I’ve tried a couple of times to imagine being confident, and sometimes it works. But the problem is I don’t feel good about being in that state. It doesn’t lead me to that great feeling and peace that I find when facing my fears and conquering them.

Would you say that this is just a lack of practicing it all mentally?

On the other side though, you have people who blindly follow “gurus” without thinking for themselves. And that’s equally problematic. But between these two extremes are the curious seekers who are committed to studying ways to improve their lives, and for those I have to say that Tony Robbins’ material is certainly worthy of study. Having been up on stage with him briefly at one of his seminars and experiencing the exciting energy of the 1500-person audience myself, I can see where his enthusiasm comes from. If you spent most of your life helping people to change and grow and enjoyed the positive feedback that results from such work, that could make you a bit hyper as well.

But what about dealing with people who simply aren’t rational? Heck, most human beings aren’t particularly rational on a day-to-day basis, though we pride ourselves on our rationality. So how do you deal with things like a moody boss or coworkers, whom you can never be sure where you stand with them? How do you deal with incompetent people in positions that have influence over you (BTW, not necessarily your boss…this can be someone in another department who irrationally doesn’t like you and has ridiculous influence and the ear of the boss…I’ve been in this situation). Often when you show confidence, others pick that up as over-cockiness and *immediately* dislike you forever. Or it could be a client who’s constantly changing the requirements but doesn’t want to pay. It could be lots of things.

Maybe it’s been that my own personal experiences are highly localized to myself and don’t apply to anyone else. I’ve learned to deal with all these situations (my basic attitude is, “screw ‘em”…except substitute in a four letter word for “screw” ). But then I come off as arrogant and uncarring. I can’t win!

So after all that blabbering, how do you deal with fundamentally irrational people? Being a consultant with a business model consisting of putting quality things out onto the internet and waiting for the money to come in, I think you may largely be divorced from this. I envy you and it’s this kind of thing that makes me want to go into consulting myself.

complete ‘leting go’ is probably a hard state to achieve whilst being in the midst of the real world. surely one should try letting go as much as possible. what others think of us is a good concept to ‘let go’.

Incidentally, the first Chicken Soup for the Soul book was originally self-published by Canfield and Hansen. So they started very much as independents and were later picked up by a publisher. Now their dozens of different books consume entire shelves at bookstores… not a bad couple of guys to model. They learned about book self-publishing from Dan Poynter, who is the same person I’ve been modeling for self-publishing my first book.

One of the examples he gives is that if someone tells you something negative (that you’re fat, ugly, bad at golf) you’ll only feel bad about it if you believe it yourself. If after they said what they said you say to yourself “yeah.. he’s right, I am fat.” But you don’t have to think that. If the event is someone telling you that you’re fat, that’s just half the formula. The only way you’ll feel bad about it is if you agree with it. If on the other hand after hearing this you tell yourself that you’re at your most optimal weight, your self-esteem won’t go down, and might even go up.