How To Gain Self-Confidence And Make Social Situations Easier
Do you lack self-confidence in social situations? Many people answer ‘yes’ to this question, even those who may appear confident on the surface. However, low self-confidence is something that can be fixed, and there are lots of things you can do to improve how you feel about yourself, and feel more at ease when socialising. Here are some simple tips to start with:
Self-Confidence Tip #1 – Remember That Most People Aren’t That Interested in You
If you lack confidence, it’s easy to think that everybody you encounter is zeroing in on your flaws and judging you harshly. In reality however, most people are more interested in themselves than they are in you, and they’re certainly not aware of all these negative points that you think are so obvious.
So bear in mind that people are fundamentally self-centred, and if you’re worrying about what they’re thinking of you, remember that they’re probably not thinking about you that much at all. In fact, they may be more worried about what you might be thinking of them!
Self-Confidence Tip #2 – Pay Attention To Your Appearance
An easy way to feel more confident it to pay attention to how you are dressed. It’s easy to feel better about yourself when you know you look your best. There’s no need to spend a fortune on expensive clothes, make-up or haircuts, nor should you try to conform to anybody else’s idea of physical perfection. But simply paying some attention to grooming, exercising and eating healthily to stay in shape, and wearing comfortable clothes that flatter your body and are appropriate to the occasion, will go a long way to making you feel good about yourself, which will in turn boosts your confidence levels.
Self-Confidence Tip #3 – Walk Tall
Another very easy way to feel better right away is to make sure you maintain good posture. Others will pick up on the way you’re feeling about life and about yourself by observing how you carry yourself. 
Unconfident people tend to slouch, adopt defensive postures and spend a lot of time staring down at the ground. These behaviours are unhelpful in social situations, as they repel others, which will in turn make you feel even less confident than you were to begin with.
It’s worth making a special effort to keep your back and shoulders straight, and to hold your head up and look others in the eye. Even if you don’t feel very confident, carrying yourself like a confident person helps you to ‘fake it ’til you make it’, and others will react more positively to you. It will also help you feel more genuine confidence with practice, as the way in which you use your body has a direct influence on your state of mind.
Self-Confidence Tip #4 – Listen Rather Than Talk
One common reason for a lack of self-confidence is because many people feel like they’re not very good at social chitchat and small talk. Fortunately, there’s no need to be, because you’ll find that many people that you meet like to talk about themselves, and all you really need to do is ask them some polite questions, and they will do most of the talking for you.
By showing a genuine interest in others, they will come away from the encounter with a positive impression of your conversational abilities, even if you didn’t talk very much at all!
Self-Confidence Tip #5 – Visualise Yourself Confident
While the above self-confidence tips can help a lot, you can also increase your confidence levels dramatically by doing a little inner work, in the form of visualisation. Real self-confidence comes from within you, and one reason why many people lack confidence is because they are still being influenced by negative beliefs and self-concepts that they picked up years ago, often in childhood.
To develop real inner confidence, it may be necessary to change these old belief patterns with alternatives that are more empowering. And one of the best methods of doing this is to use visualisation.
Don’t worry if you think that you can’t visualise – by ‘visualisation’, what we’re talking about is using your imagination to feel what it would be like to be the confident person you want to be. This might involve creating mental pictures, where you actually see yourself behaving differently, but if creating those mental pictures is difficult for you (as it is for many people) that doesn’t matter – the important thing is to capture the feeling of how you want to be.
If you devote a bit of time each day to visualising/imagining your new confident self, with time your subconscious mind will adopt this as its new belief system, and the way you feel about yourself will begin to change.
To visualise effectively, it helps if you can stay focused on what you’re thinking about without extraneous thoughts getting in the way. This kind of mental focus is difficult for many people, as it’s not something that most of us have been taught how to do. However, if you use a brainwave entrainment meditation recording, this can be a very helpful way of getting your mind to settle down and making your visualisation more effective. Recordings of this type feature sounds of specific frequencies (such as binaural beats) which help your brain to relax more profoundly, and increase your access to the subconscious mind.
If you decide to take advantage of brainwave entrainment for making your confidence-increasing visualisations more effective, it’s important to use a high quality recording, such as those which are available from The Unexplainable Store. You might like their ‘Meditation’ tracks, which I’ve found to make my own meditation deeper and easier.
© http://www.quantumbliss.com/
|
Brainwave entrainment can help you enter a deep meditative state more easily. I really like the alpha and theta isochronic meditation recordings from The Unexplainable Store. Alpha is good for light meditation, and theta for deeper trance states. I prefer the versions without music, but you can preview both to see which suits you.
|
Related posts:
