The Confidence Guy

Wired into Truly Confident Living

Category: ‘Confidence building’

May 17

The Real Secret to Consistent Confidence

leapTina was a client who told me how she’d given a great presentation once, but has bottled it every time since then

Rob mentioned to me that he’d bungee jumped once when he was travelling around Australia, but has held himself back from leaping into the abyss ever since.

Ella explained to me how she once opened up emotionally to her partner and revealed a vulnerability, but has since built those walls up again and doesn’t know how to talk openly.

One of the first things I ask a new client is “Tell me something you’ve done that took confidence”, and I’ve given you just 3 examples from a couple of hundred.

Giving a great presentation once doesn’t mean you’re a great presenter – you just gave a great presentation once.  Going bungee jumping once doesn’t mean you’re always ready to leap – you just let gravity do its thing once.  And opening up emotionally doesn’t mean you’re an open, emotionally intelligent person – you just let the moment take you once.

Confidence is being able to trust your behaviour with implicit trust in that behaviour, and that’s not a one-time thing.  That’s why I always ask that question, because I know it makes 2 things abundantly clear.

Confidence is always there.

It’s easy to be confident when you’re feeling confident, just as Tina, Rob and Ella found.  You could say that the 3 of them had a distinct lack of feeling not-confident; they found themselves in a place where there was no un-confidence; the one thing that was absent from each of their experiences was a loss of confidence.  See what I’m getting at?

Your confidence never goes away.  It diminishes the more you ignore it or when you forget it, but it’s always there waiting for you to use it.  More and more I’m seeing confidence as your natural state.  It’s how you are when all the crap that gets in the way of you feeling confident is removed.

That’s my favourite thing about confidence – it’s like the very best friend you never had.  You can bad-mouth it, disparage it, ignore it and even punch it square in the jaw, and it will always be there, willing to help you.

Watching a client as they discover that THEIR confidence is right there, waiting for them, is simply awesome.

Confidence is applied at the point of change

Confidence has to be applied at the point of change – the point that tips what happens next one way or the other – and it needs to be applied consistently.

The point of change is that moment in time where you choose between fear and action, doubt and decision, function and dysfunction, capability or disability, strength or weakness, assumption or insight.  That list goes on, but the only way you get to choose which way to go is to be mindful of the point of change itself, and then to mindfully apply confidence.

How do you that?

Practice.

Practice is the only way you can train your brain in a new way of thinking; it’s the only way to set up new patterns of thought that work better and become the norm for you.  You gotta show your brain that the way it’s done things in the past might not be the best way, and if you can come up with a more effective way then your brain will love it.

See it and apply it, and your life will be every bit as extraordinary as you always hoped it would be.

What’s something you’ve done that took confidence?
Have trouble applying confidence at the point of change?
Feel like your confidence ISN’T there waiting for you?

Let me know in the comments.

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Mar 01

What Do You Do When You Lose Confidence?

Trembling.Ever had a moment when your confidence disappears into thin air?

It’s pretty likely that you’ve had that happen, and wouldn’t you just know it, your confidence never vanishes while you’re doing something trivial like brushing your teeth or watching TV.  You never pick up the tooth brush and say to yourself, “Oh shit, I can’t do this.  I’m crap at brushing my teeth and look, there they are in the mirror staring right at me being all toothy.  Maybe I’ll just skip it today.  Hey, if I just go back to bed and pretend to be sleeping I won’t need to brush my teeth.

Your confidence has a habit of vanishing just when you need it the most.  When you’re about to make a big decision or when you need to dig deep to follow through.  Or when you need to step out of your comfort zone, or realize that you’re way out of your comfort zone and wonder how quickly you can sprint back to it.

What do you do in those moments?  What would help in those moments?

Here are a few ideas that might help when you lose your confidence.

1. Recognise that any confidence-stripping thoughts are only thoughts

These thoughts are simply mental events just like any other thought that runs through your head.  “I have a blue car”, I like eggs” and “I’m going to be just fine” are other popular thoughts that you could focus on.

2. These thoughts don’t have to dictate what happens

The problem comes when you take thoughts like “I’m not confident enough” and “I can’t do this” and make those your focus, so the first step is to notice the thought, to take a moment to notice the state of your mind in that very moment.

