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How Confident People achieve a Confident Mindset (In a Way Most People Don’t Know)

How do some people remain poised and confident where others are reduced to nervous wrecks?

I have been a student of the human condition for years.  It all started age 17 when I faced the tough life decision of what to do after school finished.

I decided to study psychology at university.  There were three reasons:

  1. I loved maths but could see that the content was distantly remote from anything that dealt with a real life problem.
  2. My school teachers were pressuring me to continue my mathematical studies at university.
  3. I react extremely negatively in the presence of adult pressure.

In reality, it was all number 3.  Given the option to rebel against adult opinions, my history will clearly show a consistent choice.

That is how I ended up at Nottingham University in a large lecture theatre surrounded by 300 first year undergraduate students.  The first lesson began when a slightly over-proud middle-aged woman walked onto the stage down below and said:

“I am Margaret Thatcher:”

Plenty of confused coughs and surprised faces.

After a pause, she said: “How do you know that is not true?  I mean, you do know that it is not true…  but what has happened to tell you that it is not true?  How do you know this?”

The next three years were spent between the bars and sports fields of Nottingham, but in my spare time I pursued the question of how human senses provide us with information that our brain can process into an answer “No, she is not Margaret Thatcher.”

That was 25 years ago.

I have spent the last 25 years seeking to understand people, first as a psychologist, then as a business consultant, then for the last decade as a teacher and sales-focussed entrepreneur.

Do you know how confident people manage to feel confident?

You may not want this answer.  You may be looking for something more mathematical, more abstract and theoretical.  You may be disappointed.

Some of the greatest problems have been solved with a very simple solution.  For 200 years the River Thames in London was horribly polluted and a source of illness.  For 200 years Kings, Dukes and Mayors had tried to clean it up.  No success.  Finally a politician came up with a simple law: “Anybody who uses the river must take water out downstream from where they return it.”  Within 4 years, river clean.

Often, simple fixes are the best.

You’re still with us… so here goes.  The answer to how confident people manage to feel confident:

Photo Credit: Daniele Nicolucci photography via Compfight cc
Confidence. Photo: Daniele Nicolucci

Pretend.

Yes, they pretend.

They don’t listen to the inner voice that is telling them that they are not good enough, that they are the wrong person, that they don’t deserve to be here.  They get up and pretend.

It works because of a psychological concept called “Emotional Contagion”.

Emotional Contagion

Human beings return what they receive.  If you walk down a hallway with a massive smile on your face, you will get smiles back.  If you walk down a hallway with an angry grimace, you’ll get angry grimaces back.

If you pretend to be confident, people will respond to you as if you are the type of person who should be confident.  You will see this reaction of others and it will actually leave you feeling confident.

So, go channel George Clooney, or Madonna, or…  the most confident person you know.

2 responses to “How Confident People achieve a Confident Mindset (In a Way Most People Don’t Know)”

  1. I think it’s a little more complicated :
    Firstly, it not so easy to shutdown the inner voice, you need to be aware and that needs work
    Secondly, how you can encourage people to fake when they can’t even imagine themselve to do it…

    I don’t agree…

  2. RE: HOW CONFIDENT PEOPLE ACHIEVE A CONFIDENT MINDSET (IN A WAY MOST PEOPLE DON’T KNOW)

    I gave a little lecture on this Conor.

    You inspired me.

    I explained how much respect I had for you.

    Then it came as a terrible disappointment in that moment when you – who I saw as a pillar of healthy authority- mentioning that we should be fake’s.

    But then it sank in and it made sense to me, that you can only fake what you can already envisage yourself to be, so it is not really faking, it is using acting as a way of becoming, or clothing yourself with the New Person.

    And then I thought of the Lizard that gets a fright and loses its tale, and I got a picture of that as my first slide, and I showed that first with a long impregnated silence, and opening loudly by saying: “Loose Your Tail!”

    Stop allowing your past to dictate your future. Grow a Vision of yourself like a Unicorn grows a Horn on its forehead, and loose the tail! Drop the past, live a new life, live into the New You.

    Fake it ’till you make it.

    (All this while having my one hand protruding from my forehead like a clapping fish, and my other hand wiggling like a tail on my bum.)

    The (Captive) audience – my employees, were struck silent, deeply impressed by this provocation of their presumptions!

    Thank you.

    One of the men you taught.

    Dirk Van Der Walt

    Pretoria, South Africa

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