The Perfect Gentleman Issue 2 - April 2016 | Page 33

Thoughtful Gentleman

The
Keys
to
Confidence
by Zach Falconer-Barfield

The first time driving a car, a person is faced
with a vast array of skills to master: gears,
mirrors, steering wheels, awareness, and
pedals, which have to be combined all in one
to master driving. After years of driving, you
now just get into the car and drive. Some
skills are easy, but some skills are a
combination of other skills put together in a
certain way, such as driving or cooking. So
here, we will learn each individual skill and
then combine them in the right recipe to
make you the confident person we know you
can be!
This is probably the most challenging skill to
learn and certainly to master: confidence. To
some this is an illusive dream, to others it is a
fluctuating current that is not consistent. We
all go through phases of confidence,
sometimes we are on top of the world and
sometimes we are staring up at the sky from
the bottom of a well. We have all gone
through it.

But with the tips, tricks and exercises that we
recommend in this article, we will make those
phases less drastic and indeed help you climb
out of the well at any time.
Just to give you some background, a great
deal of information that we impart here is
backed by science and hard data, the rest by
overwhelming anecdotal evidence. This is
about giving you a solid base on which to
build your confidence and we want to do that
from a position of assurance that this works.
Our confidence building strategy is split into
two phases, outside in and inside out. You can
do it in either way round and all the elements
in any order. Although we recommend that
you work through them all, some will work
better for you than others and some will be
easier to learn, but they will all help to
establish a level of confidence from which
you can build.

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