Walk the talk

TLDR

Self-confidence has a huge impact on the most important areas of our lives, and arguably all areas of life. Relationships, professional careers, financial security and health, are all influenced positively or negatively by our self-confidence or lack thereof.

All isn’t lost, self-confidence isn’t innate, it’s a skill that we can learn and practise until we master it. In this blog we focus on posture and communication skills, particularly on our voice as a natural instrument; and how we can use these two areas to improve our confidence.

Be mindful of people that fake their self-confidence with the aim of using you or tricking you for their benefit.

One reason for low self-confidence can be related to mental health issues. In this case, we advise to seek professional support and consider cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).

Our life at stake

Self confidence impacts four of the most important areas of anyone’s life, arguably the four most important: Relationships; family, close friends and co-workers; Career; your main activity that contributes to society, not necessarily your main income source; Finance; your financial security; and Health; This includes physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing.. There are obviously other very important areas of anyone’s life. Personal growth through education, personal fulfilment, spirituality, community and I’m sure we can come up with others. I believe the latter are also impacted but more through the impact on the former.

It’s quite normal for people that lack self-confidence to also have low self-esteem. We won’t cover low self-esteem in today’s blog but it’s important to know that by fixing lack of self-confidence or low self-confidence we are sure to impact positively on our self-esteem, if that’s an issue we also need to tackle.

Low self-confidence is recognised by thoughts such as “I can’t do this”, “I’m not capable”, “I’m not that smart / strong / ambitious / creative / knowledgeable…” insert whatever trait you can think of. I believe the main problem, although not the only one, is that we believe that’s just the way it is, the way we are. The good news is, that’s absolutely not the case. Confidence is not innate, think of it more like a skill. You can learn it and practise it, and if you practise long enough you will become a confident person, no matter how much you lack it at the moment.

What breeds self-confidence?

Yes, confidence is a skill that you can learn and practise, but there are two things that by themselves create self-confidence and support further growth of that confidence.

One factor that you might have already considered is success. When you succeed at something, it’s highly likely that your self-confidence increases. Additionally, when you feel confident in doing something, the chances of performing well at that task increase, which further reinforces your self-confidence.

The second factor, which you might not have considered, is arguably even more potent than the first one — intention. The intention behind doing something can sometimes be even more effective in fostering a sense of self-confidence than success itself.

When someone achieves success, they might attribute it to luck or downplay it, minimising the accomplishment that could foster a sense of self-confidence. Conversely, intention inherently carries the importance one ascribes to it. Given that self-confidence is necessary to execute whatever you’ve set out to do, the very act of intending to do something can automatically generate self-confidence without conscious thought.

That’s who I am

No one is born confident or lacking confidence, we are moulded by internal and external factors that will lead to us being more confident or less. Things like negative childhood experiences and unsupportive parental relationships will often lead to lack of self-confidence. Rejection and physical appearance will also in many cases dictate how confident oneself is. In today’s reality, social media will create such expectations and false realities that many fall into the trap of comparing themselves to people that don’t really exist and end up losing confidence as they don’t measure up to the lies they’re being fed. There are also mental health conditions that can impact our beliefs about ourselves, leading to lack of self-confidence being one of the symptoms.

Considering the many different ways that can take on a path of low self-confidence or complete lack thereof, it should be easy to imagine how many people suffer from this affliction. Although I’m certain there’s a lot of people that don’t recognise their low self-confidence and as such don’t feel pain or distress from it. In reality their lives are very far from what they should be, even if they don’t know it.

What am I?

You are a momentary self, you are not the same you were in the past or the same you will be in the future. This is explicitly and literally true.

When you learn something new, are you still the same person? What if you change your belief in something? You might still think you’re in essence the same person, even though you now know more and believe different things than in the past.

Most of the cells in our bodies regenerate regularly. They’re constantly dying and being replaced with new cells. This process of cellular turnover is part of the body’s maintenance and repair mechanisms. Are we the same person if the cells in our body are different cells?

The outer layer of our skin, the epidermis, is replaced roughly every 2–3 weeks. The red blood cells live about four months, while white blood cells range from a few hours to several days. Platelets have a lifespan of about ten days. Are we still the same person we were a couple of weeks ago?

