Confidence | Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

Apr 12

New Series: How to Be Amazing

Posted in Announcements

What would make you amazing?

That’s what I asked some of my personal development mailing list members last week.

Some, I know, are still thinking about it (if that’s you, here’s your reminder to email me with your answer). But here are some answers I received:

To be more comfortable around people. I’m always worried about what I’m saying or doing, if it’s the right thing or not, second-guessing what people think of me. It makes being round people tiring and stressful and, guessing again, makes me tiring and stressful to be around. It would be nice to be relaxed around people, rather than putting on a detached and rather fraught performance.

To get the best of here and now, to do things here and now, rather than live in daydreams. My mind is always at least half way somewhere else. Imaginary people and conversations. Dreams of schemes and projects I’ll do ‘one day’.

Better focus and concentration. My mind’s so used to the entertainment and ease of my dream world I find it hard to put the work in to achieve things in reality.

I would like to organise events and activities for my friends and the wider community that are popular and successful.

I’d like to be able to get up earlier in the morning and be decisive enough to get on and do all the things I want to fit in to my day.

I’d love to be able to inspire people to take action on the issues that I feel are important (like environmental sustainability and conservation) both at work and in my social life.

I’d like to be more popular and have more friends.

Among the many things I find interesting about these answers, three in particular stand out.

Common Themes

Firstly, there are some clear common themes between them. I’m sure others will come out as I receive more responses, but being more comfortable when interacting with other people, and being able to take action and achieve the things that are important to you, both recur.

If you think about it for a moment, these are connected goals. To be able to achieve anything significant, you need to impact other people, and you almost certainly need the help, support and involvement of other people (which is why I do things like asking questions of my mailing list – in fact, why I have a mailing list at all). You need to be able to come out of your head and bring your thoughts, dreams, ideals and plans into contact with real life (where they will inevitably be modified). It takes energy, commitment and focus.

photo credit: paul (dex)

Familiar Themes

For a while now, I’ve been asking people who join my mailing list, “What can I do for you?” I would send an email out the day after you joined, asking for your pain points, the issues that you’d love to get solved, and how that would make your life better.

I’ve had a wide variety of responses, but they seem to be converging lately on wanting to be more confident and at ease in the world, and wanting to be able to focus, pull things together and achieve more in life.

My email last week was a straw in the wind to see if changing the emphasis of that first email would work. Rather than focussing on “what problem do you have that you want solved so you can be ‘normal’?”, I’d like to reframe it as, “what change in your life would enable you to be much more than you are now?”.

One thing I’ve learned in my working life is that I’d much rather be involved in creating things than in fixing them. There’s a place for fixing, of course, for helping people who are in pain and in trouble. That will always be needed, and I love to see the difference it makes. But my ambition for the people I work with is higher than just restoring them to being “OK”. I’ve seen some of my clients go on to be amazing, and I want to see that happen more and more.

So here’s the official announcement: I’m changing the welcoming email. Instead of “What can I do to help you fix your pain?” it’s now “What can I do to help you transcend your limitations and be more than you ever thought you could be?”

Themes I Relate To

We humans are odd. We communicate, it seems, at a level that goes far beyond words. We walk around with signs on our foreheads telling other people about ourselves and how we expect to be treated and how we’re likely to react. And we read other people’s signs without even being consciously aware of it.

Without being at all mystical about it, I believe that if you communicate enough, people will be drawn to you who have a good fit with what you’re about, even if neither they nor you could fully explain what that is.

Which is my preface to saying, those responses that I got are about exactly the issues that I’ve been working on myself over the last few years. And I’m sure that’s got across to those lovely people who responded (who have been reading my stuff for a while now).

For most of my life I’ve been shy and socially awkward. Doing improv (which involves a lot of eye contact and connection with your fellow players) has recently helped me become more comfortable with making eye contact with people – which in turn has highlighted to me how much I avoided doing that.

And I’ve always been a dreamer (typing that inevitably starts the Eagles song “Take It to the Limit” playing in my head). Up until the past few years, I’ve seldom followed a project right through to completion or achieved much of anything, because, as one of my respondents put it, my mind was “so used to the entertainment and ease of my dream world I found it hard to put the work in to achieve things in reality”.

Because I’m working on those issues myself, and because I’m a couple of years ahead on them, and because I’ve developed a knack of coming up with practical approaches to help people shift their thoughts, feelings and behaviours, I feel confident that I can provide some useful stuff for other people who are still being held back from their best life by a lack of connection, confidence and sustained action-taking.

