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. 34 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}