2012-02-14-Confidence You Can Count On
Seminars@Hadley
Confidence You Can Count On
Presented by
Jason Murphy
Moderated by
Shirley McCracken
February 14, 2012
Shirley McCracken
Welcome to Seminars@Hadley. My name is Shirley McCracken and I'll be the moderator for today's seminar Confidence You Can Count On. Our presenter today is Jason Murphy. Jason is a Certified Trainer and Master Practitioner in Neurolinguistic Programming, NLP. He is one of six trainers in the world endorsed by the Co-creator John Grinder to provide NLP training. Jason has been practicing NLP training for 27 years in a wide variety of roles. Now, I'm going to turn the microphone over to Jason.
Jason Murphy
Okay so let's go ahead and get started. I'm glad many of you are able to hear this morning. I'd like to thank Shirley for inviting me to come do this seminar and to Hadley for making this available to everyone. I'd like to thank all of you for being willing to sign in and participate. I hope that you can take away from this hour something that will help you have access to more competence in the future.
I just have a couple of questions. I'd like to make this as much of a discussion as possible so if you're having trouble or we can't hear you at least you can type in your answer publicly. I would like to know how many of you have struggled with feeling confident in the past. How many of you in a situation like work or perhaps in relationships or public speaking have you found that confidence has been an issue for you? Many of you are saying "yes". Losing vision can definitely be an area where people can experience a hit in their confidence. Of course as you know vision loss is not the only thing that causes a lack of confidence. Losing a job, yes, Raquel. Yes, there are issues in life that we come across.
One of the things I would like to ask you is to think about this from a different perspective. When have you guys all felt confident? When have you felt confident in your life? Jennifer, when you say you win at a game. Theresa says when she's in charge and during a successful interview at work. When you have knowledge of the subject and its sound. Ken says when he's speaking to groups about guide dogs. Good. Patty, when you're quilting you feel confident. Very good. Donna says when she's cooking. Excellent. These are all very good examples. When you're relaxed. Fantastic. Mya, when you're swimming or when you're teaching Braille awareness to younger students. Very good.
I want you to think about something. I want you to go back to a specific memory when you felt confident whether it's been when you were cooking a dish or teaching or when you were working a job and I want you to remember being in that situation as if it were happening right now. Just go back to that time and I want you to tell me where you felt inside of you confidence. What did confidence feel like? I mean from an emotional perspective but also when you walk into a beach or you step out into the hot sun and you feel something on your skin. Where do you feel confidence inside of your body?
Someone says the heart. Good. Abdomen and posture. Fantastic. In my stomach and chest, it's not full of knots. Within my mind and shoulders. No quivering in the stomach. I feel good all over. Very good. These are fantastic answers. Muscles are relaxed in your mind. Very good. I want you all to be aware of each individual person and they're different and all of these answers are correct and they'll vary sometimes from context to context but you need to make sure that you need your own unique answer when you feel confident. Robert may feel it differently from Bonita and Craig and Michael. You may all feel it differently and that's okay.
Set that aside for a second. I want you to contrast when you have not felt confident. I want you to think of a memory that you've had when you did not feel confident. Tell me what you felt in your body instead. Heart beats faster, nausea, shaking all over, difficult breathing, shaky and nervous, pressure, stomach tightness. Very good. Stuttering. Excellent. Butterflies, yes. Lack of self esteem. Let's talk about some of these other answers because dry mouth, unfocused.
If you said something like dry mouth or your heart or nervousness or shaky or tense muscles, those are all very good answers. Other people sometimes say things like low self esteem or shy and that's a description of what you're feeling but it's not a body sensation. We need to keep talking in terms of what you're feeling in your body so when you're feeling shy, how would you know that you're feeling shy as opposed to feeling excited? When you're feeling nervous or if you use words like nauseous, there's probably more that you could say about the feeling of nausea. You could probably describe it a little bit more.
Someone said unfocused. That's another good one. How would you describe unfocused? I want you to keep track of these body sensations because what I want you to do next is to contrast a bad taste in your mouth, feeling jittery inside of your heart, dry mouth, tight muscles and notice that whenever you're feeling those things, whatever it is for you, that is not your definition of confidence. What would you call that? What would you say is the opposite of confidence?
We're hearing words like inadequate, low self esteem, unsure, fear, diminished self esteem and those are all very good answers. Those are what we would say are the opposite of confidence. Now your answers are all correct. Disabled. I like that one. That's very good. That's a good paralysis. Good. Your answers indicate a contrast between two different states and when I say state, I obviously don't mean somewhere like Alabama or New York although those are very nice states. What I mean is states as a word that we use to describe an emotion. When you're feeling confident, you're in the state of importunateness or sureness or feeling like you have a good self esteem. These are states and then you contrast that with the opposite state of helplessness, paralysis, disabledness.
I want you to understand something that's very important and here's one of the keys of confidence. Confidence is not about how you feel. Many people think that confidence is up on some kind of an alter as if it were something to chase after. Confidence is yours to possess. It's not something that happens to you. Confidence is something that you can access at any point in time. It's about what you know. You're close. It's actually more about what you think. Sometimes people spend an hour to two hours in the morning getting ready for work, getting ready to go on a date in the evening and what do they do? They put on their best clothes, they put on their makeup, and they comb their hair and do all the things on the outside to dress themselves up. However, they oftentimes neglect to dress themselves up on the inside.
