As if

OK, so who thinks they are not confident?  Many of us feel like that sometimes, perhaps even a lot of the time (if we were prepared to admit it).  Who would like to feel confident more of the time?  I guess most of us would.

Well, here's a little adapted NLP/coaching trick, based broadly, with a bit of poetic licence and a few other NLP concepts thrown in, on Milton Erickson's idea, 'you can pretend anything and master it'.

To start with, remember a specific time when you have really felt and acted confidently.  Yes, you have been confident at some point in your life, even if it was when you were 10 and organising your friends in the playground to play your favourite game at break time. Or what about when you are cooking a meal you know you do really well?  Or when you are telling a funny story to your best, best friend/sister/mother (ie anyone who doesn't judge you)?

If any of you are telling yourself that you are never confident, think of someone you know or someone famous who is really confident and imagine that you are them for a minute.

Right, now pause for a moment and really remember (or imagine) how it felt to be confident - see what you saw, hear what you heard, and really feel those feelings of confidence that you felt then.  Bring them back to mind and make the picture bigger and brighter, louder and clearer, and really feel those lovely feelings of confidence.  Imagine yourself putting on a confidence coat, with all of those good feelings and memories of confidence woven in to the fabric, surrounding you, making you feel secure; sure that your confidence is all around you.  Decide what colour it's going to be, and exactly what shape and style. Make sure you know exactly what this coat looks like and how it feels to wear it. Every time you put on this confidence coat now, the feeling of brilliant, uplifting confidence you have just re-created will come flooding back.

Go through the sequence again, re-creating the sounds, images and feelings of that time when you were really confident, and feel that great feeling even more intensely this time.  Put on your confidence coat, look at  yourself in a mirror if you have one nearby while you are wearing your confidence coat and see yourself smiling, standing upright, taller. Notice how you stand, how you look, giving off messages of cool, calm, confidence.

Now practice it - think of a specific time you want to be confident.  Don't try to do it all the time at first; make it easy for yourself to succeed.  Now you've thought of your moment when you want to be confident, imagine youself being in that situation wearing your lovely confidence coat.  Notice in detail how you act, how you look and how you feel.

(By the way, it doesn't have to be a coat if that image doesn't work for you - it could be a confidence bracelet, confidence socks, whatever you like, as long as you know exactly what it looks like and how it feels to wear it.)

Next step: go and actually do it in the situation you've chosen!  You have nothing to lose, and, trust me - it really works.  Please let me know how it goes.  Have fun!

Same or different?

I was chatting to my friend Jane last week.  She's really interested in personal development but hasn't got much spare thinking time at the moment because she's recently separated and has got 2 children the same age as mine.  During the taxiing to football, tennis, cricket, athletics, and every other sport it's possible for a 10 and 12 year old to do, she spends precious time sitting in her car in traffic (thank God for traffic jams for a few peaceful moments), thinking about how she thinks she'd like her life to be different.

'I just haven't got the time to change what I do', she said, 'I can't find a way to free up time to really have a look at doing something different'.

'What would you like to be different?' I asked. 'Hmm, I don't know' she said.

When we talked a bit more, she decided that she actually likes a lot of what she has, and that she just wants to think differently, for the moment, anyway.  She says she loves the conversations she has with her kids (in the car, of course) - 'Mum, what's for dinner? Jack cut his leg open really badly today.  He tripped over a javelin.  Megan said it looked like sausage, can we have sausages for tea?' - etc, etc.

Jane said she falls into the trap of thinking about what she hasn't got, instead of what she has got.  We talked about how the Barefoot Doctor (our hero!) often mentions that we have the life we have chosen right now - our unconscious mind has drawn to us the things it wants, often without us knowing much about it. 

Jane seemed very cheerful when she went off to pick the children up for the next round of fetching and carrying.  She said 'I'm going to think about how I'm actually doing what's important to me right now.  When the time comes to make some changes, I'll know.  For the moment, I'm going to make sure I get a sense of achievement and confidence from the juggling, multi-tasking and all the other things that make women fab.'

As Buddha said, 'it's your mind that creates this world'.

Pony food and NLP

"Mum?"
"Yes?"
"Do you know what I'd feed my pony on?"
"But you haven't got one"
"Yes, but if I did have one..." I don't know how many conversations I've had with my beloved daughter on the way to school (and on the way home from school, and on the way to riding....and on the way back... you get the picture) about this one.  I was trying to listen to an interview on radio 4 about tomorrow's election, but the combination of hypothetical pony food, a broken radio aerial and visions of a hung parliament involving various MPs about to dangle from the rafters of the Houses of Parliament - I won't say which MPs for the sake of diplomacy, but it was quite enjoyable - rudely interrupted my ability to concentrate.
"Mum!"
"What?"
"Do you think we'd get bran or oats?"
"I've just bought you the Coco Pops Rocks you asked for".
"No! Not for me!  Anyway, what does congregational mean?"

The point of all this is to comment on my children's amazing focus on what they want.  My daughter thinks incessantly about ponies; my son thinks incessantly about the next piece of ultra expensive sports equipment he 'needs' (at the moment it's a wildly overpriced tennis racquet).  They talk about their focus of interest ALL THE TIME; I'm guessing they think about it all the time; and, actually, they seem to get us to spend a lot of our spare family time helping them to follow these interests.

What do we spend time thinking about as adults?  I think we often think about the things we don't want, the things we want to stop doing.  It's like the election - certain parties tell us we need change, but what to?  They aren't very specific about what exactly they would do differently, or perhaps more importantly how.

Children are so great at knowing what they want - and often how to get it.  As we become adults our thoughts get confused with what we think we ought to do, instead of what we'd really like to do.  Obviously we have to learn to think about how our actions affect others, but we can get so worried about other people we forget to just do what we want - for some of the time, at least.

I'm going to have a different conversation with my daughter on the way home from school this afternoon.  It'll still be about ponies, but this time I'm going to enjoy her total absorption in her interest and learn from her how I can re-create that overwhelming enthusiasm in my own interests again, which I'm sure I also had as a child. 

NLP is all about modelling excellence - being able to bring back into adult life that fantastically blinkered child's focus on what you are striving for is definitely worth having a go at.  Remember the idea that you get what you focus on?  See the nearest child for details....