Building self confidence step by step

Charles as a young man wondered how some people were able to pick up the phone without hesitation to make those awkward calls. He consulted many experts to try to find the magic formula that would give him the power to surge through the working day with no cringing or apprehension but no concrete solution was forthcoming.

Come his 50th birthday, he looked back on this youthful fear with a tiny touch of self mockery, wondering how he could have been so anxious - as if making a phone call could frighten anyone!

So what had happened in the meantime? What top-level management course had worked this change?

The fact is that self-confidence is not something that can be installed in your brain by theoretical explanations: it's something that is built up by experience. Most people would agree with that, but the term "experience" needs to be teased open to help us build up self-confidence quickly and efficiently rather than counting on chance life events to either make or break it.

Experience is linked to feelings - the emotional reactions that accompany every sensory context. Many varied events - a rude reaction, an intellectual challenge, aircraft turbulence, a difficult ski-slope - provoke in us negative feelings that go from discomfort to fear, as well as a strategy for dealing with the situation (fight, flight, denial, nothing, intellectualisation, blame...) The results of the strategy then provoke a certain degree of happiness according to their success or failure and our role in them, and the whole episode from the initial context, the strategy, the results and our feelings are encoded in our "experience bank" that we commonly call our memory and they serve to adjust the way we react to any further difficult situations.

The crucial constructive part of the process for self confidence is the degree of happiness we experience from the results of our coping strategy. This is one of the most under-exploited aspects of the human brain: successful outcome in the face of adversity provokes extraordinary good feelings that provoke the inestimable benefit of increasing our self-confidence. It's under-exploited because it requires the application of discomfort in the first step - why would anyone want to seek out discomfort unnecessarily? Well, the fact is that to get to that happy point that Charles realised on his 50th birthday, we need to have dealt with a certain number of adverse experiences. It therefore makes sense to put ourselves in the way of some challenges in controlled situations to accelerate our preparation for dealing with the unexpected ones.

One of the many reasons that dance has been practised in every human civilisation is that it provides this opportunity. Every new body coordination learned, every technical detail accomplished is a new physical challenge that you will overcome with time and practice and that will add to your personal genuinely-experienced stock of self-confidence making you better equipped to deal with all ulterior life events and work experiences.

Learning one new step a day has been seen to significantly reduce anxiety.

https://advance.sagepub.com/articles/SAGE_main_doc_docx/9641816

For free online 3-minute movement challenges go to www.clickanddance.com