Mastering Self-Confidence with NLP

Dr. Kerry L. Johnson

• Publisher: G&D Media
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781722522803
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

Most of us suffer from a lack of self-confidence. Many of us avoid situations in which we lack confidence. But think of the things you could accomplish if you have more self-esteem and self-confidence. This book will show you:

• How to reframe your self-esteem so you can feel truly confident
• How performance anxiety can debilitate you and how to stop it
• How to tap in to past successful memories to increase your present self-confidence
• How to access self-confidence in any situation you want
• How your own self-talk can either make you consistently self-confident or focus you on failure

One of America's foremost business psychologists, will give you concepts and applicable techniques using the newest NLP skills to increase your self-confidence.

One

Why Do You Need Self-Confidence?

Are you self-confident? Do you wonder whether you will be able to complete a task effectively? Do you get nervous during a performance? Do you feel anxiety in sports, business, or even on stage? If you are like a lot of people, you lack self-confidence at times. You sometimes worry if you will be able to complete a task, let alone be successful. You worry that your career and activities will suffer. You really want more out of your life, but aren’t willing to take the risks you need to get there. The answer is to build your self-confidence.

Self-confidence does not merely imply belief in your ability to succeed. You are self-confident about many things, while others cause you stress. A lack of self-confidence often means that you dwell on the negative consequences of failing. But becoming more self-confident means that you can have more enjoyment and success in everything you do.

Many years ago, my daughter Catherine had to go through the long student-loan process to finish college. To say that she was stressed was an understatement. But if I did the loan application for her, not only would she not learn how to do it, she would not have been able to use the experience to develop the confidence that she could do it in the future. So you see, the more successes we can stack up in our life, the more self-confidence we will have in everything else we do.

One of my tennis buddies heard that I was writing a book on self-confidence. He said he had the answer: just win all the time. That will build up your self-confidence.

But in case you lose once in a while, like me, this book is for you.

Did you know that self-confident people make more money? Many studies show a link between high self-confidence and higher levels of income. Some studies have even shown that those who were confident earlier in school earned better wages and were promoted more quickly in their careers.

Much of self-confidence is about self-esteem. Self-esteem is directly connected to your social network. It’s also about your activities and what you hear other people say about you. A positive level of self-esteem can be linked to your psychological and physical health, your body images, and whether you matter to people. Low self-esteem has been linked to depression, health problems, and antisocial behavior.

Your social and academic life impact your self-esteem. Your self-confidence and self-esteem also vary in different environments. While you may feel self-confident at home, you may lack self-confidence in your work.

In this book, you will learn about self-esteem and the attributes of someone with a lot of it. You will also learn about low self-esteem and behaviors showing false self-esteem, like narcissism, arrogance, and egotism. Next, you will learn about change and how difficult it is to modify any part of your personality, especially self-esteem and self-confidence. Only babies like change, yet your willingness to read this book shows that you are emotionally prepared to make the changes necessary to become much more self-confident.

Self-confidence is also about your ability to focus on pleasure instead of pain. Changing your mental state and thinking about the joy of completing a task and a pleasurable outcome will make you much more self-confident. But if instead you allow yourself to pay attention to a possible but improbable painful outcome, you will destroy self-confidence and harm your chances of success in the future.

Next we will talk about locus of control. This will help you understand whether your confidence comes from external things that happen to you, or whether you are able to control your environment. Are you internally controlled and confident? Or are you externally controlled, reactive to what happens around you? We will also help you develop self-efficacy, or your ability to be more effective in everything you do.

Many sports coaches believe that repetition can help you develop self-confidence. I think that’s true. If you do something over and over again, you’ll be confident in your ability to do things successfully. We aren’t talking about false self-confidence, like trying to fly a 747 without any training. We’re focusing on rational self-confidence, when you have to put in what one of my friends calls the “hard yards”—otherwise known as paying your dues.

But repetition, while important, needs to be matched also with goals and outcomes. We will talk about the difference between the two and why experiencing a goal is far better than just setting one.

A lack of self-confidence is usually displayed in anxiety and stress. Often we feel these negative emotions while participating in sporting events, stage performances, and speeches. This kind of stress is called performance anxiety. There are four fears we feel during performance anxiety: the fear of rejection, the fear of looking foolish, the fear of failure, and the fear of success.

