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Do this: Stand up straight, chin high, shoulders back and
throw your arms out. Hold for 20 seconds. This pose tricks your brain into thinking
you are confident. But perhaps you should do this before you are directly in front of
people you need to be confident around.
Look people in the eye
Speak with authority, in other words, know your ‘shiz’
Smile
Fake it til you make it
Like I said, you can project confidence that you don’t actually feel. Think about when you
have been confident before (and I’m talking about true confidence, not the confidence
brought on by half a dozen colourful drinks with little umbrellas in them). Why were you
confident? You felt like you looked good, you felt like you knew what you were talking
about, you felt like you were in amongst friends or that you could hold your own amongst
your peers.
It’s all about feelings. So take those feelings from those confident times, and bring them to
front of mind. Make them happen in the present. Your brain doesn’t understand the
difference between being naturally confident, and being memory-confident. If you bring
those feelings to the fore, they will help you to project confidence.
We are all pretty practiced at portraying confidence. Every job interview you go for, every
new person you meet, every new situation you find yourself in, you try to project
confidence, even if you don’t feel it.
But how do you build real confidence? Practice all of the above in front of people. Building
confidence is a little bit like Visualisation – the more you do it, the more your brain thinks
you are confident, and the more confident you become, so the more you do it… You won’t
always feel confident in every situation, but you can make yourself more comfortable in
more situations, which means you will be confident more often.
What about when there is every reason for you to be confident, but you feel like a fraud?
What if you have success, but you feel like you shouldn’t be there, that the success should
be attributed to someone else, that you don’t deserve it?
This is a phenomenon known as Impostor Syndrome, and it is extremely common amongst
high performing people. It does not discriminate on the basis of gender, race,
socioeconomic status or education. It’s not a medical condition, but it has been studied by
psychiatrists, and there have been some suggestions made as to how you can overcome it: