How often do you hear someone say..(that someone could be you!) that they have lost some confidence or that they would be able to do something more easily, if only they had more confidence? We often talk about it as if it is something tangible when in fact it isn’t!
What has happened here is that through the way we use language, we have turned something that is a feeling, a way of being, sometimes a cocktail of feelings, into a simple noun. An elusive thing!
Sadly we cannot go into our favourite store and purchase a bag of “confidence”. It doesn’t work like that. I would go as far as to say that, in truth, “confidence” as such, does not exist.
If we can identify and recognise “it” as a feeling – a sense of “being” confident, we start to take control. That sense of control starts to come because we are experts in feeling different emotions and “being” in different states. Lets face it, we have been doing it since we were born!
Your amazing brain has many memories of feeling the way you feel when you have the feeling that you describe as confident. It knows which parts of itself to activate and exactly which cocktail of neurochemistry to create. If you need to feel more confident, you can give your brain a helping hand.
This simple brain training experiment will demonstrate:-
- Take a few moments and sit or be somewhere where you can have some peace and quiet!
- Go into your memory banks and think of a time when you felt really confident. What were you doing? Where were you? Who was there? What was happening?
- Immerse yourself in that memory ( you will probably be smiling by now) and step right back into it.
- Imagine you are back there again, seeing the sights and hearing the sounds that were going on at the time.
- Notice how you feel and smile some more as you replay the events of that memory.
- Stop and notice how much of the original confident feelings your brain has cleverly regenerated for you! If you could measure your neurochemistry right now, it would be very different to how it was before you started the exercise!
Clever eh?
Play with this and if you are wanting to incrementally build your ability to “be” confident more of the time, I invite you to do this exercise daily, several times. Notice the differences!
There is a wealth of neuroscience to support these ideas and if you are interested in more ways to run your brain differently, you can look up the many works of two of my teachers :- Dr Richard Bandler co- creator of NLP and Paul McKenna. If it’s business texts you are looking for check out the work of Simon Sinek. he includes some great explanation of our positive neurotransmitters in his book Leaders Eat Last
The aim of this post is to get you thinking about how you “do” confident and to invite you to be curious about how you work on ways to BE the way you want to be in different situations. I am aware that there are many variables to consider and this is one piece of the jigsaw.
Watch out for more pieces. I am excited that I will be sharing them with you!
Until next time
Best wishes
Bridget
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