Think of these confidence-stripping thoughts like a stormy weather system. A black cloud, heavy rain, high winds, maybe even some lightning. Oooo, looks serious doesn’t it? But picture yourself up in an aeroplane, soaring above the clouds through the clear blue sky, able to look down and see that black cloud plus a bunch of white fluffy ones, oh and look…sometimes there are no clouds at all, allowing you to see the landscape beneath.

You can see it all from the comfort of your seat in the sky, and it all looks amazing. Thoughts are just like passing weather, so don’t judge that confidence-stripping thought and don’t turn it into a problem. Simply acknowledge open-heartedly how your thoughts are going.

3. Remember the important stuff

Remember what it’s like to be at your best.  Remember what it’s like to be firing on all cylinders and playing your best game.  Remember what it’s like to be with friends or family – at ease, smiling, laughing and how being yourself comes naturally.

Remember what you’ve already achieved.  Remember that you’ve stretched yourself before and not only are you still here, but you’re glad you stretched yourself.  Remember what’s important to you.  Remember what really matters.

4. Reassure yourself

The more you focus on the things that could go wrong your confidence dips lower and panic can set in, so what can you tell yourself that would make it okay to keep going forwards?  What picture can you create that would help you get back in the saddle?  How can you make friends with those confidence-stripping thoughts and reassure them that you’ll be okay?

That reassurance serves to take away the drama and helps to turn a calamitous thunderstorm into a welcome Spring shower.

5. Make a new choice

You’re always able to make a choice, but only once you’ve got an awareness of the moment as well as what really matters. So what decision would you make if you knew you were more than capable of dealing with whatever happened? How would it be different if you went into the situation feeling on top of the world?

What’s a decision you can make based on capability and possibility rather than disability and probability?

6. Focus on other people

I’ve found that when my confidence leaves me my thoughts spiral inwards.  Round and round and tighter and tighter they go, leaving me mummified and unable to move.  A trick I’ve learned in these situations is to interrupt that inward spiral and focus on the people around me and what I can offer them.  I focus on what I’m able to give rather than how I can protect what I have.

That’s just a handful of thoughts on what to do when you lose confidence, so how about you?  How do you deal with your confidence-vanishing moments?

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Feb 10

I have a lot of time for good people, and so I leapt at the chance when Kade Dworkin asked me to be part of his brilliant Meet My Followers series of interviews.

We’ve been chatting over the last 2 or 3 years and he’s a really smart cookie.  The interview’s below, so have a listen and let me know what you think in the comments.

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Dec 16

Hold on. Help is on its Way.

hold onWhat happens when you’re up against life?  What happens when you’re tired with feeling lost or confused?  What happens when all you want is a break; for something to just go right?

You hold on.

Help is a strange beast.  You can never predict how it arrives, but it always does.  It might take the shape of a friend, a partner or family member.  It might be something you read, something you hear or something you see that makes a difference.  Or sometimes help comes in the shape of a new insight, a fresh perspective, the passing of time itself or perhaps by helping someone else.

Help can arrive in a flourish with a jazz-hands finish, or it can be so gentle you might not even notice it.

I know that a lot of people find it especially hard at this time of year, and I saw the tiniest glimpse of this back in mid-November when I offered something of an open surgery to my newsletter subscribers.  I invited them to email me with whatever they were struggling with and needed help with, and I had well over a hundred emails.  Each one emotive and many of them raw.

There are people you know who are having a tough time, right now.

You know, I really do believe in Christmas.  I love those soppy made-for-TV movies where the Dad in a family is some hot-shot lawyer who insists on working Christmas and neglects his wife and kid, only for Mickey Rooney to show up in a Santa suit to show him the error of his ways.  Or the one where the woman’s husband died some years earlier and she hasn’t dated since, only for a new, quirky love interest to show up and show her that Christmas and love are all about faith.

Confidence and Christmas have one thing in common – trust.  I trust that Christmas is the one time of the year when people smile a little easier.  I trust myself to use the best I’ve got to get through whatever life has in store.  I trust that help will be there if you hold on just one second longer.

I don’t have a religious bone in my body, I don’t have all the answers, I’m certainly no guru and I’m not doing this for my ego, I just happen to believe that people do amazing things.

Could You Use a Little Help?

So I’m opening up the comments for you to share what you’re struggling with.  Put finger to keyboard and write down where you’re stuck, where you’re scared or where you’re hoping to find some help (use a pseudonym if it makes it easier).

I’ll add my own thoughts for how you can use the best of what you’ve got to shift things, but more importantly I want you to add your thoughts, suggestions and insights too. Yes, you.  One rule though – this isn’t a place to “should” people around.  Listen and offer your opinions and insights, but don’t judge.

