Building Self Confidence

Confidence is something that can have different meanings to different people, because in many ways confidence is something that is relative. Building self confidence is therefore about first identifying those areas of your life in which you would benefit from increased confidence.

Confidence also has other dimensions, in that:

1. One person may be confident about one thing, but not another.

2. One person may have a part of their life in which they are very confident, yet appear to lack self confidence in general.

3. What other people see can vary; one may have the impression you are confident, and another may not.

4. You may appear very confident in public, when in fact you are not.

Self confidence then is nothing straightforward. It can even be confusing. I still have a vivid memory many years ago of being on a tough management course. We were given the task of playing the role of making a presentation to a high powered boss, to explain why certain action was needed to deal with a situation. The "situation" was given to each of us on the course, and it was quite a heavy document with lots of pages of information and background, about something totally new to us all. We were given an hour to read it all, comprehend it, and then be ready to make the presentation, on video, with the whole class, about 16 I think, then watching the video.

That particular day was in the middle of a London winter, and I had commuted a long distance, and several hours, as usual to get there. I had just had a long bout of flu and felt lousy, and I was going through some very serious personal problems. In short, I felt dire and miserable, and was faced with this torture before a group of other course members.

I dutifully read through, made a few notes, and when it was my turn went to make my presentation, with the whole thing being recorded for playback. Because of the way I felt, my confidence level seemed very low and I did not enjoy the presentation one little bit. We were allowed to take notes in with us, but in the heat of a skilled "grilling" any wavering looking at notes would not look good.

I got through the whole thing, then we all sat around nervously waiting to be torn to pieces when our video was shown. When my video came up, I just did not recognize the person in it as me. "He" was very confident throughout, responded well to all probing, and only once glanced down at the notes, unobtrusively. How I seemed on the video, and how I felt at the time, bore no relation to each other. I was shocked.

So what was it that had got me through the ordeal, appearing supremely confident, when I felt like death warmed up inside and living through a personal nightmare? I am sure it was one thing: memory. Because I had trained my memory a few years earlier, when I rather belatedly started a course for a professional qualification, it was geared up to work subconsciously. Although I felt awful on the surface, my inner self confidence in my memory was enough to carry me through.

Memory, therefore, can be a pillar in building self confidence. Having command of facts at the snap of your fingers is something that will breed confidence in yourself, and impress others, whether you mean to or not.

When I read my first manual on memory, I got to the end, closed the book, and thought: memory is just about self confidence. And, largely, it is, and they feed off each other very well. At least, that has been my own personal experience. I never set out to build my own self confidence, it was just that improving my memory acted as a twin prop of the process to increasing self confidence.

There is, of course, much more to building self confidence than memory, and other aspects are considered elsewhere on this web site.