6 Tips to Increase Confidence

These are tips I’ve used over the years, and these have really helped me and I wanted to share these with you. If you have any kind of confidence issues, if you are not a really big, skilled communicator, or maybe, you are just wanting to increase your confidence in that arena, these tips can help you out in that department.

1. STOP the Comparison Game

One thing that I used to do a lot of, and still to this day have to remind myself to not do, is to compare yourself to others.

In our business and what we do as health and fitness coaches, it is very easy to compare when you’re looking at two different individuals, maybe who have been doing this for the same amount of time, or really any department, any area of life, different people progress at different rates no matter what it is. So it’s very easy to look at someone who has maybe been doing something the same amount of time as you, maybe they’re progressing faster than you, maybe it’s in your health and fitness journey, maybe someone is losing weight faster than you, maybe someone is in the same business as you, and they are growing their business faster than you. But what a lot of people don’t actually realize or think about is that that person that you could see speeding through a successful event or thing in their life quite likely started off in a very different position than you did.

Often times in our business we will see someone who already has a huge social media following, for example, and a lot of influence in the things that they’ve been doing for quite a long time. They will come into our business and just naturally transition into that role, but the difference is, they know how to lead with it, and then they just grow and they take off. Or let’s say, someone comes in into their own fitness journey, maybe two people started at the same time and one is progressing faster than the other. We don’t know what kind of other issues are going on in that person’s life. There’s a merit of things that could affect how that person loses weight, gains weight. You just never know.

But what happens when we compare ourselves to others is that we set a different standard for ourselves. We are looking at a person who may be in a very different situation, and we are basing our confidence, our progress, on what they do, when that’s not necessarily the case. We have to base it on what we define as success for ourselves, in whatever journey that is.

When you start comparing yourself to others, what happens a lot of times is that you will start trying to become like others, like that individual that you see that is very successful in what they’re doing. But what happens is you start to lose sense of who you are, your identity and message, and what you have to offer to other people. We need to start comparing ourselves to our own definition of success and our own standards of what it is that we are trying to accomplish.

2. Preparing Yourself
   
   Another thing that you can do to increase your confidence is something very, very simple and something very, very basic – prepare and educate yourself for what it is that you’re going to do.

When I do a webcast or write a blog, I have to write down my notes. When I’m more prepared in what I’m about to talk about, when I’ve written out some notes, when I’ve outlined what I want to talk about, or when I talk about something that I already know a little about or experienced, I’m more confident in what I’m talking about.

In a communications class years ago, in fact when Brandy and I met, we gave a series of about 6 speeches throughout the semester. Every speech that I talked about, I talked about what I knew in my heart, what I knew and experienced –things in the martial arts arena. I always picked a topic in that. But when we were finally given assigned topics to talk about, I talked about William Shakespeare. And I knew little to nothing about him. I had to research, and I was not confident at all. It was the only speech that I gave that semester that I was absolutely just terrified to give. I was nervous, I was shaky, it was just horrible. It was the worst speech that I’d given.

But every time that I talked about martial arts, I talked from my knowledge, I talked from my experience. I gave a great speech, and I’d always get a good grade for it.

We teach fitness classes, and a lot of times, people will come in and they’ll talk to us about coming into the class, and they’ll avoid it for months and months, sometimes a year or better, before they finally come. And when they do, they often times come to us afterwards, and say, “you know what? That wasn’t as bad as I expected. I was scared of nothing. Yeah, it wasn’t easy, yeah, it was a little tough, but when I got there, I realized that this wasn’t impossible. You guys weren’t these mean, evil people trying to kill me. It was fun and enjoyable with these other people.”

So when you educate yourself and ask questions, you find out what’s really going on, and a lot of the times, it’s just not as bad as you thought it would be.

3. FEAR!

Understand what lack of confidence is all about- Fear!

Fear is something that we have created in our minds that really doesn’t exist. We often times become afraid of things that we have no idea how these things are going to turn out. It’s a response that the human mind has come up for preservation.

But, let’s understand something. Danger is very real. Fear is not. Fear is a product of the mind based on what we do not know. Let’s say, I’m driving down the road. I know if I drive down the road at 90 miles an hour, and I come to a sharp curve, I’m not going be able to make it. I’m probably going to have a wreck and die. That’s a sense of danger. That’s self-preservation. That’s a legitimate thing to pay attention to.