As an extra stocking-filler, I’ll give one person who comments a set of three 30 minute coaching sessions with me where we can work together on getting you going and feeling naturally confident (I’ll notify the winner on January 1st 2011).

This is something of an experiment that will only work if as many people get involved as possible, so , and this post as much as you’re happy to.

The door’s open.

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Nov 02

I just finished re-reading the brilliant “” (aff. link) by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, and 6 little words jumped out at me.

Put a Dent in the Universe.

It kicked up some thoughts and spurred me into recording this for you (quick summary below if you can’t watch or play the clip).

Just like you, confidence can’t exist in a vacuum.  You need to use it and you need to apply it, either that or you lose it.

There’s this moment that happens when I’m working with people; I call it the confidence tipping point.  This is the point at which your self-confidence reaches a level where you feel the deep need to do something with it, you feel the need to engage.  It’s a part of the process that slaps a big ol’ grin on my face every single time it happens, because it means you’re about to put a dent in the universe.

The tipping point is where the idea of getting out there and participating in the world becomes utterly compelling, and beyond the tipping point is where the good stuff in life lies.

And that’s what I want.  My “getting out there in the world” is taking other people to the confidence tipping point and beyond.  It excites me like nothing else.  So much so, that in my quiet moments when I dream BIG, I dream about taking the whole world to the tipping point.

So what kind of dent do you want to make in the universe?  What happens on the other side of your tipping point?

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Oct 18

Wabi Sabi, Abu Dhabi, Harry Caray

Harry Caray was a much loved Major League Baseball broadcaster who had the quirky habit of privately singing along to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in the broadcast booth during games.  One afternoon his radio producer opened the mike while Harry was singing, broadcasting the song to the whole stadium and entire listening public.

The fans loved it, and for the rest of his career Harry would sing the song during every seventh-inning stretch, leading the fans in a rousing chorus and inviting everyone to join in with the call to action “Lemme hear ya!”  Nobody could say that Harry had any special singing talent and it was all gloriously imperfect, but he started a tradition that continues to this day.

Abu Dhabi is a city that’s evolved with a diverse and fervent mix of influences.  Ethnic groups and ex-pats, wide boulevards and cramped apartment towers, traditional industries and high-end retail, mosques, churches, temples and gurdwaras.  It’s a city that’s blending new found wealth with its sweeping history, rich culture and imperfections of all flavours.

It’s this curious, unusual and natural evolution that makes it totally unique.

Okay, it’s at this point that I gotta level with you.  I picked Harry Caray and Abu Dhabi because they rhyme with what I really want to talk about (and it’s fun to say stuff that rhymes).  They do help demonstrate my point however  – my point being about wabi sabi.

Wabi sabi used to be two separate things – wabi and sabi – until a man named Matsuo Basho saw the two words, put them together and used them for a different, deeper purpose.  That was 300 years ago, and this Japanese term is still taught, still pondered and still longed for.

Author Richard R. Powell describes wabi sabi as nurturing “all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.”  In his book (aff.), he goes on to describe it as “a way of being that celebrates the beauty of age, the richness of character, the importance of imperfection, and the reality of impermanence.

What Does Wabi Sabi Have to do With Anything?

Now, this could be a real bummer if you wanted to see it that way.  You could look at wabi sabi and see a melancholic, depressing, desolate way of perceiving the world based on the fact that everything’s imperfect and nothing lasts, but that’s totally missing what it’s really about.

raku / 04
Wabi sabi sees the impermanent and the imperfect and it accepts it all as beauty.  It looks at all of the simple imperfections that tumble out of life and embraces them all. Pottery used in the Japanese tea ceremony is valued more because of the flaws and imperfections in the shape, glaze and colour.  Scratches and blemishes are respected and valued and items are never discarded to be replaced with something uniform or “more perfect”.

Wabi sabi doesn’t judge, it doesn’t tightly grasp hold out of fear, doesn’t side-step the uncomfortable and doesn’t devalue something because it’s not perfect or finished.

Remind you of something?

This might sound like I’m getting all zen on you, but I happen to believe that true, natural confidence is largely a matter of acceptance.  Of it all.  Even the stuff you’d rather not even acknowledge, let alone accept.

You’ll Never Be Finished But You’re Always Whole

Natural confidence is embracing the fact that you’re not perfect and not finished.  Confidence is seeing your beauty and value as evidenced through your uniqueness, quirks and anomalies.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m no enlightened guru or some kind of wabi sabi master.  I’m a bit of a schmuck with a bald patch and a love of gooey cheese.  But that’s just peachy with me.

I’ve come to accept my illness even though I’d love to be rid of it.  I do my best to accept my weaknesses, my quirks and my flaws.  I’m just like a Japanese tea cup – I’m scratched, flawed and discoloured and one day I’ll break.  And like Harry’s passionate, ridiculous singing and the hotch-potch evolution of Abu Dhabi, wabi sabi sees the fullness of life through all its randomness and flux.

Wabi-sabi is mindfulness and hootlessness.  It’s honest.  It’s natural.  It’s confidence.

Call out your wonderful flaws and quirks in the comments.  Let’s get wabi sabi.

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Jul 20

The Real Truth About Confidence

The real truth about confidenceWhat are you good at?  Singing?  Cooking?  Leading a team?  Empathy?  Maths?  Design?  Running?

How about confidence?  You good at confidence?

See, the real truth about confidence is that it’s a skill, and just like any other skill you can learn it.

Learn

By the time you turn three years old and you’re feeding your toys into household appliances, your brain has around 100 billion neurons – these are the doing cells in the brain.  Each of these neurons is connected to around 15 thousand other neurons, and it’s this network that allows you to think.

These synapses connect together to form circuits of wiring, patterns of thought that your brain uses to “do stuff” (that’s the technical term for it).  This is your grey matter, and new connections are formed in your grey matter whenever you learn something new, see something in a new way or acknowledge or understand something.

This is all learning is – building new connections that allow your brain to process things in new ways.

Just like any other skill, self-confidence is a pattern of thought wired into your brain; a circuit that gets triggered when it’s needed.  If your self-confidence pattern isn’t used much or isn’t efficient at getting a result, learning is what enables a new, more effective self-confidence circuit to be built.

And like any learning process it feels awkward and deliberate at first, simply because your brain doesn’t have an efficient circuit yet.  It’s like learning to juggle – tough at first, but you get better.

Which brings us onto what gets you to Carnegie Hall…

Practice

It’s been shown that through practice the density of grey matter in the brain increases.  Taxi drivers in London, for example, are required to learn and pass a test called “The Knowledge”, a notoriously difficult test that demands learning every street in London (although somehow my cab driver always seems to be the one who skipped lessons).  The posterior hippocampus (I’m pointing to the lower central bit of my head now, see?) in London cabbies is bigger and denser than in you or me, simply because their brain has adapted and grown in response to the need.

So practice builds grey matter in the parts of the brain where it’s needed, but new research shows that white matter increases with practice too.  A fat called myelin is produced in your brain when you practice something deeply, as author and thoroughly nice guy Daniel Coyle describes in detail in the brilliant “The Talent Code”.

Myelin insulates these circuits from signal loss, supporting the ability of these circuits to fire at maximum speed and ensuring that whatever skills you’re practicing work as efficiently and effectively as they possibly can

Your circuits, self-confidence included, are just like muscles – the more you use them in the right ways the bigger and more effective they get.  The less you use them, the smaller and less effective they get.  Practice is what makes the difference.

Confidence Gets in the Way

Okay, so that’s the science bit.  The reason I’m telling you all this is because I’ve seen that even though someone can be really bloody good at something, their lack of confidence stops them from using a skill or from practicing.  An insufficiently developed self-confidence circuit means 3 things:

  1. It’s harder to practice the skill of confidence because you’re not confident enough to practice.
  2. A poorly developed or inefficient self-confidence circuit makes it harder to practice other skills that require self-confidence to pursue.
  3. Circuits that aren’t fired due to a lack of self-confidence will not get used as frequently and will fall into disrepair.

So I began to see confidence as something that gets in the way of firing other circuits – it can stop the circuit of another skill firing, and it can even default to a different, tried and trusted circuit to fire in its place.

If you lack confidence that you can build a business, for example, then you might not entertain the idea of becoming self-employed.  You might fire a pattern of thinking that says it’s best for you to stay in a job you don’t like because there’s more security and it doesn’t require you to have a more developed confidence circuit.

If you’re not feeling confident enough to go on that date you might turn someone down unnecessarily or you won’t ask out that guy or girl you’ve met.  Even though you’re normally sociable, you might even “choose” to avoid certain social situations or to retreat into yourself.

This is all your brain selecting circuits based on what it knows to work, and I think that that self-confidence acts like a meta-circuit – if it isn’t fired then it short-circuits any subsequent firing mechanism.

You end up not feeling confident and not following through.

I wanted to bounce this off someone, so I emailed Daniel Coyle and asked him.

What Daniel Coyle said

What circuits are you firing?I think you’re right to think of it as a meta-circuit — and also one that gets built from the earliest ages — and thus would be immune to quick fixes.  So while it grows exactly like a skill, it’s also pretty well wired in so that it’s easy to fall into old patterns.  One neurologist I spoke with compared existing behavioral patterns like sled tracks on a snowy hill — the more you behave in a certain way, the more likely your sled is to fall into those tracks.  So that “backsliding” moment you’re speaking of — when someone seems to have it, but still falls into old patterns of non-confidence — would be expected. Even if they’ve worked with you for a year, they’ve still got decades of “non-confidence” circuitry that’s fast, fluent, and ready to fire.

So the question becomes, how do you stop that from happening?  How do you demarcate old and new?

The places that seem to have the most success in these areas (that I visited) are good at demarcating the old and the new (places like KIPP and the Shyness Clinic), they use a cohesive suite of cues and signals to help create a new persona — and by your website, you’re doing some of the same things.  Also, it seems that playing up the difficulty and arduousness of this can have a good effect — it cures people of thinking there’s a quick fix and allows them to see the truth — this does take time. It’s exactly like a gym workout — and you’re training people to run a marathon, not giving them a one-minute makeover.

I don’t believe that it’s necessary to create a “new persona” – it’s a case of creating a new way of thinking – and so the separation of old and new is something that’s very central to how I work. (This pleases me, because I hadn’t thought about it before Daniel mentioned it.)

Daniel’s also right in saying that it’s hard.  It’s hard to leave behind years of efficient (if ill-serving) wiring and risk going into the unknown, just like it’s harder to run a marathon than it is to stroll down the street.

The real truth about confidence is that it requires you to make a choice based on your potential to learn and practice rather than your existing boundaries.

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May 04

Why Do You Lose Confidence in Yourself?

Even the most confident of us have moments when self-confidence seems to vanish quicker than a pre-election manifesto promise (ooh, topical).

What you can’t do is think that losing confidence in yourself means that you’re not confident.  You still have confidence, you just have to apply it.  Here are 3 of the biggest reasons you lose confidence in yourself and what to do about them.

1. You’re somewhere new

Arriving somewhere new is scaryIf you’ve arrived somewhere in life you didn’t expect it feels pretty scary.  Unfamiliar territority, new people, new challenges – it’s easy to lose confidence when you’re somewhere new.

But who said that’s not how it’s meant to be?  You’re supposed to be feeling a little scared; if you weren’t then where you are wouldn’t matter, and that would be a dull place to be (believe me, I know).  So don’t think that shaking in your boots when faced with something new, big and scary means that something’s wrong – it’s just means that it’s the first time you’ve been here.

But please remember that you’ve been in new places before.  Your first day at school or college.  A new job or a new relationship.  Life is full of “somewhere new”, and you’ve got through it all just fine and learned all kinds of cool stuff to help you deal.

So use what you’ve learned and use what you know to be true.  Start at the start, do what you’re best at, make decisions that serve you well and trust yourself to make a new decision when you need to.  You’ll be better than fine – you’ll be confident.

2. You start role-playing

Your brain’s very cool, I want you to know that.  It has a bunch of maps stored away, maps that help it navigate through situations based on the routes it’s learned in the past.  Left to it’s own devices your brain does the most efficient job it can of plotting a course from point a to point b and keeping you safe on the way.

Your brain's very cool, for the most partBut sometimes your brain is where the problem lies.  There are times when your brain picks a really old map, something it’s used time and time again successfully, but it completely forgets that the landscape might have changed.  In the blink of an eye your brain picks a pattern of behaviour that’s out of date and no longer matches with who you are and what matters to you today.  Sometimes, your brain picks a route that emphasises safety over results.

Let’s say there’s a family occasion that means you have to head home to see your folks (and siblings if you have any).  You love them, of course you do, but they drive you a little nuts if you spend too long with them.  At some point when you’re back home with them you start behaving differently.  Maybe you get a little moody.  Maybe you get a little silly.  Maybe you get a little irritable.

