The Perfect Gentleman Issue 2 - April 2016 | Page 34
Thoughful Gentleman
Firstly, let’s talk a little about confidence itself.
The dictionary defines confidence as “belief
in oneself and one’s powers and abilities”, it
also talks of “certitude and assurance”. This is
all about you and your faith in you, this is not
about what others may or may not think of
you. Faith is that complete trust in someone
or something, in this case that someone
would be you. I hope that we trust ourselves,
to a greater or lesser degree, therefore we
have a certain level of faith in ourselves, and
this is what we build on. Trust in yourself is
faith in yourself and therefore confidence in
yourself.
Let’s put this another way, do you trust
yourself to make that morning cup of tea for
yourself? If the answer is “Yes”, which it really
should be, then that means you have
confidence in your ability and that proves
that you can have confidence in yourself. We
just have to grow that small seed and turn it
into the mighty oak of certainty.
Confidence can start small and grow. Like the
tree, it needs nurturing; you can’t neglect it
otherwise you might have to spend a long
time rebuilding it. With dedication, energy
and a little bit of love, you can grow that tree
and your confidence. Let’s get on with it...
Outside In
You might be surprised to discover that one
of the speediest ways to build and grow
confidence is to build it from the outside in.
What do we mean by that? Well, simply put,
there are physical and visual things we can do
that will build our confidence and some of
them work on us without us even noticing.
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Working from the outside in will work for
people who are not good at dealing with
internal feelings and self-analysis. It is also the
quickest way to build confidence, though
after a while, it will require internal back up
to maintain longevity of the self-assurance.
Why is the ‘outside’ so important for
confidence both for ourselves and what
others perceive? When you first meet people
both you make a judgement of them in one
tenth of a second. Yes, you read that correctly,
this is based on a study by two Princeton
professors. Less than a second and people
have already made a judgement about you,
then you reinforce that judgement in the next
2 minutes, after which it becomes
exceptionally hard to change people’s
opinions - I won’t bore you with the formula
they discovered, but it is a mighty long time.
So we need to think very hard about the first
impression we make.
This just shows the importance of non-verbal
communication, which we are transmitting
constantly and often unconsciously.
Subconsciously we pick up on these
non-verbal elements and we use them to
generate our judgements and responses to
people.
{If you want to more and learn more about
body language, we recommend Dr Lillian
Glass, Mark Bowden and Paul Ekman}