I was coaching a guy the other day who came to me with a belief that he had a terrible lack of confidence. This was really affecting his ability to live the life he wanted to live, so of course I wanted to help him.
Now confidence, or lack of, is a gross generalisation… There have to be things that we are confident about or we would soon cease to exist, we wouldn’t have the confidence to eat something, or breathe.
And that’s why I love generalisations, when I hear them in conversation I look forward to challenging, because they just don’t stand up to even light scrutiny.
“No confidence? Not even when you are deciding what to eat?” stuff like that usually gets a response, because people don’t think of stuff like that as things that they are confident about. And this is the way, because what ever you do that you think is easy and doesn’t require any confidence, I guarantee that there are people out there wishing that they had as much confidence as you in making that decision.
So back to this guy. We identified some particular areas that were really limiting him, and I asked him a really simple question.
“Imagine you could go back in time to a time when you felt like that, and give yourself resources, that would have really helped you.”
Hindsight is 20:20, the cool thing is, if you know how, you can actually use hindsight to go back to the experience and modify it. The brain gets this really quick, and it will integrate the change in to future situations. (more…)