You start playing the role of the person you were years before; whether that’s the 8 year old little angel, the 16 year old stroppy teenager or the 21 year old rebel without a clue.

At a party filled with strangers you fall back into the role of a nervous teenager.  At an important meeting you fall back into playing the role of an ill-experienced new starter, scared to speak up.  With your parents you fall back into the role of a child.

I hear this a heck of a lot, I really do.  People switch back to who they’ve been simply because their brain brain matches the inputs it’s receiving to the best developed map it has for safely navigating through the circumstances it finds itself in.  And that means you sometimes start playing roles that no longer apply.

Playing a role switches you immediately from the capable, resourceful and confident you to a you that might be none of those things.  Watch out for these moments when you swicth roles, because they’ll always make you feel like your confidence has vanished and it’s only by noticing them that you can take a new, better direction.

3. Your Expectancies Get Muddled

Throw away your rulebook and be more confidentIn addition to switching roles at the tip of a hat, you also carry around a huge, fat rulebook, containing all the stuff that you and other people should do.

This rulebook is constructed from expectancies – everything you expect of yourself, everything you expect of others, and here’s a real brain-teaser, everything you expect others expect of you.

Yep, that’s right – it can be a real mess.  You carry around with you an expectancy set that says things like “I expect my boss to listen to me”,My manager expects me to be quiet when we’re meeting with the CEO”, “I expect my friend to jump through hoops” or “My partner expects me to not display affection when we’re in public” – dozens, hundreds of expectancies piled up on top of each other that guide your thinking and your behaviour.

Different expectancies flying around that are often in conflict with one another leads to one thing – second guessing.  And what does second guessing mean?  It means you can’t have confidence in your behaviour.

So leave the rulebook behind.  So stop living your life according to a set of expectancies that might not be true.  Don’t assume how you should behave, don’t assume how other people need to behave and don’t make assumptions about how other people expect you behave.  It’ll drive you crazy.

You Lose Confidence Because You’re Not Paying Attention

Put simply, you feel like your confidence vanishes because you’re not paying attention to how you’re thinking.  Each of these 3 causes occur when an automatic thought pattern gets triggered that you don’t notice.  You don’t need to understand how these patterns came about or how they work, you just need to recognise them so that you can trigger a new, better behaviour.

That’s where the magic starts, learning to recognise those situations where you feel your confidence leaving you, acknowledging the thoughts that take you there and making a deliberate decision to do something else, something better.

So I’m interested to know – when you feel your confidence leaving you is it because you’re somewhere new, because you’re playing an old role or because you’re behaving according to your expectancies?  Let me know in the comments.

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Apr 13

Forget All About Confidence

Forget all about confidenceI want you to forget all about self-confidence.  That’s my aim for everyone I work with and that’s a point I want EVERYONE to reach.

Let’s say you’re learning to dance the merengue.  And why the hell not.  At first you have no clue, but you’re aware that it’s some kind of South American thing, kinda like the lambada or salsa.  Your first classes are tough.  You’re clunking around, trying to remember what step’s coming next while forgetting that you should already have switched to a closed position.  Your feet ache, your partner is sympathetic but frustrated, and you’re wondering if you’ll ever nail it.

But then something interesting happens.  The music starts to make sense, the steps start to flow together rather than being separate, and you start to feel it.

You loosen up, start enjoying it and as you continue to “practice” you have it nailed.  The moves come naturally and you’re even able to improvise beyond the steps you’ve been taught.  You and your partner move as one, the rhythm always letting you know where you are and allowing you to be right there in the moment, a big smile slapped across your face.

I don’t dance the meringue personally because I dance like Ernest Borgnine, but I make a mean omelet.   I can establish trust with someone in moments.  I can always find humour in life.  I can spot problems in a digital marketing campaign and I can belt out a cracking version of “Beyond the Sea”.

I do all of those things without worrying about whether I’m confident enough to do them or not.

And that’s exactly where I want to take people.  To a place where the question of whether they’re confident enough never arises.

Because it’s the point at which you forget about being confident in something that you strike upon your natural confidence.

So while at first a new endeavor might feel clumsy, hard or awkward, with practice you can reach the point where confidence is felt in your bones.

Forget about confidence.  What matters is the dance.

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Mar 04

Here’s a little video post that, besides offering a key strategy for building confidence and having more fun, could make you either smile or throw-up.

So what would you love to say “What the Hell” to?  What have you just said “What the Hell” to, and what happened?

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