si dawson

Con­fi­dence is a funny thing. It comes in two flavours. How con­fi­dent other peo­ple believe you are, & how con­fi­dent you feel inter­nally. The two are related, but not nec­es­sar­ily linked. E.g., it's quite com­mon that other peo­ple see us as more con­fi­dent than we may actu­ally feel.

So how do you go about becom­ing more confident?

Well, there's a bunch of phys­i­cal attrib­utes: head up, shoul­ders back, firm eye con­tact, firm hand­shake, steady voice. None of this is new or com­pli­cated. You can read more about it here & here.

Chang­ing your pos­ture does change your emo­tional state, so by all means do the phys­i­cal stuff as well (it'll help how you feel), but I'm going to talk about work­ing directly on the non-physical stuff.

Let's start with the easy side of things — how we're per­ceived exter­nally. Other than pos­ture, how do other peo­ple assess how con­fi­dent we are?

By our speech. What we say, how we say it, the words we use.

I got to think­ing about this when read­ing Jean­nette Maw's excel­lent Good Vibe Blog. She was talk­ing about wip­ing out wimpy words. Words that dis­em­power us, make us sound wishy washy, limit us.

These are all words & phrases that will make us seems sig­nif­i­cantly less con­fi­dent than we may actu­ally be.

pic by nnn27

What are some examples?

• Hope­fully
• Prob­a­bly
• Should
• I sup­pose

So, my hypoth­e­sis is, if we stop using these kinds of words, we'll appear (exter­nally) more confident.

Well, that sounds worth doing, but wait up a sec­ond. Before we rush into this, let's think a little.

Who do we talk to the most, out of all of the peo­ple in our lives?

Our­selves, of course.

For every time we say some­thing out loud that makes us sound inse­cure, we're going to be say­ing the exact same thing to our­selves dozens if not hun­dreds of times.

Remov­ing these words from our vocab will not only make us more con­fi­dent to oth­ers, but will also make us notably more con­fi­dent inter­nally, when talk­ing to ourselves.

As within, so with­out — maybe it's not quite so much of a sur­prise after all.

Of course, a healthy goal is to remove that nag­ging inner voice entirely (through med­i­ta­tion, releas­ing etc), but until we reach that noble pin­na­cle of enlight­en­ment & inner peace, we still have to con­tend with our ego. Why not push things in our favour in the meantime?

What's a good way of remov­ing (or at the very least dras­ti­cally min­imis­ing) spe­cific words & phrases from our vocab­u­lary? Well, the tool I've found best for this task is EFT. It's super sim­ple to use and ridicu­lously quick.

If you haven't used EFT before, I've put a quick intro up here. The basic gist is to tap (just like tap­ping a key­board, but with a cou­pla fin­gers at once) on var­i­ous points around the body, while think­ing or say­ing whatever-it-is you want to fix. The tap­ping loosens up energy blocks in the body, your energy starts flow­ing prop­erly again and you auto­mat­i­cally heal (since our nat­ural state is to be 100% healthy).

So how to remove a word from your vocab? Just tap the karate chop point (side of hand) while say­ing some­thing like "Even though I say 'hope­fully' I love & accept myself", or "Even though I use the phrase 'I guess' I love & accept myself." Really, the words don't mat­ter too much, just say what­ever pops in your head & feels right for you. Once you've said that a few times while tap­ping your karate chop point, work your way around the points on the body (pic here), say­ing "I say 'hope­fully" or "I use the word 'hope­fully'" etc & tap­ping each point 5–10 times.

Once you've done a cou­ple of full rounds, & if you want to be really thor­ough, you can do a cou­ple more rounds, say­ing some­thing like "I still say 'hope­fully'." This will clear out any remants that might be left over.

It really is that sim­ple. Total time? 2–3 min­utes a word, if that.

pic by pix­i­etart

Here's the list I cleared out yesterday:

• hope­fully
• prob­a­bly
• should
• try
• pretty sure
• I'll fig­ure it out
• doubt
• can't
• want (since want is syn­ony­mous with 'lack', why not clear that too?)
• I guess
• I sup­pose
• I need to
• I'm not sure
• I don't think
• kinda

Of course, every­one uses dif­fer­ent words & phrases, so your own list will likely be quite dif­fer­ent, but these might help you get started. Just see what res­onates for you.

The funny thing is, as you start to clear them out, other com­monly used lim­it­ing phrases will start to become more obvi­ous & bub­ble to the sur­face. I also felt the way I was think­ing chang­ing. Sounds insane but it's true. I could feel myself using dif­fer­ent phras­ing inter­nally, & as I did, my body became more sure of itself. Not quite sure (ha! I'll add that to my list) how that works, but a def­i­nite exam­ple of the mind/body con­nec­tion at play.

The net result of all this muck­ing about? More con­fi­dent thought pat­terns, more con­fi­dent speech & a sig­nif­i­cantly more con­fi­dent per­sona. Total time taken? A lit­tle over half an hour.