But when you’re going into a situation that you can’t possibly know what’s going to happen, the point of fear, is… there is no point to it.

Years and years ago, when Brandy and I first met, in that same communications class I mentioned earlier, I had a fear of talking to women. I was just shy. I looked over at this young lady, she was beautiful, I had to talk to her, but I didn’t know how I was going to do it. And for just that split second at the end of that class, when she started to walk past me, I just really put all the fear aside for just a split second, because what was I afraid of? This was a little petite woman, who, you know, maybe she’s like some kind of ninja I didn’t know about, and she was going to kick my butt for what? For me coming up and saying hi? So when I acknowledged the fact that I was afraid to go and talk to her, I suspended that fear, and I just went and talked to her. And 20 years later, we are still together, happily married.

Fear is something we make up in our minds, so there’s no point in fearing, we just need to go and do. So often times, we can get over fear by just taking that action, very quickly, not thinking about it, taking just those few seconds of reckless courage and just going for it.

4. Build your Case

The next thing is build your case and use it.

There are things that you have experienced over your life where you have proved yourself confident and have proved yourself adequate to go through a specific situation or prepared yourself and you have overcome a fear, you have overcome that lack of confidence,  or you know you are good at something specific. As you achieve these victories in your life, you’ll start to build what we learned from one of our business mentors, an evidence file for yourself that shows that you are in fact capable of doing these particular things.

In basic training, there were a lot of things that we had to do as a troop. Coming in there, we often times were put in situations that were uncomfortable, we had no idea what was going to happen, and it was intimidating. Often times we were put in those situations, but every single time we were able to push through them. We passed with flying colors, we all got through it and it wasn’t near as bad as we thought. We were constantly building our confidence and constantly building that mental file, that evidence file in our heads that said “you know what? We are capable of doing this. We are capable of taking and doing whatever’s thrown at us, and we are going to keep going because we know we’ve done it before, so we know we can do it again.”

So as you overcome things in life, build that evidence file in your mind, and you’ll be able to refer back to that every single time you’re in a situation where maybe your confidence is a little low. You can go back and look at those things in your mind and go, “you know what? I did this thing in my life, so why shouldn’t I be able to do this new thing coming at me?”

5. Achieving Small Victories

If there’s something new that you are going to experience, and you’re just really petrified of it, and you just really can’t quite overcome that fear,  do small versions of it.

For example, Brandy and I teach fitness classes. Maybe you feel like you’re not ready for some intense form of exercise. So maybe the first thing you do to prepare for that is you start walking around your block a few times a day, maybe you start doing a little light jog every so often, maybe you just start moving your body a little bit, and start building your confidence up. And you test yourself a little bit here and there, a little bit harder each time, setting little benchmarks for yourself, achieving that, then set a higher benchmark, achieving that, and higher and higher each time.

What happens is you start building that confidence and your capabilities and what you can do, so that when you want to try something bigger later, all you’re doing is building up to it.

Those are points that we’ve used in programs and things that we’ve done, things like Insanity, which is aptly named, because it is crazy. We would pick points in the workout that maybe we had to take a break before this move, about 10 minutes in. Well, our next goal was to last that first 10 minutes without stopping. And once we’d hit that, we’re going to work up to 15 minutes without stopping. And the next time, we’re going to work up to 16 minutes, etc. We were slowly building our confidence until we were able to do the whole program without stopping. We’re building that ability, building our confidence, building our strength.

So do this with anything that maybe you need to build confidence over or want to achieve in your life. Find little small benchmarks. When you know you’ve got something coming, set little benchmarks for yourself. Achieve that, then set something higher. Achieve that, set something higher, achieve that, and before you know it, when you’ve been achieving these little victories, those things stack up into some big confidence.

6. Wash, Rinse, and Repeat!

These are not things you are going do just one time. These are points that you will be constantly implementing in your life to keep building that confidence. And what happens is eventually, these things become second nature. You do them without thinking about them. And before you know it, you’ll be trying new things, amazing things that completely change your life, because you have found this confidence to go out and experience and live life!