Exploring The Concept Of Confidence

As an active NLP Master Trainer and Personal Development Coach, I often hear the phrase ‘lack of confidence’ from my students and clients.  I’m sure that you have heard the phrase many times too and perhaps used it yourself more times than you would care to admit.  

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Let’s get specific for a moment and ask, “what is this ‘confidence’ that we all value so highly as being critical to our success?” What are people referring to when they talk about confidence, or lack of it? What does it mean for you (The Complex Equivalence in NLP language)? Consider that for a moment, would you please? How specifically do you map ‘confidence’ internally? What does confidence look, sound and feel like to you?

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Models of the world (the way people think) vary considerably from person to person and we all have a slightly different interpretation of confidence and what it means for our performance and capability. For example, when you think about the concept of being confident and how you map it in your mind, do you view it as a process or feel it as an emotion? There is no right and wrong answer to this question, however you map your confidence is perfect for you.

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When you are looking to increase or ‘get’ confidence, which often comes up in life’s daily activities, the most important question you can ask yourself is, ‘How do I know when I lack confidence?’ The question is important because that is what you are doing right now, so it is useful to know how you are mapping ‘not confident’ in your mind so that you can guide your re-mapping process towards changing your internal strategy and therefore creating ‘confidence’. You can understand more about how you create ‘not confidence’ by asking yourself this valuable question set and jotting down a few notes to capture your thinking:

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When you experience ‘not confidence’…

‘What do you feel inside?’

‘What does your physiology feel like?’  

‘What are you saying to yourself in your head?’  

‘What pictures do you have in your head?’  

‘Are there any sounds that are important?’

‘What emotions do you feel?’

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The answers to these questions will give you a crystal clear representation of how you relate to and internally map ‘lack of confidence’.

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The next key question to ask yourself is ‘How do I know it’s time to feel lack of confidence?’ This question will give you the specific trigger, or set of triggers, that sets you off doing your lack of confidence. A few well-constructed and carefully worded questions give you valuable information that you can work with to help yourself resolve the problem and move your thinking towards confidence.

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To help you to move your mental mapping towards confidence, now, you can deploy new internal language patterns to change your perceptions and your view of reality. In NLP, the process of considering something from a different, more resourceful perspective is called reframing. Reframing is a linguistic tool used to break down rigid patterns of thinking and behaviour and make them more fluid and flexible, with more choice. Everything we do in NLP is designed to increase choice and open up possibility and opportunity. When you say that you lack confidence, then you are often stuck in a rigid loop of thinking which produces an undesirable set of behaviours and unacceptable performance levels.  

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Here is a proven and widely successful general reframe for you, a new perspective, a new operational frame to address the problem of ‘lack of confidence’. You can utilise this reframe as an affirmation, repeating it to yourself in your internal dialogue so that your unconscious mind understands that the desired behaviour is confidence. The reframe is elegantly enhanced with a healthy punctuation of quantum linguistics which you will learn as Master Practitioners of NLP:

“Confidence is inextricably linked to familiarity.  The more I repeat or experience an action or an event, the more familiar I become and the more confidence I achieve.  This is how I can create confidence now.  Accepting that this is true, then how can I be confident about something new, that I have never experienced before?  It’s OK not to be confident about something new because it is unfamiliar.  I know that the confidence will grow with familiarity, without me even having to think about being confident now.  Knowing that it is OK, how can I not not notice now how confident I am?”

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(Note: The ‘not not’ statement is intentional and is taken from Quantum Linguistics, designed to confuse the conscious mind and destroy the linguistic boundaries that hold the problem in place.)

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Allowing yourself to think differently about lack of confidence is the first step to removing the issue completely.  As an NLP Practitioner, you can then move forward and remove any limiting beliefs, values conflicts and negative emotions which you have discovered supporting the problem, during your questioning phase of your thinking. An age old complaint, reframed and often removed in a few minutes, such is the power of NLP thinking, elegantly coupled with well-constructed language patterns.

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