yourself, suck it in and make a choice to go for it, getting that burst of courage that takes you forwards.

Find the right words so that you can feel this burst of courage in your body; you get a physiological response to the fear – a sense of energy, vigour or power that propels you forwards.

Make your parachute ahead of time.

It’s not much use to wait until you’ve jumped out of the plane to start weaving your parachute. Call me crazy, but I’d suggest it’s a better option to weave it ahead of time and have it ready to go before you even get on the damn plane.  I’m nothing if not wise.

So this is about prepping your self-confidence ahead of time so that it’s in decent shape for you to get going.

To do that there’s one thing to understand first: that your confidence works just like a muscle.  The more you use it the bigger it gets, the less you use it the smaller it gets.  If you need to lift boxes all day long then the muscles that help you life those boxes will grow in response to the need.  If you need to climb stairs all day then the muscles that help you do that will grow in response to what’s needed.

Exercising your confidence muscle is how you have your parachute weaved before you jump out of the plane, and this kind of confidence becomes a deliberate choice based on what you know without doubt – “I know I can do this“.

It’s knowing how far you’ve already come and – based on the facts – recognising that you’re more than a match for the challenge in front of you.  This strategy allows you to move forwards with a conscious, learned sense of your own self-confidence.

Don’t Give a Hoot.

Being hootless means that you know that your happiness isn’t dependent on getting the things you want.

It’s the feeling that you can live your life fully without struggling, striving or suffering, simply by engaging with what matters and not giving a hoot about the outcome.  All hootlessness and true confidence require is that you can chose your behavior with implicit trust in that behavior.  This isn’t the same thing as having implicit trust in the outcome, no siree; it’s trusting that you can play a damn good game and deal with whatever comes at you.

This is pretty fucking cool.  Pardon my French, but I get kinda passionate about this one.  Think about it with me for a second – if you have an implicit trust in your behavior, what does that mean?

It means you’re free to make choices based on what matters to you.  It means you can stop worrying about the crap that doesn’t matter and you can move free from fear or doubt, for the simple fact that you know you can trust yourself to deal with anything that happens.

Freedom is simply moving forwards with true confidence.

This strategy means that even though fear might still be there, it loses its power to control you.  It’s just another part of your experience; neither right nor wrong, neither bad nor good.

I’m interested – what techniques have you used before and what are you avoiding because it scares the crap out of you?

The first time I saw this YouTube clip I was watching from between my fingers, a grimace of embarrassment on my face.

See, as a fairly typical English guy, this kind of thing makes me cringe. It’s just the sheer bloody awkwardness and potential for humiliation that makes me wince. But as I watched it that first time, I slowly took my fingers away from my face and watched closer and closer.

Something brilliant happened.

The unexpected.

I’ve probably seen this a dozen times over the last 3 or 4 months, and it makes me smile every time. Why? Well, the cute bridesmaids help, but the big reason is because it challenged me. It challenged me to think outside of the conventions and outside of the rules. Seeing these people having the time of their lives doing something new challenged me to enjoy what at first I thought I’d hate.

The unexpected does that – it makes you go out of your comfort zone and challenges you to adapt.

It’s not easy to open up to, feeling weird at first, scary even.  But like new underwear, you soon get used to it.

The expected is predictable, safe and lacking in power.  The magic of the unexpected is it’s power to show you something new in life; something that might just be amazing.

The question is, do you have the self-confidence to open your eyes and welcome it in?

Scared to change?  Scared to start?  Scared of screwing up?  Scared of succeeding?

So’s the guy down the street.  And the barrista who serves you java every morning.  And the guy sitting next to you on the train.  And the receptionist in your office.  And your Mum.

Everyone’s scared to change, me included.

Let me tell you something about us human beings.  We’re all hardwired not to change.  That’s what we have in common.  That and opposable thumbs.

And nipples.

If left to our own devices in a bubble, we’d happily live our lives without really changing at all.

One guy I worked with really stands out.  The first time we met he told me all about the things he wanted to change.  He wanted to write a screenplay and was willing to change his priorities to make it happen.  He wanted to make changes in his career and was happy to make the necessary decisions.  He wanted to find someone special to spend his life with and was willing to make space in his life for romance.

He went to great lengths to tell me how ready he was for change, so off we went into the coaching wonderland.

I had my suspicions in the first session, but they were made concrete during our third session when he told me all the reasons why he couldn’t do the fieldwork we’d set for him in the previous session, and started explaining how he didn’t really think he wanted the things he said he wanted when we first met.

I gave it one last shot, but after our fourth session together I fired him as a client.

He wasn’t just resistant to change, he point blank refused to change.

I could have happily kept taking his money, but I was having no fun coaching him and he was getting nothing out of it other than a little attention for 50 minutes a week.

He was so terrified of changing his life that his brain had immediately constructed a world view where he didn’t need to change.

Try as I might to make him see how he was fooling himself, his brain would keep on justifying his reasoning for side-stepping what he’d told me in our first meeting.

He wasn’t willing to be scared; wasn’t willing to experience his inner wimp.

In fact he was the worst kind of wimp, because he didn’t even know he was a wimp.

Change is scary.  I get it.  I feel it too.

But sometimes you gotta suck it up, walk right into it and get involved.

What’s the alternative?

Living in a bubble where everything stays the same until a neighbour complains about the smell and the authorities find you slumped in the corner of your soulless flat, wearing a t-shirt with the slogan “I’m fine, don’t mess with my shit” and a lopsided, defeated look on your face.

The alternative is living in a world where you’re always safe and always right, but never happy.