Some cells, like those in our bones, can live for many years, but they’re eventually replaced through osteoclasts and osteoblasts processes. If we are still the same person after all this, you may think that’s because there are many types of neurons that last our entire lifespan. But it’s known that even though we are born with “all” our neurons; we’re purposefully ignoring neurogenesis here; and most do indeed live with us our entire life, there are still neurons that do die and more important than that, it’s not about the neurons but the synapses and synaptic plasticity; that is, the changes in strength and number of connections our neurons make during our lifetime. Are we still the same person after all these changes?

What are you then, if you’re always the same person despite all these changes taking place within you? You’re a momentary self, and you can change anything about yourself at any time, confidence is no exception.

The impacts

How does a lack of self-confidence affect our lives? We’ll focus on the four most important areas of our lives.

Relationships

A lack of or low self-confidence leads to insecurity and jealousy. You can see how this creates conflicts in relationships, not just marital relationships but with other family members, friends and the community at large.

In some cases, a person becomes overly dependent on their partner for validation, which can lead to an unhealthy balance in the relationship, whether it’s the man or the woman who becomes too dependent.

Due to fear of rejection or conflict, some will avoid necessary confrontations, leading to unresolved issues that continue to have a negative impact on their relationships.

Low self-confidence often results in poor communication because people don’t feel comfortable sharing their true feelings or opinions. When someone lacks self-confidence, they often don’t value their opinions as highly as others.

In the context of work relationships, a lack of self-confidence can lead to missed opportunities for promotion, collaboration, and further development.

Lack of self-confidence can sometimes manifest as humility, which may be appreciated in certain relationships, fostering empathy and understanding. This allows for lack of confidence to exist but it doesn’t prevent all the aforementioned issues from taking place even within the relationships where humility is appreciated.

Sometimes low self-confidence can catalyse a need for personal growth and learning, as individuals identify the reason for their insecurities and want to work to overcome them.

On the other hand self-confident individuals tend to communicate their thoughts and feelings more often and openly, leading to healthier, more honest relationships.

They are also more likely to bounce back from disagreements or conflicts because they don’t rely solely on others for their self-worth. They tend to be independent which can lead to balanced relationships where they can enjoy spending time with others without being dependent on that for happiness.

Confidence is attractive to others, and when it comes to women, you can be sure that confidence beats looks.

It’s normal for people with too much self-confidence to come across as arrogance or insensitivity, which can be off-putting to others, because we all know that there’s never grounds to be overconfident. It may lead to dominance in a relationship, creating an imbalance and potentially causing conflict and degrading the quality of the relationship.

Career

If you care about the work environment, advancing in your career and have some sort of job satisfaction, you will want to be a confident person.

Self-confidence will help you to take on challenging projects, speak up in meetings, and apply for promotions, all of which can lead to career advancement. One of the main reasons why some people have better wages than others in similar roles is because they’re more confident and less agreeable than their colleagues leading to more discussions with their management around promotions, job opportunities and raises.

If you’re confident and trust your capacity to find solutions and make decisions, you will fare better than someone that lacks confidence even if they have more experience than you in that role.

As an entrepreneur self-confidence can lead to healthy risk-taking, such as trying new approaches or venturing into unfamiliar areas, which can fuel innovation and growth.

Resilience usually relies on confidence. When facing setbacks, you need to believe in your ability to overcome challenges in order to remain resilient.

A lack of self-confidence will probably hold you back from seeking promotions, voicing ideas, or taking on challenging projects. You’ll find it difficult to make decisions and because you don’t believe in your ability to overcome challenges you will also lack the resilience required to be very successful in your career.

Finance

You cannot rely on your job for financial security, today more than ever. I don’t care if your job is in your own company that is at the stage of expansion, or if you’re an expert technician in a highly sought after field, your job and related income is at risk at all times. And if your financial acumen is not there, chances are that even if you do live a good life; for these examples I just mentioned; you are at risk of not being financially secure.

What I mean by that is that your income alone does not mean you’re financially secure. You’d be surprised by how many people with great jobs and wages are actually slaves to those wages and if something happens outside of their control, their lives change dramatically. Our reality today is that there are a small number of people that have the power to make changes so substantial to the way we live that no one company or job is safe from complete annihilation. On top of that we have a relentless technological advancement taking place and that continues to increase its pace of progress leading to huge changes in society in a very short span of time. These changes will impact us in ways that no one can even predict.