Who would ever fear success? The problem is that many of us sabotage ourselves when we are too successful. This sounds very strange, but we will talk about how to manage and alleviate these fears, making it easier for you to develop a self-confident life.

There was a business executive who was deep in debt and could see no way out.

Creditors were closing in on him. Suppliers were demanding payment. He sat on the park bench, head in hands, wondering if anything could save his company from bankruptcy.

Suddenly an old man appeared before him. “I can see that something is troubling you,” he said.

After listening to the executive’s woes, the old man said, “I believe I can help you.”

He asked the man his name, wrote out a check, and pushed it into his hand saying, “Take this money. Meet me here exactly one year from today, and you can pay me back at that time.”

Then he turned and disappeared as quickly as he had come.

The executive saw in his hand a check for $500,000, signed by John D. Rockefeller, then one of the richest men in the world.

“I can erase my money worries in an instant!” the executive realized. But instead he decided to put the uncashed check in his safe. Just knowing it was there might give him the strength to work out a way to save his business, he thought.

With renewed optimism, he negotiated better deals and extended terms of payment. He closed several big sales. Within a few months, he was out of debt and making money once again.

Exactly one year later, the executive returned to the park with the uncashed check. At the agreed-upon time, the old man appeared. But just as the executive was about to hand back the check and share his success story, a nurse came running up and grabbed the old man.

“I’m so glad I caught him!” she cried. “I hope he hasn’t been bothering you. He’s always escaping from the rest home and telling people he’s John D. Rockefeller.” And she led the old man away by the arm.

The astonished executive stood there, stunned. All year long he’d been wheeling and dealing, buying and selling, convinced he had half a million dollars behind him.

Suddenly he realized that it wasn’t the money, real or imagined, that had turned his life around. It was his newfound self-confidence that gave him the power to achieve anything he went after.

That is what self-confidence is all about. It’s like knowing you have $500,000 in your pocket to save you, but also knowing you will never have to cash the check. Wouldn’t it be nice to have that kind of confidence?

In the next section, we will talk about learned helplessness. There are certain things that you are convinced you will fail at. In fact, after you fail, you will actually learn you can’t win and will never attempt it again. Martin Seligman, a famous psychological researcher, discovered that you may self-limit, or avoid trying things you have failed at in the past.

You may have bought this book because you wanted to increase your self-confidence using neurolinguistic programming, or NLP. Using NLP will help you develop more self-confidence, using techniques like recasting your visualizations. How you see things in the future can be changed. Through NLP, you can dissipate, and sometimes eliminate, fears and phobias. In this new and very effective approach, you will learn how to see yourself successful at everything you want to do.

Since your beliefs are critical to self-confidence, changing your negative beliefs into positive expectations is also important. To achieve this, we will focus on a technique called frame of reference.

Self-esteem and self-confidence are also governed by how you approach and avoid your dreams: you tend to approach the things you like and avoid the things you don’t. The NLP technique we will use to help you through this process is called metapatterns.

A University of Chicago professor developed a very interesting concept called flow. In his research, he discovered that your skill level must meet the same level of challenge for you to feel successful. As you meet the challenge, there’s a certain level of effortlessness, or flow, that makes you feel completely confident and joyful. This flow state is the kind of feeling you have when you win a tennis match or hit the best golf score of your life. We will also work on NLP techniques called anchoring and circle of excellence.

When we feel a lack of self-confidence, we also feel stress. You and I will spend some time talking about the types of stress you will encounter and how to measure it. To do this, you will learn the Subjective Unit of Discomfort, or SUDS, scale.

I once heard a very self-confident person say that he faked it till he made it. You and I will work on a technique close to this, called modeling—how to mirror a very self-confident person you look up to and make those attributes your own.

In my graduate studies, I researched a concept called behavior modification. The technical term is operant conditioning theory. We will use this concept to change your negative behaviors into ones that help you become the self-confident person you want to be. To keep you on track, we will also implement behavioral contracts, a way to keep yourself accountable in your quest to become more self-confident.

Nearly all the research on self-confidence indicates that the earlier you can learn to be self-confident, the more successful in life you will be. If you have kids, the time to develop self-confidence in them is now. Kids without self-confidence are vulnerable to peers who may introduce them to drugs, teen pregnancy, and crime. Kids with self-confidence are more prepared to say no to the harmful things they should avoid, and are less vulnerable to peer pressure. In chapter 9, we will look at your parenting style and see if it is focused on raising self-confident children.

