Life Is A Confidence Game.

Team Massive Result’s Thursday’s Thoughts  

Life Is A Confidence Game.

 

It doesn’t matter what pursuit we are talking about, our performance seems to be directly related to our confidence.

The more confident we are, generally the higher level we perform at.

The better we perform, the more confidence we gather.

The two are inextricably and irretrievably linked.

If you think back to your school days you probably performed better at those subjects you liked and worse in those ones that you didn’t. Liking is often synonymous with being confident in this context.

 

It surely follows that the more confident we can be the better we will perform. But confidence is often a mercurial, ephemeral thing. Often something of which we catch a fleeting glimpse, but it is not often, or not often enough, a permanent or frequent visitor to our mental framework.

 

Perhaps if we could do something about our level of confidence, we could improve our performance.

With some individuals the major thing I am working on is their confidence and as a business coach I often feel that the best contribution I can make is to lend the client some of my confidence until they have chance to develop their own. Perhaps this is one of the greatest gifts any of us can give.

 

I believe that one of the reasons that so many of us lack confidence has its roots in the evolution of our species. One expert in the field believes that we have 8 basic emotions of which 5 are what I might call negative. Disgust and shame would be negative emotions. It does not take a lot of imagination to see how the effect of those emotions over the course of our evolution has helped the species to survive.

 

Disgust has prevented us from dying out by eating rotting flesh or vegetation, for example. Shame helps to prevent us from doing things that are injurious to our moral wellbeing. So these are extremely important and necessary emotions, and we are emotional beings. However the balance of 5 to 2 means that we are literally hard wired to see the dark side, to see the danger, to see what might go wrong rather than to see the bright side, the opportunity and what might go right.

 

If you are following this you will have calculated only seven emotions and I said eight. The one I have omitted is shock/surprise which is, of itself, neither positive or negative but a sort of watershed leading to landing on one side or the other.

 

So if performance and confidence are so closely linked does that mean that we can  do things that will help our confidence and therefore or performance level and perhaps vice versa? Perhaps it does, and next week I shall share a sure fire method that any of us can use to help our confidence levels.

 

For now though just consider how much attention we pay to our confidence level. The chances are that if we are confident we pay little attention and take it for granted and if we lack confidence we will be all too painfully aware of the fact.

 

Learning to calibrate would be a start and noticing in what circumstances our confidence rating is high and when it is lower will help us understand the patterns that are at play in our lives. A simple self-reflective question like “on a scale of 0 to 10 how confident do I feel about “x”” would be  a good start, because the natural follow up question is “What do I need to do to move it up a point?”. This question will lead us to some answers.

 

At this point it is often worth remembering the words of Arthur Ashe the former tennis champion when he said

 

“One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.”

 

The great news is that we actually have more choice in our confidence level than we might have thought and next week I shall look forward to sharing the best method I know to quickly build confidence, because, after all, life is a confidence game.

Team Massive Results next free business growth seminar is scheduled for Tuesday 3rd March 2015.Click here to book your place and view our scheduled events. We look forward to seeing you there. What better preparation for the great game of business.  

To read more ‘Thursdays Thoughts’ by Ian Kinnery and many other blogs please visit our website