Richard Bandler reveals the secrets of confidence to NLP Life.
NLP Life: How can you learn to be more confident?
Richard Bandler: Well, the best way to be more confident is to be more competent at what you do.
I realise there are many people that think you just need to visualise yourself being confident and step inside it, but then you’ll just be a pompous ass, and that really isn’t a good idea.
To become more confident you have to stop thinking about your mistakes and look at what you actually accomplish. If you spell two out of ten words correctly and you look at the 8 you feel incompetent, but if you go “I got these two perfect” you feel more confident. The trick is to increase what you are doing well and ignore the rest. That’s how people become more confident.
They have to stop planning to fail and planning to make mistakes. The more you look for where you can have problems and what can go wrong, the more you will find it. The more you start looking at what works, the more you’ll find it and the better you’ll feel.
I think the best way to feel good about yourself is to do the right thing for the right reason. Somebody drops a bag of groceries and you help them pick it up so other people will see how cool you are. You never feel good about yourself. But if you help them pick it up because it’s the right thing to do, you’ll always feel good about yourself. Same action, one gives you confidence and the other puts all of your self worth in the hands of people that you have no idea what they’re thinking.
Most people know what the right thing to do is, they just can’t bring themselves to do it because they’re thinking about it for the wrong reasons.
And you know you shouldn’t yell at your kids. If you’re yelling at them for the wrong reason, you need to look at yourself and go “Stop it” and then you need to make a better plan about what you’re actually going to do when they spill their milk and what you’re actually going to do when they jump out of bed in the middle of the night and what you’re actually going to do when they come in with dirty pants – because if you don’t have choices you can’t make them.
When you find something that really works and you visualise yourself doing it enough times, when it comes up you will, and then you’ll feel better about yourself and you’ll have more confidence and it will last and grow your entire life.