So, alongside my series on How Not to Change Your Life, which deals with things that hold you back, I’m going to start running a How to Be Amazing series, on things that will move you forward. They’ll more or less alternate.

We can become amazing together.

And if you haven’t told me yet what would help you to be amazing, email me (mikerm at hypno dot co dot nz) and tell me. The questions I asked were:

What would make your life amazing? What do you secretly wish you could do, but you’re not sure you can?
Why is that important to you?
And what’s stopping you?

UPDATE: This series will continue on my new website, How to Be Amazing.

comments: 0 » tags: anxiety, attention, change your life, confidence, how to be amazing, motivation, personal change

Mar 29

How to Own Your Space: 3 Confidence Exercises

Posted in Techniques

A well-dressed, wealthy businessman and a homeless man are walking down the same street. Who has more status?

Well, if it’s daylight and a main street, probably the businessman. But if it’s a dark alley where the homeless man lives and is comfortable, and the businessman is in fear of his life, it’s the homeless man. He owns the space.

This is the definition of “status” used in improv. As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, I’m doing an improv class at the moment (with fellow hypnotherapist Wade Jackson, who’s basically Mr Improv in New Zealand), and last week’s class was on status.

Status, in this definition, isn’t about hierarchy or theoretical social position. It’s about who owns this space here, now.

Status as inner control

At first that sounds very competitive and macho. But when you dig in a little deeper, a lot of what status is about has to do with how comfortable you are in your own skin. The person who is desperately, aggressively trying to dominate doesn’t have high status – they’re trying too hard. But the person who indulgently lets such a person do what they want – who demonstrates in this way that this is their space and they can lend it to others if they feel like it – has status.

The centered person who doesn’t care about the outward markers of status, who doesn’t have to be the one dominating the conversation, who is happy to step back and let others step forward, and who can let go of outward control because he or she has inner control – that is the person who has status.

Now, most of us aren’t like that. But if you’ve been around here for any length of time, you know that once I get hold of an idea like this, I immediately start thinking about how to turn it into teachable techniques of personal development.

Status Enhancing Techniques

So here we go: three techniques to grow your own (improv-definition) status and inner confidence.

1. Status Gym

Go to a place where you feel at home, a space you own. Very probably this will be where you live.

Stand in the space and close your eyes.

Feel how you relate mentally to the space. Do you feel as if your presence fills it?

Imagine your presence as a bubble surrounding you, a kind of personal force field. Where does the field stop?

Now imagine the field a little larger. Keep stretching it in your imagination until it’s as big as it gets.

Let it fall back to the size it was before.

And stretch, and back, and stretch, and back – put your heart into it!

That’s the way.

Like a muscle, your sense of personal presence will strengthen and grow as you exercise and stretch it.

2. The Alice in Wonderland technique

Alice, if you recall, kept finding things that made her shrink and grow.

Next time you’re somewhere that you’re reasonably comfortable – preferably a situation with other people – pay attention to your own body language, and try Alicing a bit.

When you own less of the space, how does your body feel? What shapes does it take on?

When you own more of the space, how does your body feel? What shapes does it take on?

Pay special attention to the “owning more” body language. Record it clearly in your mind. Practice it. Take it as your new norm, and then practice getting bigger from there.

3. Status Judo

A lot of Eastern martial arts are based on the principle of using the opponent’s strength to your advantage (which is why little old Chinese monks and petite women who are martial arts masters can defeat much larger opponents).

This is partly an awareness exercise. Be aware of aggressive people around you – on the road, at work, in your family. People who are trying to exert force or power to get what they want. Most people get aggressive from time to time, and some are always like that.

Is your natural instinct to resist? Mine is.

Instead of doing that, though, how can you remain in ownership of the space without struggling over it?

If you let their aggression go past you without resisting, they’ll be off balance. What can you do then?

Smile, remain calm and reasonable, agree with them where you can. While they’re confused, suggest mutually beneficial arrangements.

This is status judo.

Getting more confidence

If confidence is an issue for you, by the way, I recommend you take a look at my review of Vlad Dolezal’s Unleash Your Confidence ebook. It’s got some great techniques to increase your confidence and inner strength so that your presence can shine out around you, and you can own your space. (In that review, I offer a confidence hypnotherapy recording as a bonus when you buy Vlad’s very reasonably-priced ebook through my link. That offer is still good.)

