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What is Confidence and is it An Innate Characteristic or Learned Behavior?
What is confidence? A state of certainty or belief that a person will be able to create or achieve a specific, intentional result...
What is self confidence? Belief in oneself that you have the ability to create a specific desired result.
Is confidence something that a person is born with or is it learned behavior? There are various personality types with characteristics that we would externally assume to be associated with confidence, but this doesn't necessarily mean that this person is actually experiencing self confidence.
For example, at first glance the picture of the woman above may seem like she is exhibiting confidence. She is pointing at herself with both hands, a big smile and if she were talking loudly about her abilities then she might convince a lot of people that she is confident. Some people (perhaps women) may instantly notice that the body language doesn't match the facial expression.
If you could turn off her voice... looking closer at her smile you might notice it isn't a smile because a genuine smile pulls upwards at the corners of a mouth and causes little wrinkles at the outside corners of the eyes. In fact, that woman is barring her teeth - body language used in the animal world to signal perceived danger or a threat. Now that you're looking closer, you may also see tension in her jaw and that her eyes are very focused; revealing that she is likely in foveal vision (a sign of fight or flight response).
What is confidence? Well, how about: internal and external congruence between thinking / feeling patterns and one's certainty that an expected outcome will occur from one's own or another's actions.
Building Self Confidence Through Controlled Failure
How could you go about building self confidence? When I use NLP modeling to study the successful outcomes that industry leaders have created, I find one common theme: failure. But not just normal failure; instead, failing forward and controlled failure.
By failing forward or controlled failure such individuals are actually building self confidence. Consider the irony that a 12 year old kid will spend hours upon hours playing a video game in which s/he is initially failing in the game. You've seen it - or experienced it yourself - that such a kid has no problem losing at a game until the muscle memory and grasp of the game techniques are developed at an unconscious, reactionary level. Once these video gaming "skills" are developed, then the game can be won. But even then, at the end of the day, winning the video game is just a false sense of achievement.
So, why is it so difficult for people to master certain skills such as confidence building in real life? If you knew that all you had to do was fail forward, keep failing and eventually your neurology would adapt to the outcome you desire, then why don't we do this more often? Because we attach meanings to how "failing" might play out in hypothetical scenarios and that is what keeps most people stuck without self-confidence because their egos won't allow them to risk failing.
Think about this - if you can ride a bike, you probably crashed at least once. There's no way around it.
My belief is that most people do not have a recovery strategy like that Complete Confidence 1.0 and Complete Confidence 2.0 hypnosis apps and hypnosis downloads that utilize NLP techniques.
Confidence building, what is confidence, building self confidence.
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