So what can we do to better prepare ourselves? Well a confident person is better equipped to take some of the actions required. As we have seen when discussing careers, negotiating for better compensation, seeking promotions, or pursuing higher-paying job opportunities will still help you, since having more disposable income makes it easier to take other actions.

For instance, you are more likely to start your own businesses or make other investments, which can provide additional income. Confidence helps you to take those risks. Investing, starting a business, or buying real estate have the potential for high returns.

You will need to learn about managing your finances, making sound investment decisions, and planning for the future. Self-confidence will not only drive you to learn those things but because you believe you will do good at it, guess what, your chances of being good at it have already increased dramatically. Confidence will also help in networking situations, leading to more opportunities for income or investment.

Lack of self-confidence will create difficulties in all of those areas we just looked into. People with low self-confidence tend to mismanage their finances, because they don’t learn to manage them but also because they spend to hide their insecurities and low self-confidence.

Health

I don’t think that anyone thinks health impacts confidence, we’re not confident because we’re healthy, or lack confidence because we’re ill. But when it comes to confidence impacting health, you might be sceptical of how confidence can impact our health but I’ll attempt to show you just that.

To maintain good health, especially as you grow older, it requires a few things:

Exercise, a balanced diet, getting enough good sleep and minding your mental health by exercising your brain. If you do these things, your chances of being healthier for longer increase substantially compared to someone that doesn’t. It has a higher impact than age, if we don’t take it to extremes and compare someone in their 70s with someone in their 20s.

A lack of self-confidence impacts your motivation to exercise, eat healthy, and even have a good night sleep, since lack of confidence can lead to anxiety and stress which causes poor sleep patterns. If you don’t believe in yourself you’re also most likely to avoid challenging problems and tasks that exercise your brain; watching a documentary about quantum physics for instance, does not register as exercising your brain, unless you spend a good amount of time thinking about what you just watched and trying to come up with insights using the information received.

Psychopaths

Be alert for the “false” confident people. I say that they’re falsely confident because they have no success or good intention to support their self-confidence. Notice that I’ve said “good intention”, because they have intention, and that intention is to take advantage of you. These people usually exhibit self-confident traits and are charismatic, well spoken, calm and in control and well groomed. The problem is that all they want is to take something from you. What it is that they want to take from you depends on what you have to give them.

These individuals can have a particularly profound and long-lasting impact on women. This is primarily due to the fact that self-confidence is often an attractive quality for women, although it’s essential that this confidence is backed up by success in meaningful life areas. While what you’re about to read may be a broad generalization, it does reflect some truths about our contemporary society. Of course, exceptions exist, and it’s important to acknowledge that not only women can be attracted to self-confidence or potentially be taken advantage of because of it.

If you impersonate someone successful and have the self-confidence traits to support that lie, you will most likely be successful with women, it doesn’t matter if the success is a lie and your intention not a good one, you will be successful for a short period of time. Not with all women but with many, since a characteristic of these individuals is that they prey on many women. It’s a numbers game. This is why these individuals impact women in such a negative way. Women fall for these men and are discarded soon after. Note that this starts very early in a woman’s life.

Two things will generally happen, one is that obviously the woman needs to find another man and the second one is that the more men a woman goes through, or the more dating she does, the less chances she has of finding a highly successful self-confident man. Or rather than finding, keep him. Highly successful and self-confident men, will also spend some time with them, just not marry them and make a family with them.

Now to go back to the first point. After a woman has a relationship with a highly self-confident man; even if it’s a psychopath; it will be very difficult for that woman to give a chance to another man with low-self confidence or even just lower than what she got access to. The problem here is that the chances she will get together with another psychopath are quite high. Eventually, the woman may settle down with someone with low-self esteem or lower than what she got access to, get married and have kids. Later she might seek out highly self-confident men again and potentially end up getting divorced or cheating.

We can’t blame women for their attraction to self-confidence and everyone gets tricked by a psychopath. There’s only one thing we can do, because we can’t change the psychopaths and we can’t change women. And we shouldn’t want to; change the women I mean. All we can do is improve our self-confidence, and by we, I mean everyone that is not self-confident, and that includes women as well.