So, any stories about owning space that you want to share? Do so in the comments.

comments: 2 » tags: anxiety, attention, change your life, confidence, practice

Mar 10

Review: Unleash Your Confidence by Vlad Dolezal

Posted in Reviews

Lack of confidence is one of those issues that most people have. For me, it used to be meeting new people. For you, it might be speaking in public or launching a new project. So I’ve been thinking about creating some kind of confidence resource for a while, particularly since I’ve been increasing my own confidence.

But now I don’t have to write something, because Vlad Dolezal has a new ebook out called Unleash Your Confidence, and it’s excellent. (Read the whole review – there’s a surprise from me near the end.)

Who the hell is Vlad Dolezal?

I “met” life coach Vlad Dolezal when I was preparing to launch my Stop Procrastinating, Start Succeeding course. A Google ad in my gmail alerted me to his free course on procrastination. I subscribed to it, as well as to several others – and his was far and away the best. I emailed him to tell him so, and invite him to be part of my Eight Action Takers post, and he graciously accepted.

The other anti-procrastination courses I found had the faults of so much personal development crap material:

There was nothing in them that a reasonably intelligent person couldn’t figure out for themselves,
They consisted of what I call “vague encouragement”, without much in the way of concrete exercises to actually change things, and
They were flat-out dull.

Not so with Vlad’s. He had specific techniques which he explained well, which weren’t just worthy good conventional advice, and he presented them in a casual, enjoyable yet always responsibly professional voice. (His site is called “Fun Life Development”, and he delivers on that promise.)

So when he approached me (personally, not in a mass mailout) to be part of launching his Unleash Your Confidence ebook, I had high expectations. And I can tell you that all of the same good things that I’ve just said about his procrastination course are also true of his ebook on confidence. It’s well-written, concrete, practical and enjoyable.

5 products I won’t review

A while back, I looked at another confidence product which had an attractive affiliate program (meaning, if I recommended it I would potentially earn nice money). I subscribed and read through the lessons – nah. Not going to recommend that to my subscribers, sorry. It was flat and ordinary and I just couldn’t summon any enthusiasm for it.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve had five approaches by people wanting to joint-venture with me in various ways. One came from a virtual assistant who misspelled my name even more badly than people usually do, and asked me to promote a website that didn’t excite me – I ignored that one. One came off as spammy, and I ignored that too. One was just another worthy vague encouragement ebook, like a thousand others (ironic, given that it was about how to stand out as an individual). And the fourth relied on a technique which I’m not convinced is effective.

Vlad’s was the fifth, and it’s the only one I’m going to recommend to you. I am very, very fussy about the products I review – too fussy, in some ways. Most personal development products get me thinking, “I could write a better one than this.” Vlad’s got me thinking, “I wish I’d written this.”

Yes, it has an affiliate program, which I’m part of – if you buy it using my link, I get some money. But that’s true of most of the ones I didn’t review, too.

As I mentioned before, I’ve been increasing my own confidence over the past several years, and the methods I’ve used are largely the ones in this book.

What’s in the box

So what’s in Unleash Your Confidence?

The main part is a 55-page ebook. It starts with a minimal amount of definition and theory (I’m always happy to see minimal theory and maximal practice). Then it sets out half a dozen straightforward, well-described techniques to increase your confidence. They are:

Changing your “mental movies” around situations where you don’t feel confident,
Dealing with the voice in your head that criticises you and reduces your confidence,
Moving beyond the limiting beliefs you hold about yourself and the world,
Taking gradual action to build up your confidence,
Using confident body language to feed back into your mental state, and
Pre-capturing a confident mental state to play back in critical situations.

Throughout, he uses everyday images and metaphors to make his points clear, and tells you exactly how to do the exercises that will (I’m confident) change your thoughts and feelings about the situations that currently intimidate you.

The version I read was an Adobe pdf, but if you like to read on a mobile device like an iPhone or a Kindle, Vlad also provides it in .mobi and .epub. Nice.

As a bonus, he also includes a second ebook setting out a personal development technique called the GROW model. GROW is an acronym, and the technique is fresh and well-thought-out.

At this point in a review I usually talk about what I didn’t like, but honestly, there wasn’t anything. Vlad’s name may be hard to spell, but his ebook is easy to recommend.

It’s $11 (USD) this week and $17 thereafter. That, folks, is a bargain. Go and buy Unleash Your Confidence.

(Vlad will send you an emailed receipt. As an extra inducement, if you forward that receipt to me, confidence@hypno.co.nz, I will send you a download link for my audio track Confident Person as an additional bonus. No extra charge, as long as you’ve bought through the link above.)