If true confidence is being able to choose your behaviour with implicit trust in that behaviour – and it is – then it’s confidence that allows you to welcome your inner wimp along for the ride.  You can welcome your inner wimp and still trust yourself to step forwards.

Confidence is what makes it okay to admit that you’re scared, and for the the whole being scared thing to be okay.

Your inner wimp isn’t the enemy of change, it’s what brings you back to the present and reminds you of what’s important.

Embrace it, and enjoy the ride.

Life has recently been slapping me round the face and calling me bad names.  Like “ninnymuggins” and “poopmeister”.

Sometimes life gets more serious and sends something big your way that can rock you to your core, and when it’s not doing that it’ll regularly throw things at you to test you and your confidence.  In these times it’s perfectly natural for your confidence to vanish quicker than a pot of taxpayer’s cash in an investment bank.

It’s scary when your confidence goes, isn’t it?  You wonder why it is that you still can’t figure this shit out, those old, familiar doubts fly around in your mind, you beat yourself up (more than usual) and you talk yourself round in circles.

Here’s what to do when you’ve lost your self-confidence.

1. De-dramify it.

When you feel your self-confidence vanish you might mutter the exact same words as a tiny nun at a penguin shoot – “Shit, I’m screwed.”

You’re facing a tough situation with zero confidence and yes, holy mother of God is that ever scary.

But as long as you stay in the drama of the situation – the buttock clenching, throat drying, stomach dropping, heart racing drama of it all – that’s all you’ll experience.

By all means keep rolling around in the drama.  It can even feel kind of good to put yourself in the centre of your own drama, just like you see on TV or one of those talking pictures they make these days.  But that can only last so long, and the drama only serves to polarise your experience as a negative one.

You need to de-dramify it.  That’s a Steve-ism.

Take a breath.  Notice that you’re in the drama of the situation.  Notice that your perception is coming from a place where your experience is heightened and magnified to make events seem more powerful than you are.

Once you’ve noticed where you are and what your experience is you have a choice about what happens next.  Check out the expertly drawn picture right here.  Purty, ain’t it.

The drama’s right there at the bottom, and your job is to step up and out of the drama and be ready to let go of all the stuff that reminds you how big, scary or challenging things are right now.

Step above the problem and the details and specifics of the situation, because those things will only take you back down to the drama.  Everything below that line works as a vicious circle – focus on the problem and it’s easy to wrapped up in the drama and details.  Focus on the details and it’ll keep you rooted in the problem.

Below that line is where Fox News viewers live.  Shudder.

So your aim is to get above that orange line, because it’s only there that you can feel okay about things.  It’s when you’re above the line, looking at the solution and the vision, that you can normalise things, make it okay to be where you are and say,

“Okay, I get that it’s scary but I’m pretty bright and I know I can figure this out.  Now, what’s a way I can be okay with this? Even better, what’s a good win for me here?”

2. Take off your running shoes.

It’s easy to run away.

Running away gives you an instant pay-off – a sense of relief and a sense of being safe that can make running away seem pretty compelling.

It seems especially compelling when you’re standing there without any confidence, wondering just how the hell you’re going to move forwards.  In no time at all you can turn round, run and be back under the duvet in time for Deal or No Deal.  Turning round and walking away is the no-brainer, no-risk thing to do.

Of course, it’s also the no-success thing to do, so it’s important you’re aware of the pull that turning away has, and the true cost of that course of action.

This is about making a deliberate choice to begin.

You’re a living, breathing, conscious individual, so switch off the auto-pilot and recognise that to get anywhere with anything you need to make a conscious choice to start.

It’s a choice you can only make when you’re out of the drama and aware of what’s in play, and there are 3 things you need to remember when making it:

1. You’ll never get to 100% with something unless you’re willing to go from 0% to 99% first.
2. You have to engage with the things that matter to you.
3. You haven’t even touched the edges of your capability.

3. Raid your toolbox.

Your capability is vast.

I know people like me – i.e. coaches – are supposed to spew trite remarks like that all the time, but as a confidence coach who’s known for not playing up to the Fluffy Side, it’s not something I say lightly or without thought.

Yeah, I get that sometimes it’s easy to shrug comments like this off, and I get that it’s easy to intellectually acknowledge the fact that you’re hugely capable, but how often have you felt it?

I’d bet that it’s not very often you feel that potential in your bones.  I’d bet that you’ve all too rarely connected with your own untouched capacity for Doing Great Things.

It’s there all the same, and it’s by using everything you’ve got – all the things in your toolbox – that you can get through those times when you feel like your confidence has vanished. And you won’t just “get through”, you’ll storm through.

I’m talking about your values, talents and strengths, the triumvirate of assets that allow you to explore that capability and – when you feel how real they are – to move forwards with a degree of confidence in yourself.  Not using your values, talents and strengths is like a fireman trying to put out a blaze with his spit when his fire engine is parked right there.

And that, my friends, takes us to the very centre of it.

If you’d already done and succeeded at everything there would be little that would phase you, right?  But the reality is that you can’t have confidence in every situation you find yourself in for the simple reason that you haven’t done and succeeded at everything in the world (yet).

There will always be situations where it feels like you have no confidence, but following this 1, 2, 3 connects you with a confidence in yourself, even if you’re in uncharted territory and quietly shaking in your shoes.

As the 3^rd Principle of Self-Confidence says, Being Truly Confident Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Not Be Confident, or in other words this is why you can find confidence even in those moments when your confidence disappears.

What do you think?  What’s your experience when your confidence vanishes?

Let me know.

People seem to think that if they’re scared or fearful of something that it means they’re not confident.

Nonsense.

Confidence and fear actually get on like a house on fire, and one without the other is a flawed experience.

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