How to be Confident in an Instant

As you all know my areas of expertise are Learning and Communication and I do a lot of business networking. I was approached to do a workshop for students about “ Communication and Networking in Business “ – not a particularly sexy title! I designed the workshop around the importance and purpose of networking and we talked about how success is not possible without effective communication, both external and internal.

In considering internal communication, how you connect and interact with yourself, I asked the students to set a goal for the workshop and every single one of them wanted to be more confident.
I really appreciated their honesty and we worked on a technique that enables them to become more confident in an instant.
If I had asked the same question of a group of business owners or business professionals I wonder if I would have got the same degree of honesty? Because as adults we often appear to be confident or even convince ourselves we are when in fact we are just familiar with a particular situation or have experienced it before, but that is not real confidence.

It is easy to be confident when you know people really well or when you’ve been doing a job for some time but this confuses confidence with familiarity. I meet many people who are confident in certain situations but are totally lacking in confidence in an unfamiliar one.
Real confidence is being comfortable enough with yourself to enter an unfamiliar situation with a “bring it on “ attitude and it can be transferred to a different situation with equal self –belief.

Now there may be any number of situations where you lack confidence but they all have one thing in common – they will be based on some kind of fear about your ability to succeed.
All problems are problems of imagination and all solutions are solutions of imagination and you can make your imagination work for you, helping you to be more confident, rather than against you picturing everything that can go wrong.

An easy way to do this is to think back to a time in the past, a specific time, when you have felt truly confident.
Imagine being there and notice what you see, hear, and say to yourself in your own mind when you know you are this confident.
Notice how you breathe.
Notice how you stand.
Notice what you feel.
Notice how others are responding positively to this confident you.
Then practise being in this state , adopting the breathing, stance and feelings of being confident.

You can use the power of this image to build confidence so that you can switch it on whenever you need to and it will make you feel good in any situation in an instant.

Until next time….

With best wishes for your success,

Cath

Cath Daley Ltd.