For many people, when they feel slimmer and healthier, they feel better and more confident.

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Dr. K Weight Loss

It contains a lot of information about how to lose weight without dieting.

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Another Confidence Video!

Another Confidence Video:

If you’re like most people you hate the idea of making mistakes. Who wouldn’t? We get taught from a very early age that making mistakes is bad. All through school, you get punished for making mistakes and rewarded for not making them.

Imagine if the teacher said to you: “I’m so pleased that you got 51% of this test wrong”. It doesn’t happen. In fact, even if you got 90%, the teacher would concentrate on the 10% you got wrong.

And so we develop the erroneous belief that we must avoid making mistakes at all costs. But the problem is, when we aren’t making mistakes we are also aren’t learning.

Think of a baby learning to walk. Babies fall over all the time when they are learning to walk. Unless she makes mistakes, she’s not going to even be able to stand. She has to keep trying, learning a little bit from every mistake and finally taking her first steps. It’s only by making mistakes that you learn what works and what doesn’t.

Ask any successful person and they will tell you that they learnt far more from their mistakes than from their successes. Most successful businesspeople have a few failed companies and bankruptcies in their past that set the groundwork for their subsequent success.

Part of being confident is being able to try new things. To cross over from your area of competence into new areas and not feel intimidated and immobilised by fear. When you venture into new areas that are not your strength, you are likely to make mistakes. But it is only with making mistakes that you learn and with the lessons you learn you broaden your experience.

In other words, success in any field means you need to be willing to make mistakes. So how do you make yourself cope better with mistakes. Again, like with much of confidence building, it’s about modifying your beliefs. What are your beliefs about mistakes? Do you feel like mistakes attack your self-worth? Do you feel like mistakes mean you are less of a person. The most empowering way to think of mistakes is to stop calling them mistakes and instead describe them as learning. It is part of learning. And to add to this, the more mistakes you are making, the faster you are likely to be learning.

The person who makes the most mistakes learns the fastest.

In other words, if you want to learn quickly, you need to be out there making as many mistakes as possible. And surely, we all want to learn things as fast as possible. What’s the benefit in slowing down your progress?

The more comfortable you can be with mistakes, the more likely you are to succeed.

Action Step:

Today, notice if you make any mistakes in anything you do. See what you learn from it. I can guarantee you will learn more from the mistake than you would from a flawless performance. You just need to look for the lesson.

Check out this confidence video!

Confidence isn’t just for the good times. In fact, the mark of a truly confident person is that they maintain their confidence when times are bad. People who are only confident when things are going well for them have a fragile confidence that you can’t really call true confidence.

So how do truly confident people maintain their self-esteem when things get rough? Well, part of confidence is knowing that you can deal with whatever situation comes your way. In other words, you have the ability to deal with problems. Let’s face it, problems are a part of life. It’s even been said, if you’re not having problems, you’re probably dead.

So it makes sense that we should learn to deal with problems as best we can. But if dealing with problems is a sign of confidence, conversely having confidence can help us deal with problems. It’s kind of a self-powering loop. The better you get at solving problems, the more you confident you feel. The more confident you feel, the better your attitude, and therefore it will be more likely that you will be able to solve problems.

So how do we get better at solving problems? We get practice! We deal with every single small problem we can find and then build our way up to larger and larger problems.

The key to problem solving is keep a solution focus. Don’t get too hung up on the problem. You can spend all day thinking about the problem and make yourself feel worse and worse. Instead focus on the solution. Have faith that you can find a solution.

First of all, define the problem. Write it down on paper if you need to. Then start trying to come up with solutions. Write as many as you can. At least 20. Yes 20! The more the better. Often people find that the 20th is the best solution. Once you have written down as many solutions as you can, pick the best three or four. Apply the solution to your life. If it works, great, you just solved a problem! If it doesn’t try the second, third or fourth options. Repeat until this works.

If you can, also ask the help of someone who has had a similar problem before. Why reinvent the wheel? If they already have found a solution, you can borrow theirs’ and avoid the time taken to discover it yourself.

Once you get good at problem solving, you will feel more and more confident.

I often get asked by clients I work with on confidence issues, whether they will need to be free of anxiety to be truly confident. The image they have of truly confident people is someone who is pretty much relaxed about everything. They think that a confident person is so full of self-belief that this prevents them from experiencing anxiety.

This is a myth, since even truly confident people feel anxiety in certain situations. Confidence does not mean the absence of fear. It does not mean the absence of anxiety. Confident people may get anxious in certain situations that they are not comfortable in. But the difference with the confident person is that they respond to anxiety and fear differently.