Practice makes confident

So what can we do to become more confident? Everything you read so far was just a primer for what comes next, and what comes next will be shared today and in a number of future blog posts. The reason for this is because this one is already quite long and there’s much still to cover. I write from experience, and as such, provide you what works best for me. You need to find what works best for you. I like to start small and make sure I don’t take on too much or I’m setting myself up for failure. Although I’m quite well aware of a good number of things I can practise in order to improve my self-confidence, I only choose 1 or 2 to focus on.

Posture

It’s incredible how our confidence, or lack of, manifests in our posture and how by correcting our posture we can impact our confidence. If you lack confidence, chances are that you have poor posture.

This will manifest in a slouched posture, where you slouch or hunch your shoulders, trying to appear smaller or less noticeable. You might rationalise this by thinking you like to be low profile.

You might notice that when in company you tend to cross your legs when seated; sometimes even when standing; and cross your arms pretty much at all times and positions.

When walking you tend to look at the floor rather than walking up straight, you prefer to lower your gaze and avoid eye contact.

It’s very possible that your body language and your verbal language do not match. Others will sense something is not right when you say you’re ok and your body language says otherwise.

Bad posture leads to physical problems and communication problems impacting your health and relationships.

One Fix

How to correct it? Practise, practise, practise. Like any other skill, it takes time and effort to become good at it. Obsess over it. That’s one of the reasons why I only choose 1 or to 2 things to focus on. The result is that I’m constantly becoming aware of my bad posture and then correcting it.

Pay attention to how you stand and how you walk. Stand straight, keep your chest open and shoulders back. Look big. Do not cross your arms and legs, force yourself out of it as soon as you realise you’re doing it. Your hands do not have to be behind your back or in your pockets, there’s no reason to hide your hands, and many reasons to keep them where everyone can see them. Rather than hiding your hands, incorporate them into your communication, capiche? Yes, use your hands and gesticulate while you talk.

When walking, look straight at eye level; make sure you don’t completely ignore the ground 😀; don’t be afraid to throw in some swag to your walk, it will feel out of place, but only for you. You see, others see you through your eyes not theirs. What I mean by this is that if you see yourself as someone confident, others will see you that way too, but you’re acting like it. Not everyone is a good actor but most people that think of themselves as confident, fool almost everyone else.

Think of someone cocky. Most cocky people are so because of their insecurity. Most cocky people suffer from false confidence, yet for everybody else, they’re confident, even if we think they’re arrogant. We don’t think of them as insecure though.

Walk at a steady pace and swing your arms naturally as you walk, even if you skip the swag 😀.

Obsess about your posture as this will help you practise it. Only by doing your very best to have a correct posture at ALL times, will you improve it in a reasonable amount of time, and be your natural posture, which will allow you to start practising something else.

Communication

This one is a biggy because it involves a number of different skills actually. It’s so big that we will break it down into several different blogs and my suggestion is that, if you think you need to improve your communication, to start small and improve a couple of things at a time and start increasing your communication skills by adding new skills as you become comfortable and skilled at the ones you’re practising.

Communication is less about what you say and more about what is heard. We tend to care a lot about what we want to say but completely ignore how we say it and how the other person receives it. People don’t only hear what you say, they feel what you say. They can feel your lack of confidence, or they may feel bored, offended, not interested, or the opposite. Can you think of a situation, where 2 different people were saying pretty much the same thing to a third person and that third person would only listen to one of the other 2? It wasn’t what they’re saying, it’s how they say it and how the other person receives it.

Look in the mirror

Like I said, there’s quite a bit to go through on communication skills but I want to first focus on the voice. Our voice is an instrument, and just like an instrument you may play it skillfully and create emotions with your melodies, or you can play very poorly and make us want it to stop, please just stop. And everything in between. The boredom, lack of interest, or trust, or interest, all is influenced by the way we play our natural instrument that is our voice. Obviously content matters, but have someone learning the piano play Beethoven Symphony №5 after 5 lessons to someone that has never heard it before and then ask them if they think that Symphony is a masterpiece.

This exercise is quite useful for many aspects of communication skills and it’s very probable that by carrying out this exercise you will identify many things you want to improve on and nothing will stop you from doing it. The aim of this exercise at this stage is for you to realise how you sound to others.

