August Newsletter

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Word of the Month: Self-Confidence

Four Principles for Building Self-Confidence

Did anyone teach you the language of self-confidence when you were young? Did they help you build skills and trust in your own abilities? Or did someone tell you what to worry about or only point out what you did wrong? As a result, do you embody self-confidence? Or, do fear and anxiety drain your energy and cast shadows on your daily activities?

If you’ve lost your self-confidence, I’d like to show you a simple way to get it back.

Tearing Down Self-Confidence: What Not To Do

We begin to learn our language of self-confidence and its cousin, fear, when we’re very young. I observed a profound example of this during an outing to my local botanic garden.

My sister and I went to the Chicago Botanic Garden to photograph spring flowers and wildlife. We parked ourselves on a hill among the poppy gardens and lost ourselves in the blooms—until a four-year old girl joined us.

As this four-year old climbed to the top of the hill, her Nana called out, “Be careful! Don’t fall down!” As you can imagine, the little girl ran down the hill shouting, “Look, Nana, I not fall down!”

This seems relatively normal, right? She’s reassuring her Nana that she can run without falling. But if you could have seen her, she was so focused on “not falling” that her whole body looked cautious and fearful. She didn’t fall, but she looked like she was preparing to tumble at any moment.

She climbed the hill repeatedly, as children do when they’re learning something, and repeated over and over again, “Look, Nana, I not fall down!”

Knowing this type of negative self-talk rubs against my philosophy, my sister walked over and said, “Oh my gosh, listen to her! All she’s talking about is falling down. Don’t you want to say something?”

I don’t like to get involved in other people’s business, so I wondered if there was a way to do something tactfully. The girl’s Nana, her grandmother, was just trying to keep the girl safe by telling her to be careful and not fall down. The child simply picked up on her language and used it to reassure her. To them, all was well in their world.

Here’s what I did.

Principle 1: Rephrase Self-Talk To Build Self-Confidence

I tried an experiment. The next time she ran down the hill I said, “Look, you’re standing up!”

She tilted her head at me, surprised by the shift in language, then straightened up considerably.

The next time she ran down, she shouted, “Look, Nana, I’m tall.” Her entire posture had changed. She held her head high and her body straight. She radiated self-confidence.

No matter how many times I rephrase language this way for myself and my clients, I am always delighted by the radical, positive shift it makes in body language and emotions.

Next I used Principle 2.

Read More on my blog…

*Update*

Coming in Late August/Early September

Golden Words

The Journal

for

Changing Your Life

One Word at a Time

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