Mind Power

Self confidence is an amazing quality. It can help you to create the life of your dreams. It is more responsible for success in people’s lives than any other single quality.

You could take two people; one with tons of self confidence and mediocre talent, and the other with tons of talent but very little self confidence. Put them in almost any kind of competition that involves the approval of other people, and the person with the least talent, is going to win out, almost every time.

Now consider two men. One is much better than average looking while the other is actually less than average looking. The better looking man is very shy and introverted. The less attractive guy is oozing with self confidence. Put them in a party situation where they don’t know anyone. Have them see who can get the most phone numbers from attractive women.

Do you need to guess the outcome? In almost every circumstance, the less attractive man, the one with the self confidence, is going to leave with not only the most phone numbers, but probably with one of the women on his arm. The good looking guy will probably not even get one number, and will, almost undoubted, go home alone.

Generally speaking, people with self confidence make better sales people. They get promoted more. They make more pay. They have more friends, more sex, more fun, and they even tend to have more overall happiness. Not only that, but the people they are closest to tend to be happier, as a result.

The question has to be asked. Is self confidence something you either have or you don’t? It sure seems like the people in high school who lacked self confidence are the same ones lacking it at the thirty year high school reunion. There are been a lot of studies regarding the question of whether self confidence is nature or nurture. The results may surprise you.

The majority of these studies conclude that self confidence is largely influenced by environment and experience. Even in cases where one sibling may be extremely outgoing and the other is extremely timid, the timid person often becomes timid as a result of the outgoing nature of the other sibling.

The conclusion of a recent study done at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, said that extroverted people are usually molded. That is, they were not born that way, but were shaped into extroverts as a result of their life experiences and their mindsets.

The famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the man who actually coined the terms, introvert and extrovert, came to the same conclusion several decades earlier. In his long and celebrated career, he helped many of his friends and clients to transform from being introverted to being extroverted.

This flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Most people would tell you that people really don’t change, for the most part. However, the question is, can people who lack self confidence do anything to actually create self confidence. The answer to that is a resounding, yes.

If you are skeptical of this premise consider the research that was done in interviews with some of the most captivating public speakers in modern history. The vast majority of them admitted to initially being terrified at the mere prospect of getting up and speaking before a large group of people. Yet, they totally transformed who they were, in this regard. Most of them developed the ability to speak before a totally engrossed audience, with no preparation whatsoever.

So, how did they go about creating this transformation? They went ahead and got up on stage and started giving speeches, even though they were absolutely terrified. That is known as the sink or swim method. Many people have been taught to swim when a parent tossed them in the water, standing by to save them if they went under.

Many of the shyest men around women have taken classes taught by pick up artists and transformed themselves into one of those guys who are “naturally” good in scoring with women. The answer is unequivocal: self confidence can be learned.

Tags: self confidence

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 4th, 2011 at 5:51 am and is filed under Self Help . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.