Isn’t mentally raising your conscious kind of cheating? Shouldn’t confidence be reached by facing your fears and gaining courage (and confidence) that way?

Personally I’ve reached very good confidence levels that way, many times (and lost it as many times, unfortunately). I face my fear, gain courage. Sometimes when I’m not facing my fear and feel I need confidence for something, I’ve tried to gain it with my imagination. It does work, but I don’t feel “fulfilled” after it; I realize I might seem confident to other people, but I don’t enjoy myself in that state. This has largely led me to believe that “programming” yourself to be confident isn’t going to work; you can’t cheat it.

Reading this entry and the comments made be wonder about that belief; could one still imagine confidence and feel good about it? In other words, can one imagine confidence without facing fear?

As for the Tony Robbins seminar, I live in a country where that’s not available. However, another fire walking seminar is held from time to time, and I decided to go to that one.

Thank you again for your excellent suggestions.

A distant alternative would be learning this from an audio program, since at least then you have the vocal cues to go on. Tony Robbins’ Personal Power II audio program is the best one I’ve listened to in this area because you can hear the emotions coming through Tony’s expressive voice. But again that’s still like trying to learn martial arts from a CD.

The best free alternative I can offer you is to pop into the forums on Tony Robbins’ web site. Those forums get a huge amount of traffic, but you’ll be able to meet dozens of people there who are highly skilled with emotional conditioning, who apply it on a daily basis, and who’ll be happy to give you further instruction. I suggest doing a search there on “HOP” or “Hour of Power,” since that’s a decent place to start. If you’re lucky you might even be able to find one or two members who live near you and who’d be willing to show you in person. But depending on who you find, your mileage may vary. The energy level on those forums can be a bit giddy and over the top at times, but there are still a lot of solid, practical ideas to be found.

Pray, Master, how does one find this misterious person?

Seriously, can you recommend a few books about going from the 60% I already achieve up to the full 100%?

I have already put a lot of effort into this, and I’m willing to put more effort.

It’s frustrating, to say the least.

Mental conditioning is a skill like any other. It takes practice to become competent in it. I’ve also read many of the “guru” books that oversold the idea, claiming how easy it is to apply. Mental conditioning isn’t easy though, but it can be extremely effective once mastered. People spend their whole lives studying such things, especially meditation, and even after decades of practice they still have more to learn. But saying you’ve reached a certain level of skill after a period of years and then hit a wall doesn’t mean that further progress is impossible — it doesn’t make sense to claim that something is impossible when our ability to fathom all possible solutions is so limited… especially if there already exist people who’ve broken through the barriers that are still real for us. Htting a wall is merely a sign that further progress may require learning something new or going in a different direction for a while. But the existence of the wall itself cannot rule out the possibility of ultimately reaching the other side. However, if we summarily surrender to the idea that the wall is fixed and permanent, then we won’t reach the other side. But this is an internal limitation, not a “real” external one.

I’m glad that it works for you.

> But the first requirement is to believe that such a
> thing is possible. Otherwise the doubt becomes a
> self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe that your
> imagination can only get you 50% of the way to
> feeling totally confident, then that will be true
> for you – you’ve just used your imagination to make
> it so.

In the past, I did belive that I can reach 100% confidence with lots of imagination, sugestion, self-hypnosis and practice. I put a lot of effort into these and they helped a lot.

However, my experience has always been that one can only reach 60%, maybe 70% by mental practice alone, and the rest of 40% or 30% can only be reached through real physical practice.

This is not an idea I started with. It is a principle that I discovered after doing a lot of work with myself.

> The reason for this is that imaginary experiences
> can be just as confidence-building as real-world
> ones. So you can substitute imaginary practice for
> real-world practice.

I know that lots of self improvement books say things like this. The question is if it’s true or not.

From my experience, it’s not true for me.

> And I’ve found that this is enough to get me to
> feeling 100% confident even when I don’t have any
> real-world history of success.

I’m glad that it works for you. Maybe for some people it works, and for some people it doesn’t.

The areas in which I experimented were areas in which I had a history of failure. I could not get to 100% confidence by mental practice alone - I also had to do real practice.

Thank you for your book recommandation.

While I would agree that performance results require physical practice and that using your imagination will only get you partway there, I’m convinced that one can reach 100% confidence purely through use of the imagination. I’ve done it myself on numerous occasions, and I’ve seen others condition themselves this way as well. But the first requirement is to believe that such a thing is possible. Otherwise the doubt becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe that your imagination can only get you 50% of the way to feeling totally confident, then that will be true for you — you’ve just used your imagination to make it so.

The reason for this is that imaginary experiences can be just as confidence-building as real-world ones. So you can substitute imaginary practice for real-world practice. And I’ve found that this is enough to get me to feeling 100% confident even when I don’t have any real-world history of success. Even though I’ve only given a handful of speeches so far, in my mind I’ve been on stage hundreds (probably thousands) of times. This doesn’t mean I’ll perform exceedingly well at something new, but it does mean I’ll go into that performance feeling certain that I’ll do my absolute best.

Believing you’ll perform at your best and actually performing at your best are two different things. As comment #3 implied, there’s a difference between confidence and competence, and it’s important to summon the wisdom to know which is needed. Imagination is a factor in both, but it has the greatest power to affect our beliefs and feelings about an event as opposed to the event itself. But sometimes our beliefs and feelings are the dominant factor in determining how an event turns out.

There are numerous techniques for conditioning confidence — most of the ones I know come from the field of NLP. It often amazes me just how powerful such techniques can be. With a bit of practice (and especially if you have an experienced NLP practitioner to help you), you can become totally 100% confident about something you’ve never done before in less than an hour. One of my favorite NLP books is Using Your Brain for a Change by Richard Bandler. It’s less rah-rah and more down to earth than Tony Robbins’ books, but the basic concepts are the same. It takes some practice to get good at it. I’ve been using NLP for over a decade now, so I’m very experienced with it, and I practically use it without even thinking about it. But it took me at least a couple years to start seeing consistent results with it. I highly recommend the above book to anyone who wants to learn how to mentally condition themselves to succeed. I still think it’s the best NLP book available.

I’m just saying that for some, confidence comes from building your skills, but that it’s not always necessary. (I wish it were the case, so we could get rid of charlatans, but it’s not.)

I have belived this also, and I have worked hard using suggestions and self-hypnosis in order to become more confident in some areas of my life.

Here is what I found out by doing this:

Suggestions and self-hypnosis work well if you put in some effort. However, don’t expect them to do everything.

Confidence appears to be in fact 50% thinking, emotions and attitude, and 50% practicing in the area in which you are trying to build confidence.

Let’s say we rate confidence from 1 to 100, with 100 being the most confident. Let’s say that I start with a confidence of 1 in one area of my life.

If I put in some effort with self-hypnosis, self-administered RET therapy and reading books on the matter, then I may be able to get that confidence level to 30-40.

If I put in a lot of effort, then I may be able to get my confidence level to 60.

However, without practicing in that area of life, I could never get my confidence level above 60. The moment I started to practice in that area, my confidence started slowly increasing, and now it is at about 95.

Another conclusion that I have drawn from my experiments is that if I have very low confidence in one area, then I can’t usually improve it by practice alone.

Practice in an area in which I have very little confidence and skills leads to very bad results, which reenforces the poor confidence in that area.

So, in order to build confidence, you can’t just do it all in your mind. You have to:

- improve your attitude by self-sugestion and self-hypnosis, and really putting an effort into this

- improve your skills by reading, taking advice, etc.

- after your confidence and skills are about a certain mark, go out and practice

Do you plan out your Halo playing time as well? =)