It’s easy to believe that feeling a lack of confidence in certain situations and yet confident in others is something outside of our control. That is it just happens that way and we can’t do anything about it.
Today I worked with a client who mid-way through our session bemoaned the fact that she could easily deal with difficult people or situations that made other people melt and yet feel tense, uptight and unhappy if her teenage stepson made a negative remark.
Learning to be confident
She was coming to see me so that she could regain her confidence and get back into work and re-establish her career.
Her remark and desires reminded me that in CV speak there is the phrase ‘transferable skills’. This is used to convince the reader that the candidate has skill sets that they can use in different industries and businesses.
My client thought about this for a moment and realised that she could get the feelings of confidence just by talking about and being back in those times that she knew she’d been confident.
We talked about the qualities of these feelings and where she felt them in her body.
Training your Mind
Then we trained her mind to associate these feelings to the sensation of her squeezing the thumb and finger of her right hand together. We did this a few times until it got to the point that she only had to press her thumb and finger together and she had all the feelings of being confident in that way again.
This is a well known NLP technique used by thousands of people and borrowed from everyday life. We all have certain physical or sensory-based triggers that take us to a different state of mind.
For example walking past a bakery where delicious aromas of freshly baked bread are wafting out into the street will make many of us feel instantly hungry or have a strong urge to tuck into some bread.
How to Make it Last
Now I’m not saying this one tool is a cure-all wonder. But what I am suggesting is that once you realise you can direct your mind from one state to another you begin to understand that you have more control and choice. You really can decide what state of mind to be in at different times and in different situations.
I suggested to my client that having practised this technique with me she put it to use immediately after the session and as many times as possible until it became an almost unconscious behaviour. This would have two outcomes, firstly that it would firmly establish the neural pathway to change to a confident state of mind and secondly that subconsciously she was now aware that her confident self could appear on demand.
She considered this for a moment and thought about all the situations in the near future that would be different now she had this skill. She was looking down and then ever so slowly at first she turned her face upwards and a huge and infectious grin spread across her face and her eyes lit up and she laughed out loud and exclaimed: “Wow!”
If you adopted this skill how could you use it and what changes to your life would the ability to choose your state of mind make?