How To Build Your Self Confidence

Posted in : HR Updates on 4 March 2015
Paul Fieldhouse
Hyperion Growth
Issues covered:

Self confidence is one of the key leadership skills, so what is it?

Emotionally intelligent leaders accept and respect themselves and essentially like the people they are. They are confident in their skills, abilities and judgments and possess the emotional resources necessary to maintain motivation and achieve challenging goals.

So this month lets consider one activity that can help us to build our self-confidence, positive affirmations.

Positive Affirmations

From our previous articles in which we discussed the Identity Ice Berg, you will now know that the two little words “I AM” are two of the most powerful in our challenge to shape ourselves and our identity.

So what are Affirmations?

Every thought you think every word you say is an affirmation. All of our self-talk or inner dialogue is a stream of affirmations. We are continually affirming subconsciously with our words and thoughts and this flow of affirmations is creating our life experience in every moment.

Our beliefs are just learned thought patterns that we have developed since childhood, many of these work well for us, but others may now be working against us, they are dysfunctional and may be sabotaging us from achieving what we believe we want.

Every affirmation we think or say is a reflection of our inner truth or beliefs. It is important to realise that many of these “inner truths” may not actually be true for us now or may be based on invalid or inappropriate impressions we constructed as children, which if examined as an adult can be exposed as inappropriate.

Our subconscious uses the behaviour patterns we have learned to automatically respond and react to many everyday events in our life. This is essential to our survival, we need to be able to respond quickly to events around us which would be impossible if we had to re-examine every aspect of things every time something simple happens.

Our learned responses and thought patterns enable us to automatically respond to circumstances quickly and easily. Problems arise however, if at an early stage some of the foundation beliefs on which many of the others are built were formed from a skewed perspective, maybe the strategy was appropriate for a perceived difficult circumstance, however often such beliefs are totally inappropriate for succeeding in the real world as adults.

You can use “Positive Affirmations“, which are usually short positive statements targeted at a specific subconscious set of beliefs, to challenge and undermine negative beliefs and to replace them with positive self-nurturing beliefs.

It is a kind of “brainwashing” only you get to choose which negative beliefs to wash away. The way these statements are constructed is extremely important. It is important to remember of course that everything we say and think is a positive affirmation, using positive affirmation statements forces us to keep focussed on our inner goals and reminds us to think consciously about our words and thoughts and to modify them to reflect our positive affirmation.

Do affirmations work

YES! Affirmations really work. You will be hard pushed to find any self help program anywhere that does not include affirmations, even the ones that appear to pooh-pooh affirmations include them under some slightly different guise. And the reason for this is, they work. The more determined you are to make your changes, the more you are prepared to accept change and let go of the past, the better they will work for you.

Why affirmations work

By choosing to think and say positive affirmations as true, the subconscious is forced into one of two reactions – avoidance or reappraisal. The bigger the issue the bigger the gap between the positive affirmation and the perceived inner truth and the more likely that one is going to experience resistance.

This is where the subconscious finds it easier to stay with its perceived inner truth and avoid the challenge using any means at its disposal to avoid examining the issue. You will recognise this reaction by a strong negative feeling inside as you state the positive affirmations. Equally if your experience a sense of joy and well being, your mind is instinctively responding to something it believes to be true. When you get this emotion, you know your affirmations are working!

This article is correct at 14/10/2015
Disclaimer:

The information in this article is provided as part of Legal-Island's Employment Law Hub. We regret we are not able to respond to requests for specific legal or HR queries and recommend that professional advice is obtained before relying on information supplied anywhere within this article.

Paul Fieldhouse
Hyperion Growth

The main content of this article was provided by Paul Fieldhouse. Contact telephone number is 07545 251095 or email paul@hyperiongrowth.com

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