Visualise you confident
If you’ve ever been to one of my workshops, you’ll know I’m a big fan of visualisation; I use it myself every day, and I firmly believe it gives us access to parts of our subconscious about which we simply don’t know enough.
Please don’t think I’m going all new-agey and suggest you practise the Law of Attraction or pay hundreds of pounds to hear The Secret. I’m not. The Law of Attraction and The Secret are examples of a good idea spun out of control; there was so much hype about them that they put people off using visualisation. How can you take seriously a concept that suggests that just by thinking about a Mercedes, one would magically appear on your driveway, complete with keys and owner’s manual?
Er, no, that’s not how it works at all. But using visualisation can help to affect the way you behave so that getting that Mercedes becomes a real possibility instead of just a daydream.
And for boosting your confidence, visualisation is definitely a real winner. Try this exercise and see for yourself. Allow half an hour or so and be prepared to think hard so that you create some really strong mental images.
- Find yourself somewhere quiet and comfortable, warm and undisturbed.
- Relax. Use deep breathing, yoga, meditation, a combination of those or whatever works for you to get yourself into that lovely relaxed state where you could almost drift off to sleep.
- Now create a mental image of someone you admire, a role model, for being as confident as confident can be. It doesn’t have to be someone you know – choose George Clooney if he represents wonderful confidence to you or Pixie Lott is she seems to have the world at her feet. Doesn’t matter, because this is your visualisation, so you can make it work for you. If you are facing a particular challenge, say a job interview or a big meeting, imagine your role model dealing with the challenge confidently and successfully.
- Spend a little time – how much time depends on how easy you find visualisation – getting a really clear picture of your role model in the situation that makes you wish you had more confidence. Flesh out the detail; get a real 3D sense of the scene, and see your role model dealing with the challenge calmly and confidently. Create a little movie and run it in your head half a dozen times.
- Now superimpose your own face on to your role model and run your movie again, this time seeing, in your mind’s eye, yourself dealing with the challenge. Really make it vivid: hear what you would hear, smell what you would smell, see what you would see and, most important, feel what you would feel. If you’ve put the effort in on step 4, you should find it relatively easy to really feel the sense of achievement and self-assurance you’d get from coping with your chosen challenge in a confident way. If it doesn’t work at first, go back to step four and tweak your mind movie until it’s as real as it can be in your mind’s eye.
- Run your new movie, the one in which YOU are the star, as often as you like; once you’ve dealt with one challenge, it becomes easier and easier to picture yourself dealing with all sorts of challenges in this confidence, calm, assured way.
Try it out. It’s a half hour of relaxed mental activity that certainly can’t do you any harm and will definitely boost your confidence.
And let me know how you get on?
