How you can learn to be confident

Something that regularly gets asked by clients is "how can I learn to be confident when I have never felt it before?". Good question right? How would that person know what it feels like!

Remembering confidence

In an ideal world, when working with clients, they are able to think back to a time when they felt confident. We can then use visualisation, meditation and self-hypnosis tools to help build on that and improve their confidence. For some people though, they tell me they have never felt it before, so how are these people able to dramatically improve their confidence?

Discovering your confidence

If you have never felt confident before, it can be tricky to imagine a future with confidence, so as a hypnotherapist I start with the basics. Hypnotherapists are trained to ask very high quality and specific questions that are designed to help people consider themselves in a different way.

This means that I can find something that makes that person feel good about themselves. If this describes you, or you are just curious, ask yourself these questions now;

• What qualities do you have that could help you be more confident?
• What have you done, at any point in your life, that has benefited you?

The answers might just surprise you - we can always find something!

Don't think too big

There seems to be this idea that confident people have done huge things in their lives which make them really confident. In some cases that may be true, but for the large majority of people, it really can be the little things.

Maybe you are a great parent; maybe you are good at staying calm in a situation; maybe you cook something really well.

It doesn't matter!

It doesn't matter what it is as long as you feel good and confident doing it! There is no 'correct' confidence. Confidence is personal and internal to you. You can't just learn a series of behaviours and attributes that make you confident. You might fake it pretty convincingly, but you won't feel it.

Learning confidence

Having discovered aspects of ourselves that are confident, we can then build on this. Take advantage of the situations that make you feel good and use that feeling to help propel you forwards.

Take some time to visualise what you are like in those situations. Observe the use you make of your body and mind in those situations where you feel a little bit of confidence. Allow yourself to feel curious about what you feel in those situations, and consider what you say to yourself in your mind.

Over time, you can start to build on that confidence, by firstly making sure you know what it is to you, and secondly imagining what it would be like to bring that confidence into other situations.

Building confidence through achievement

Another great way of building confidence is to consider what achievements you have already made, and what things you would like to achieve in the future. Many people get stuck here and say they haven't achieved anything, but I have never come across a client who has genuinely achieved nothing.

Make a list of your achievements to show you how far you have come so far, then make a list of small goals you can set yourself to add to that list.

Seriously - anyone can learn to be confident. Why don't you start today?