I’m sure you’re quite good at identifying when someone’s communication skills are poor. He speaks too softly, she speaks too loudly, he’s boring, she speaks too slow, he’s monotonic, she doesn’t stop to breath, he eats half the words, she keeps saying “like” like. The list goes on but you get the point. What about you, what are your shortcomings in your verbal communication? Chances are you don’t know because you never heard yourself from an outside prespective.

Record yourself talking in a 5 minute video. Don’t listen to it straight away, put it away for a day. When you come back to it, first watch the video without sound and just watch yourself. Take notes.

Then, raise the volume and turn the video screen down or away and just listen to yourself. Take notes.

Then do it again with video and sound. Take notes. Like I said, you will notice a lot of things that are important and you will need to work on them at some stage if you don’t decide to do it right now, but for now, at least be conscious of how your voice sounds when you’re talking.

Notice the volume, is it too high or too low? Is there tonality and emotion in your voice? Do you sound confident? How’s the pace, do you talk too fast or too slow? Do you make natural pauses when talking? Is there melody when you speak or are you more monotonic? Do you use filler words much, such as “hmm” and “Umm”? Are your movements and gestures consistent with what you’re saying?

I’d like to focus on the volume of your voice when you talk. You want to talk loud enough that anyone can hear you. Melody, emotion, pace and filler words are important to get right, and I will write about it, but I believe that first of all you need to correct volume by increasing or decreasing it. For that you need to be mindful of two things:

The environment

Your volume will need to be adequate for the environment you’re in. A small room is different from a large room and a quiet dinner table is different from a busy restaurant. Adapt your volume to the environment, don’t talk in a busy pub like if you were in the library.

The recipient

If the person you’re talking to speaks with a lower volume, you want to lower your volume as well and try to match your recipient’s style of communication. In a setting where there are several recipients, you adjust your volume to the environment rather than a single recipient.

Second thing, I have alluded to already, is to use your hands to emphasise your words and message. And this is a great way to keep your hands where they should be, visible and somewhere between your waist and your chin.

Don’t give up

When you start practising, you will feel awkward and you will make mistakes and not perform at the same level as someone that has been practising for longer than you have.

When you need to grab someone’s attention and need to turn up the volume of your voice, it won’t feel natural. When you want to interject in a conversation between a group of people, it won’t feel natural, but do it anyway. Raise your voice and gesticulate to bring everyone’s attention to what you’re about to say. Don’t just say the words, feel the words.

Remember, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. Your insights might be great, but no one will trust them, if you don’t sound confident. What you’re telling your audience, is that you’re insecure, not what your insights are. Tell them you’re confident, and they will believe any crap you tell them, just like we saw with the psychopaths. If you have great insights AND are confident, you will be successful in life.

When you start gesticulating while you speak, your gestures might not be in sync with your voice or you might just feel awkward doing it. Just be authentic and you’ll be fine, if you notice you’re being clumsy or out of sync, laugh about it. No one will care as long as you’re being authentic, and they will even support you if they know what you’re trying to do.

When you walk down the street with your chin up and look people in the eyes, you will see the world differently and might not even like that much that experience, but do not look down. Keep steady and calm and own it. Remember, intention is more powerful than success.

It won’t be easy, especially if have already acquired bad habits in your posture and verbal communication. You’re not just starting to learn a new skill, you’re correcting an existing skill. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it, and it will impact your life in the 4 areas we discussed. You know what they say, practise makes perfect. You will get better at it and walking and speaking with confidence will soon become natural to you. Now go for a walk. And while you’re at it, talk to a stranger… I know, I know, I’m pushing it too far now. Maybe later…

Conclusion

I wrote the conclusion at the start as you may have noticed. That’s the main format change I implemented in the blog. The “too long didn’t read” is hopefully a great feature for those with less time for reading longer blogs. I’m also trying to decrease the reading time of each post to around 5 minutes but it’s not an easy task to accomplish and when choosing between length and making the post as valuable as I can make it, I will opt for the latter every time. I will do my best to keep it short though. So since the conclusion has been written, I’ll say this to finish it off:

If you have low self-confidence but these are not areas that you need to improve on, you can look at other areas of communication skills, positive self-talk, self-care, setting goals and personal growth. I will write about these topics and more in future blog posts.

But if the root cause of your low self-confidence is related to mental health issues, please seek support from a professional. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can be particularly effective for building self-confidence. I know because I’ve done it for a different reason and can recommend it.

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