You could be the most qualified, well-organised, pleasant, polite person who appears complete in every way, but without the confidence to express who you really are, to share your ideas, to get people on board, then you’ll always feel vulnerable.

Confidence is king!

When you meet someone who seems to ooze confidence, do you find yourself thinking, ‘How lucky’? Guess what? Self-confidence is far from luck. You aren’t born with confidence, it’s a learnt behaviour. True, most confidence building is learnt during childhood but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn how to be more confident now.

Take this confidence test and score yourself out of 10 for each statement:

Total up your score and see where you are.

• 40–50: You could write this chapter! You know the secret of self-confidence so I guess you are here to brush up a little.
• 25–39: Reasonable but I bet you’d rather do pretty much anything other than the public speaking!
• 10–24: I’m guessing you are confident with the ‘known’. I predict you gave yourself a high mark for being happy to talk to a stranger who talks to you but not so high if you have to start the conversation yourself.
• 0–10: Oh, dear! Well, the good news is you can only become more confident! Let’s start with a few tips.

Seven ways to guarantee an increase in confidence in just seven days

1. Think about what you are frightened of and overcome that fear first. By taking some time to identify what it is (specifically), you’ll start to rationalise the thinking that takes place behind the fear. So, if you are worried about speaking in public then identify what it is about this worry. Do you fear it may all go wrong, that people won’t listen, that you’ll go bright red? Be as specific as you can be.
2. Master positive mental rehearsal. You have probably mastered the negative version already where you play images of the unconfident you. Instead, focus on playing an image where you look, feel and act confidently. Feel the fears but also see yourself overcoming them.
3. Baby steps. Take some small actions which reinforce your new confident self. Go to a different shop. Buy different food. Call a friend whom you haven’t talked to for a while. Make eye contact.
   Every time you take these actions, you reinforce in a small way that you are becoming more and more confident, so congratulate yourself.
4. Spend time with pleasant, confident people. I know it’s difficult when you feel you are lacking confidence yourself, but it rubs off. I said pleasant people very deliberately. I mean confident people who will introduce you to others and who will look out for you. There’s a thin line between confidence and arrogance and you want to spend time with the confident ones.
5. Tell yourself you are confident – but say it like you mean it. Affirmations are powerful tools to help you become more like the person you want to be. It’s simple. If you want be more confident, start saying: ‘I feel more and more confident, in every way, every day.’
6. ‘Act as if’. My friend Simon Woodroffe is the founder of YO! Sushi. When he first started in the restaurant business he’d be the first to tell you he had no idea how to run that kind of business. He needed backers, premises, partners and suppliers to make his new venture fly and he was terrified. His solution was to simply ‘Act as if’. He would have meetings with suppliers and act as if he knew what they would need. He would present to banks and act as if he already had the money but he was just auditioning them for a little more.
   When you ‘Act as if’, you quickly find yourself becoming that confident person.
7. Your lack of confidence is a learned behaviour. You weren’t born with a lack of confidence; this means you must have learned it through life’s experiences and usually the knocks that go with it. The good news is that because you’ve learned them – you can unlearn them. But here’s a tip. When you unlearn something (take it out of your life) you must replace it with something positive. Lot’s of people give up smoking but replace it with chocolate. Then they blame quitting smoking with getting fat! As you start to eliminate the worries and remove your limiting beliefs you must replace them with lots of positive new tools and techniques. You’ll find them on every page of this book.

Confidence is a huge issue for most people and perhaps you can be reassured by the fact that you’re expected to be totally confident in every area of your life. At the same time I’m sure a little more confidence would be welcome in your life. Some extra points scored here will have a positive effect on every other part of your Wheel Of Life.