In this weeks guest post, coach and psychologist, Colin Clerkin shares some thoughts about confidence. Could these be steps you use personally or with clients?

What Shape is your Confidence: taking these simple steps can boost your confidence

by Colin Clerkin

What Shape is your Confidence: taking these simple steps can boost your confidence

When you think about confidence, what does it mean to you? It is an attitude, a belief, a sense of assuredness that permeates your being and allows you to feel that you can achieve anything. A confident you can nail that presentation, make that sale, ask for that raise.

But an un-confident you… now, that is a very different story, is it not? Self-doubt, uncertainty, anxiety; an inability to function that often makes little sense to you because you know you have the ability, but the self-belief is just not there when you need it.

There are many things that we can learn to try to address our lack of confidence. Coaches and psychologists can help with psycho-educational training that looks at assertiveness, stress management courses, social skills training, etc. All of these can make a positive difference to how you perceive a situation and your response to it, but I would like to introduce another, simple idea, one that approaches the problem at a physical level.

I would like you to consider how your body shape reflects your inner state — and then recognise how you can start to overcome problems with confidence by actively, physically, making the changes I will introduce to you in this article.

Lack of confidence has a “shape”

When we are NOT confident, we all know that it shows. The people around us can tell. For example, the un-confident me will tend to close in on myself: my shoulders droop; my head drops; my eye contact becomes poor. I might rub my hands, or chew my lip, or yawn even though I am not tired. All of this occurs unconsciously in response to some perceived threatening situation. This is not threatening in the sense that my physical well-being is at risk, but threatening to my self-esteem and my sense of competence as a person.

So, let’s begin to address this by looking at how adjusting the frame of the body can lead us to positive change in how we feel in certain situations, and we can learn to use body posture as a priming cue for confidence.

Body posture creates the scaffolding upon which we can hang positive imagery to help shift our perceptions of ourselves — if we can learn to project our confident shape onto our body framework, we can use this to start altering our response to challenges to our confidence.

By paying attention to and altering our body posture in line with our desired functioning, and building onto this scaffold, we can cue associated desired, confident responses.

But where do we find “our confident shape”?

The first place to look is in our own experience. Think back to a time when you did feel confident. Spend a minute or two recalling that experience; what it felt like and, importantly, how you held yourself at the time. Notice how your shoulders were set strongly, your head up. Felt good, didn’t it? This is the core of the confident image that I want you to project onto the body scaffold I described above.

If your life experience has not been of confidence previously, then take some time to think about someone that you admire whom you consider to be supremely and positively confident. They can be a real person or someone from fiction; it does not matter. But notice what it is about their physical presentation that causes you to perceive them as confident. Notice how they hold themselves, the way they meet the gaze of the person they are speaking to, or their voice tone when they speak. Imagine this confident posture projected onto your own frame and pay attention to where in your body you first notice the spark of that feeling as it takes hold.

Breath in deeply and focus on that part of your body where you feel that confidence once again. With each deep breathe in, allow yourself to experience that confidence growing. Physically allow your body to mirror the posture of that confident you of old or that admired role model. Feel the shape of confidence as it takes hold of your frame and inhabit it.

Now realise what you have just achieved

With a few simple deep breaths and the application of a memory from another time or an impression of another’s poise to your current body posture, you have boosted your own confidence. It may only be by a matter of degrees this first time, but imagine how, by practicing this technique regularly, you can enhance this experience and learn to apply it readily at those times in your day-to-day life where previously you have felt your confidence escape you.

Learn to do this and you will soon see how your confidence can take on this new and exciting positive shape.

About the author

Dr Colin Clerkin is a psychologist and coach based in Chester, in the North West of England. Colin has been involved in helping people tackle challenges in their lives for 20 years, initially as a clinical psychologist and, over the past three years, as both a personal and a parent coach.After his own experiences with cancer in recent years, he has also been inspired to coach cancer survivors as they look to adjust to life after cancer.

He launched Mirror Coaching in 2010, and provides face-to-face or Skype-based coaching to parents, individuals and small business owners. He is currently creating an on-line coaching programme to help people in the early stages of setting up their coaching and therapy practices.