In addition to helping you become self-confident, I will also show you ways you can develop self-confidence in other people. I’m sure you have family members and friends in whom you would like to see more self-confidence. I will show you techniques that you can use to behavior-shape these people into a higher level of self-confidence.

So we have a lot to cover. But we will also have a lot of fun. You will learn all the tools you need to become more self-confident and to apply them to everything you do in life. All you have to do is use the techniques you learn.

Self-Esteem

One component of self-confidence is self-esteem. While self-confidence is a belief in your ability to achieve an outcome, self-esteem is a reflection of your overall sense of self-worth. People with high self-esteem believe they are competent and worthy. In other words, self-esteem is your positive or negative emotional self-evaluation. One researcher defined self-esteem as feeling worthy of happiness. Another researcher, Nathaniel Branden, said that self-esteem is the sum of self-confidence and self-respect. You can think of self-esteem as your mental state and of self-confidence as your ability to face life’s challenges successfully. This will help you possess the knowledge that whatever happens, you will be successful.

Here are some attributes of people with high self-esteem:

• You believe in certain values and principles. You are ready to defend them, even when finding opposition.

• You are able to act according to what you think is best, trusting your own judgment, and don’t feel guilty when other people don’t like your choices.

• You don’t worry excessively about what happened in the past or what may happen in the future. You learn from the past, but you live intensively in the present.

• You trust in your capacity to solve problems, but when you have setbacks and difficulties, you are ready to ask others for help.

• You understand that you’re interesting and valuable to other people, especially your friends.

• You resist manipulation, and you collaborate with others only if it’s beneficial to both of you.

• You are able to enjoy a great variety of activities, not just the ones you do well.

• You can work toward finding solutions and voice disappointment without belittling yourself or other people when challenges occur.

As Winston Churchill once said, “pessimists see the difficulty in every opportunity. Optimists see the opportunity in every difficulty.”

Low Self-Esteem and Narcissism

People with low self-esteem possess a number of negative attributes. They criticize themselves heavily and often seem very dissatisfied. They are hypersensitive to others and feel resentment when criticized, having almost a sense of being attacked. They have an excessive desire to please others, beyond being generous. They have neurotic guilt and dwell on past mistakes, and even increase the magnitude of those setbacks. In other words, they continue to beat themselves for past errors. People with low self-esteem also seem to be very pessimistic and have a generally negative outlook towards life. This is probably because they don’t feel equipped with the emotional tools to face those challenges successfully.

One of the most debilitating aspects of low self-esteem is the tendency to see temporary setbacks as permanent. One of my clients wanted to sponsor me to speak to 2000 attendees at an investment conference in Canada. The conference organizer was able to secure a sponsor in competition with my client. I had to tell the client that his competitor locked up an exclusive sponsorship. My client said, “No problem; I know something good will arise from this.” This is an example of someone who has such high self-esteem that he thinks success will come to him, no matter what the circumstances.

By contrast, people with low self-esteem see setbacks as debilitating and permanent. They would look at the conference setback as another reason they are unable to get any breaks in the world, and another reason they will never be really successful.

Types of Self-Esteem

There are two types of self-esteem: implicit and explicit. People with implicit self-esteem evaluate themselves unconsciously negatively or positively on the basis of how they feel. Those with explicit self-esteem incorporate more conscious and reflective self-evaluation: they evaluate themselves on the basis of what happens to them and their resulting self-talk—what they say to themselves. In any event, your self-esteem can be high or low, whether it is implicit or explicit. A good example is the character Eeyore from Winnie-the-Pooh. He always has a cloud over his head, no matter what happens. He has implicit self-esteem, but it is low.

Do you ever hear people say that you’re negative? Do they ever ask, “Why are you always negative?” or say, “Just look at the positive?” If so, you may have implicit negative self-esteem. No matter what happens, you find a way to diminish good things, and you increase the importance of bad things that happen to you.

If, on the other hand, your self-esteem is implicit and positive, this is good, because it means that not much can steer you away from optimism.

People with explicit self-esteem react to what happens to them. You might hear someone tell you n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• One Why Do You Need Self-Confidence?
• Two The Magic of Goals
• Three Using Self-Confidence to Stop Anxiety
• Four Visualization and Recasting
• Five Changing Your Beliefs
• Six Metapatterns
• Seven Using Optimism to Build Self-Confidence
• Eight Coping with Stress
• Nine Raising Self-Confident Kids