If you're going on a job interview, usually if you're the average person, you start worrying about all of the things that could go wrong. You might picture in your mind's eye stuttering or you might remember a job interview that went really, really badly. What do you think that does to the feelings in your body? It causes fear. Raquel, it brings them on. Correct. When you go back and remember something, and there's a study that was done a few years ago that a PET scan was done and a PET scan looks for electrical impulses moving throughout different parts of your brain and in this study they realized that if someone could imagine sticking their hand out and taking the glass of water and drinking the glass of water and putting that water back on the table and they can see the mapping in the brain and all of the different electrical impulses and this person was only imagining it.
They had someone hooked up to the same machine actually do the very thing they imagined and they actually reached out, got the glass of water, took a drink and set it back down. Guess what the PET scan showed? The brain mappings were exactly the same. The brain, in its pure form, electrical impulses and neurochemicals, can't tell the different between fantasy and reality. When you imagine something, your brain thinks its happening. It responds accordingly. That's why when you imagine that you're going to mess up and you start picturing it in your mind's eye and you start telling yourself all these things, your brain starts reacting as if it's true and then guess what happens? Your body begins to react.
Your brain reading speeds up. Your stomach starts getting into a knot. What happens after that is you don't breathe as well. Your body is all locked up and all your muscles are locked up and you can't get oxygen through your body. What happens to your brain when you don't have oxygen going through your body? Well, if it goes on too long you'll die but temporarily, what happens is your brain starts putting out less quality thoughts. It's a circle, a downward spiral.
This is why chasing after confidence isn't the best idea. The way to get confidence is to first off, just begin with what already is. I want you to think about something for a second. So far, is this making sense? I need some feedback from the audience. Okay, good. Thank you. What I want you to do is I want you to imagine an area in your life where you would like more confidence, be it a job interview, going on that date with that special person that you want to be with or you name it. Maybe you're going to do some public speaking; maybe you're going to be a better teacher. Pick an area and you can tell us if you want to or if you want to keep it private, that's okay, too.
I want you to start with step number one. I want you to imagine yourself and I want you to imagine yourself in a particular way. In your mind's eye, I want you to imagine that you look relaxed. I want you to imagine that your muscles are relaxed. If you can hear your own voice, I want you to imagine what your voice would sound like if you were to speak with confidence. Mobility skills and doing tasks independently. Imagine walking confidently down the street independently, relaxed and maybe even having a good time but alert and being aware of your surroundings.
If you're doing public speaking, imagine people are actually listening to you and enjoying what you're saying. I want you to tell yourself in your mind's eye and I want you to hear your own voice say, "You can do this. You can do a good job." Or if it helps, you could hear the voice of a teacher or the voice of a friend or maybe the friend of a father or mother and have them tell you, "You're going to do a good job. You can do this. You have the ability."
How does that feel compared to if you were to go into a situation and worry about all the things that could go wrong? Do you notice a difference? If someone's willing to share, I would like to hear either by speaking or someone could type what they feel and what they experience. Someone says, "Empowering. It feels very calming. More relaxed." A couple of people are saying, "Worried." We're going to talk about worry towards the end so let's kind of bookmark that and we'll come back to it.
Right now, I'd rather go through the exercise. This is part of preparing yourself for what you're going to be doing next. Any questions so far about this exercise? Theresa's got an interesting strategy. She says that if she's doing speaking, she can just remember that the people that asked her to speak did so because she knows more than they do. That's one approach. Maybe some of you have heard the motivational speakers tell you to go in front of an audience and imagine everybody in their underwear or some ridiculous thing. Whatever works for you is great.
What happens if you get into a situation and you're doing some public speaking and there may actually be some people in the audience who know as much or more than you? What happens if you're not sure if they know more than you or not? You need to have a back up and that is this. Part of dressing yourself up on the inside is knowing that your brain is doing all sorts of things for your body right now. Your brain is pumping blood through your capillaries and it's enabling both sides of your brain to be working and it knows everything that's happened to you since you were born and even before you were born. It's beating your heart, it's keeping the oxygen going through your bloodstream and it's doing so much for you.
If you think about it, your brain has the capacity greater than many, many computers. Part of dressing yourself up on the inside is to give yourself a little credit. Remember, confidence is not something that you chase after. Confidence is something that already is. This brings me to an interesting point. I want to talk a little bit about the difference between confidence and competence. If we said confidence is smooth muscles, relaxed, good heartbeat and all these other body feelings that we talked about, what is competence?
Ability. Understanding. Knowledge. Interesting, Jackie. "Competence is all the outward signs and being good at what you do and being sure." It's good communication. These are all good answers. Can you have competence without confidence? The crowd is split. Some say yes and some say no. First off, someone tell me why. Why can you not have competence without confidence? Is it possible to have confidence without competence? If you say no, why not?
Good, I like Lila's answer very much. "Competence is measurable. Competence is knowing the subject and confidence is conveying knowledge to others." Rachel says they go hand in hand. Good. Let's talk about competence because I like the approach of being measurable. How many of you have watched American Idol? Over the years, American Idol has turned into an amazing phenomenon. It's almost embarrassing because there are people that get up on that stage who think that they can sing and they're quite confident that they can sing and why does everyone love Simon Cowell? Because he tears them to shreds.