I Can Improve Your Confidence in One Minute

I have a question for you. 

Do you want to improve your confidence quickly? Even as quickly as inside of a minute?

I’ve been in front of different audiences for some 30 years. I’ve worked with people from all over the world.

High-level entrepreneurs right through to people that are just starting out in their careers. Maybe these people have had experiences in their past which have knocked their confidence. Maybe it’s a young person wanting to go into a job interview.

I’ve worked with guys who might want to have more confidence talking to a woman they admire.

It might be that you’re watching this and just want to have more confidence while developing your business, or to communicate in front of people. It might be that you want to produce videos on YouTube. You’re just not quite sure how to come across confidently on camera.

Often we get our confidence knocked by a bad experience. It could be something that we experienced when we were younger. Or our confidence could be knocked by general interactions during our childhood. We don’t realize that these interactions are building up and negatively affecting us over time.

The key to increasing confidence, and combating these past negative experiences, is physiology. 

In the world of neurolinguistic programming (NLP), the original developers of NLP Richard Bandler and John Riddler discuss the fact that every single human being has an anchor. The anchor is an experience, and it acts as a trigger. When humans experience a situation similar to the anchor, reactionary symptoms are triggered.

So for example, think about something that happened to you when you were younger that could be an anchor. For me, this is when I was young and got a bee sting on my ear. This experience created a strong emotional reaction to something physical. Even now, at age 53, if a bee comes too close to my face I anchor back to that experience when I was younger.

I’ve managed to train myself to consciously not go back to that place. Even though I’m aware of that experience, I have trained myself to prevent the physical trigger symptoms.

The same thing happens with your confidence. If you have a similar past experience, whether verbal or physical, it could cause you to immediately shut down when you’re prevented with a relatable situation to that anchor.

You suddenly don’t feel strong. Your breathing probably gets shallow. You may feel your tummy start to crunch. You might find yourself stepping back a little bit. Your voice may go quieter. Your eyes may lose focus. None of these reactions are unusual.

So, I want you to be aware of this because you can make a change literally in a moment. And then practice that change to create a really strong positive anchor, an emotional reaction to something that you are looking to do and then create a trigger to make sure you keep going back into that space.

At the moment, every time you face this challenge, that lack of confidence probably comes surging out. It’s in your face. You can hear yourself saying certain things to yourself. Your body starts to shut down. And that’s not good. 

You and I both know that if you can get this right, you can control this, you own this. If you can feel empowered when you need to, it doesn’t matter what the circumstances are, you can take control of that situation in a positive way.

So, think about a time when you typically start to feel that lack of confidence. Pay attention to what’s going on with your body. It will probably be a physiological reaction. Maybe your breathing is a bit shallower. It will probably shift your focus. You’ll probably notice you’re saying things to yourself like ‘What if this doesn’t work? What are they going to think about me?’

I want you to erase these thoughts. Instead, I want you to imagine a moment when you were really confident. Think about when you have felt great. Maybe it’s coming out of a movie, and you feel great. Maybe you did something positive in your work place. Maybe you helped somebody out and you feel really confident. You think, “Wow, I feel great” and that person thanks you for what you’ve done. That gives you a surge of positivity. Imagine how that feels.

Picture that positive scene. How does it feel? Your legs, your body, the muscles in your chest, your breathing, your eyes, the intensity of your face illuminating. And just get a feel for how confidence feels in your body.

And then what I want you to do is picture the scene that makes you nervous. I want you to imagine yourself in those circumstances, what an amazingly confident person would act like? How would they feel? How would they look? How would they physically act?

Become that person. And just run a movie of it in your mind, go through it, I’m going to sit like this, I’m going to walk like this, and talk like this and imagine that feeling. Imagine – I can present this, I own this moment, I control this moment. 

You’ve got to find language that is really engaging, really empowering. When you combine those two together, it’s like mixing up an incredible cake that you’re just about to pop in the oven, and when it puts the heat on, which is you putting the focus on, it creates this amazing cake. Bread puffs up, or whatever it is, that’s the confidence we are talking about. 

The physiology has to come in. How does confidence look when you focus on it? When you walk into that meeting, focus on getting a great result.

When you walk up to that beautiful woman, or beautiful man, focus on the reaction to you. Are they smiling at you?

If you’re giving a presentation, focus on how the audience is smiling and engaging with you. Focus on how they’re laughing with you.

If you’re shooting yourself on video, imagine people sitting forward and taking notes.

If you have these thoughts running through your mind, they’ll create a harmony with your physiology. They’ll create a harmony with your words and your body language.

The final icing on the cake is to find an anchor. An anchor is when you trigger an emotion. For me, my anchor is to bounce up and down before I’m about to speak in front of an audience. So you’ll see me pumping up my system. Getting my heart going using a vibration or a jigger.

You may not be able to do this if you’re going into an interview. But you could do something that creates a similar result, like closing your eyes and transporting yourself to that amazing moment.

Find something. A piece of music, a physical movement, an anchor point. It will allow you to instantly, within a minute, go to that place that can calm you down and bring you to a place of full confidence.

Hopefully this has helped and given you a sense of how you can get confident instantly. The most important thing is to develop a set of really powerful beliefs about who you are as a person and what you can achieve. Build on those beliefs. If you do that, you will start to find that instant confidence comes to you naturally.