A less confident person sees anxiety and fear as unpleasant and a trigger to either not act or to run away from the situation. A truly confident person, on the other hand, feels the anxiety and fear but uses this as a trigger to take action. They have felt the fear, but are able to act in spite of it.

Remember someone who has practiced a particular skill like playing the guitar may be confident in that particular skill, but that doesn’t make them truly confident. Their strong confidence while playing the guitar might crumble when you put them in a social situation like a drinks party. Confidence is the ability to take action even in situations where one is not so comfortable or practiced. Confident people will still feel uncomfortable in certain situations but it doesn’t stop them from acting.

Knowing that confidence doesn’t mean the absence of fear can be very liberating. Some people say that they thought they could never be confident because they felt so anxious. But again, it’s not whether you feel anxiety that determines whether you are confident, but what you do with that anxiety.

Do you know how confident people make decisions?

They make them quickly and firmly. The fact is, decisiveness is confidence in action.

A person who is confident in their thoughts and actions makes decisions quickly. They don’t hesitate. Why would they? They are confident in their judgement.

How do you make decisions? Most people are not confident. And most people are not decisive. They take a long time to make decisions. They hesitate. They “um” and “ah” and even after they have finally made a decision, they second-guess whether it was a good decision or not.

This is not for you. If you are to be the confident person you know you are, then you need to be decisive. By being decisive you will be giving yourself a huge advantage over everyone else you know. It’s worth the effort to focus on decisiveness.

So you’ve realized that you’re actually not very good at something. Can you develop confidence in something that you’re incompetent at? Yes. Will being confident make up for the incompetence? No.

Confidence without competence is not a particularly good idea. As they say in marketing, if you’re promoting yourself before you get good, you just speed up the rate at which people find out you’re no good.

But, wait a second. How do you get competent? Competence requires time and effort. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. So once you put in the time, you will get the competence. But this is where confidence comes in. If you’re good at something, but don’t have confidence in yourself, you will continually undersell yourself. You need confidence in yourself and in your abilities to push yourself further to achieve more.

But confidence also plays a role before you get good at stuff. Confidence allows you to venture into an area that you otherwise are no good. Confidence helps you to develop competence. People who are truly confident are able to transfer their confidence to areas where they wouldn’t normally feel comfortable. That transferred confidence allows them to have a superior attitude, which enables them to pick up new skills quicker than someone who was lacking in confidence.

When we develop our skills and abilities in a certain area, we go through 4 distinct stages. The first stage is that of unconscious incompetence. That’s when we don’t even know what we don’t know. Then comes conscious incompetence. That’s when we realize how little we know, and how much we need to improve. This can be frustrating and demoralizing. This is where, the truly confident person distinguishes themselves. They have confidence in their ability to learn and become skilled in this new area. They push through to the third stage, which is conscious competence. You know what to do, but you have to be fully attentive when you do it. The final stage is unconscious competence. You know what to do, and you don’t even need to be attentive, because the skill is imprinted.

So you see, confidence without competence is no good. But it can help you push through and make the effort required to be competent. Once you have both confidence and competence, you are unstoppable!

If you want to know how to gain confidence, there are two sides of the equation. One is making sure that you do things that build up your confidence. The second is being able to deal with things that can potentially drain your confidence.

Think of this example. At the Smith Company office, John and George have just been told off by their boss. Told off is putting it mildly; they were screamed at. John feels awful. He feels like his confidence in his abilities has been wiped out. He goes home miserable. Now, looking at this situation, it is easy to understand why John feels that way. He was screamed at by his boss. We can easily understand that being screamed at by his boss made him feel miserable. That makes sense.

But does it really make sense. When you look at George’s case, you start to doubt the cause and effect relationship. George was screamed at even more by the boss. He feels a little bad about it, but understands that it really only applied to that one particular mistake that he and John made. The screaming has no impact on his self-esteem and he goes home and is able to relax and forget about it.

So why did the boss screaming at John make him miserable while not really affecting George? The reason is their beliefs. The beliefs they have colored their perception so that one felt bad while the other felt OK. John’s belief was that the boss screamed at him showed that he was incompetent. So he felt bad. George interpreted the screaming as simply related to one mistake and didn’t think the boss thought that he was incompetent. So he felt OK.

So the beliefs you have affect the way that you interpret the situation. Now who was right in this particular scenario? We don’t know. But who has the better attitude and maintained their confidence? Clearly, George.

Next time you are in a situation that there seems to be a natural response to feel bad, question it. You will discover that underlying the bad feeling is a belief that makes you feel that way. If you change the belief, you will change the response.