When you think about NLP training, a lot of people think they do this to get more confidence, or self esteem.The truth is that, although the word confidence exists as some kind of entity in the world, the word confidence can be taken out of the dictionary as it doesn’t actually exist at all in reality!
Ohhhh, gasp, you may be saying to yourself…..confidence not exist!!??
No, not at all. Confidence exists as a figment of our imaginations. Whereby I would choose more readily an action or a ‘non’ action to describe what a persons choices are in life. Where a person may say, “I’m not going to do that BECAUSE I’m not confident”..they have taken away the most powerful entity on the earth; namely themselves!
Cogito ergo sum
Descartes, the great mathematician and philosopher coined the phrase Cogito ergo sum. He said that, from my understanding of the man, that was all he could prove absolutely about a human existence, I think therefore I am. Further than that, he could find no absolute proof of what a human being is!
Bringing that back to the notion of confidence, a language pattern has a life of it’s own and we are language beings. The only proof you have of confidence or no confidence is inside your own head.
What I’d point to is that wherever you go and whatever you do, that’s what you are doing. There is nothing else! That you have a notuion that you’d like to go and talk to a person sitting over there and you don’t has no relevance to anything other than you do or do not go over.
Who is to say whether you should or shouldn’t and the FACT is whatever you are DOING now!” The rub comes when somebody says they are going to do something, place their word out there and then NOT do it. Yet that doesn’t mean to say anything about the word confidence. The truth is they just didn’t do it. Simple.
The sooner the person comes to terms with their inner realities of what they are going to do and what they are not going to do brings immense power back to the person. It may not be the right time to do this thing, ask a girl/guy out, go for the promotion, start a band etc.etc. So coming to terms with what’s real or not will save a person a lot of energy and angst in their lives.
We could exchange the word confidence for presence. if you are to go on stage, you are either present to what you are doing there and who you are, or not. If not it may LOOK like you are not confident, yet I’d say, more powerfully, you were not present to who you were at that time. This will save you a bunch of money and time trying to ‘fix’ this thing called confidence and lack of it.
If I train a sales person to great skills and get their vision perfectly aligned with their inner goals and then send them out into the big world, it’s not confidence that would stop them picking the phone up; it’s just picking the phone up! That’s called ACTION, and it’s either time for ACTION or it isn’t. That’s the great thing about being as human, you have a choice. You decide if it’s time for action, and if it is….you make sure you get a strategy in place to do what’s needed and when 🙂
Of course we have an MP3 product on NLP and confidence, click here.