Success Pain Attitude Life Attitude

Confidence Is A Process - From the Book "Unstoppable Confidence" By Kent Sayre

  • Monday, June 20, 2011
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  • Let me let you in on a little secret. Confidence is not a thing. It’s not something you eat, drink, or inject into yourself. It’s none of that. By calling something confidence, it’s actually a misnomer. There is only such thing as acting confident or behaving in a confident way. There isn’t a confidence pill you take to become confident in whatever you do. Someone who behaves in a confident manner is said to have confidence. Someone who behaves in a tentative manner is said to lack confidence. And confidence is context dependent. Confidence isn’t pervasive everywhere in all facets. You don’t catch it like a disease. It’s simply a process that you do inside your mind.

    The same goes for any emotion, be it fear, sadness, depression or anxiety. None of these are actual ‘things’. They are the result of processes, sequences of thought that you run in your mind. Up until now, you may not have been aware of that you were doing this, and the vital thing to realize is that you have complete control over these processes. You can decide which mental processes have use and which do not, and if they are useless, you can stop, interrupt and banish them.

    Let’s begin now to blow out those negative emotions. A great place to begin to interrupt and banish those useless thought processes is to consider the language you use to describe them. Let’s say you’ve feared public speaking. How do you describe this to yourself? If you say, ‘I have a fear of speaking in public,’ you are, in a sense, taking possession of something that is just a mental process! What if you were to describe what is really happening and say, ‘When I think about a certain context, I run a process in my mind which I have labeled as ‘fear’.’ How much does that change things for you? How much better do you feel, knowing that what you previously described as ‘a fear of public speaking’ is really just a process you ran in your mind?

    Begin now to notice how you have been describing your other negative emotions. Have you been saying things like, ‘I always get nervous when I talk to strangers’, ‘Talking to customers makes me anxious,’ ‘I just feel depressed,’? Instead of feeling, ‘I feel sad’, describe for yourself what is really going on: ‘I choose to think in a certain way that results in my feeling ‘sad’ when I encounter a certain set of circumstances.’ It may sound a bit hokey at first, but as you think about it, really think about the meaning of that sentence, you will begin to gain a sense of how truly liberating this is.

    By changing your language you change your life.

    The language you use to describe what you are feeling impacts that feeling tremendously, and it is your knowledge, your awareness of these processes that gives you power over them. Just like when somebody says, “I’m depressed”. What they’ve done here is built that notion into their very being. Nobody can be depressed all the time. If they were, they wouldn’t call it depression. It’d just be their normal state of being. Instead, people who consider themselves depressed should be saying, “I run a process through my mind that causes me to experience certain pictures, sounds, and feelings inside that I have collectively labeled as depression.” The same goes for anxiety.

    Now, after taking control of these processes, put a good emotion in place of the negative emotion. “I have absolute confidence in public speaking.” Try that out. The negative processes do not serve you. If you catch yourself running one of these negative processes, interrupt it! Inside your mind, go FFFFFFFFTTTT….wait a minute….STOP! Make the sound inside your mind…DING…stop the negative process. Start the resourceful process. As you go through your day, become aware of what you are seeing, hearing, and thinking inside yourself and realize that you have control. Change your physiology to have a confident state. Change your internal pictures, your internal voice to suit you.

    Congratulate yourself when you stop the negative processes and praise yourself when you start a confident process, because you get more of what you reinforce. Praising yourself gives you incentive to run the resourceful process. Naturally, you’ll then be more likely to do it again in the future. After all, you should treat yourself well. Some people have negative internal voices nagging at them all day. How awful would it be to live like that? Remember, the only person who you spend all your time with is yourself. You may as well have great rapport with yourself. Compliment yourself. Praise Yourself. Just do it. When you do something well, congratulate yourself.Similarly, do that whenever you step outside your comfort zone. Celebrate those successes and reward yourself accordingly!

    For example, consider the example of the rookie salesperson, Janet. Janet finds herself saying, “Talking to customers is scary. They frighten me and I feel the fear when I go to ask them to purchase my product. I just don’t know what to do.”

    What is occurring here is that Janet has give up her personal power by using dis- empowering language. If we were to reword her language in such a way that would allow her to easily change her perception of the situation, the translation would be, “According to me, right now, talking to customers causes me to experience a certain emotion that I describe as scary. I choose to allow them to frighten me and I do something inside my mind that collectively I label as fear which I then feel while I ask them to purchase my product. I don’t know what to do yet.”

    Here is what Jan can do to immediately gain control over her emotions:

    1. Append “according to me at this time” onto every sentence of hers. This forces her to acknowledge that what she is describing is not absolute truth and not etched in stone for all time.

    2. Whenever there is an unwanted emotion (e.g., fear, guilt, anxiety), she must prepend the emotion with the following phrase, “I choose to experience a certain emotion by doing something inside my mind which causes me to experience a set of pictures, sounds, and feelings that I collectively have labeled…” [Emotion] This requires Janet to take the fixed emotion and turn it back into a process, which it already was all the time. It also demonstrates to her that she is the one doing the process. Since she is the one doing the process that means that she obviously has control over it.

    3. When she catches herself using that dis-empowered language, after she restates it using the guidelines above, she must empower herself by using sentences stating how she will behave in the future. An example is, “Although I’ve done that in the past, I wonder how quickly I will find myself becoming more relaxed and confident when I go to ask the customers to purchase my product.”

    As you’ve gone through this example and seen how it’s done, and read the step-by-step account of how to do it yourself, you now realize you can do it now. In fact, it’s now time for you to think of five unwanted emotions and a context in which you experience those emotions. While you do that, become cognizant of the language you are using to describe what you really do to experience those unwanted emotions, and think of emotions that would best fit in their place after you rid yourself of them. Following that, do the exercise of changing your language and adding in more empowered language. Remember that when you change your language you change your life.

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