Visualising Confidence

When you think of a confident person you know, you probably assume that person is confident in all areas of their life.

However very rarely is this the case, because even the most confident of people still have insecurities about themselves.

A good example of this can be found with very attractive people. Most people tend to think of attractive people as being very confident, however attractive people usually have many insecurities regarding their looks, so most are not as confident as they appear.

What this tells us about self confidence is that perception plays a big role in how we see other people.

If someone looks confident to us, we will naturally assume (rightly or wrongly) that they are a confident person, and so how we act towards them will be different than if we were dealing with a person who appeared to lack self confidence.

Therefore it is possible for a person to give the appearance of being self confident, such as by using self confident body language, so that others perceive them to be confident until they actually feel confident themselves.

Since developing self confidence is ultimately a process you must go through, having an idea in mind as to the sort of confidence you would like to display will help you to stay on track until you reach your desired goal. One powerful way to do this is by visualising a confident version of yourself.

Visualising Confidence

In a previous article I talked about the two main types of confidence, internal and external confidence.

Whilst external confidence can be useful, and to some extent help to build your overall level of self confidence, what you should really be aiming for is developing internal confidence because this is what will make the most difference to your life.

The Super Confident You

An effective way to develop your internal confidence is to use visualisation on a daily basis.

To do this simply imagine yourself as a super confident person, and then apply that image of yourself to a real life situation coming up sometime in your future.

Try to notice the things you are doing, the people you are with, the talents and skills you have and how you are feeling. This image of yourself should be the ideal person you would like to become.

Although you probably won’t achieve your visualised image the first time you practice it in real life, you will slowly start to incorporate that image into your personality the more you visualise it and the more you practice it.

Of course this won’t happen if you only visualise this image once or twice, as that is simply not enough time for the information to register in your brain.

However if you keep at it, eventually you will become more and more like the person you want to be.

Practice In Your Head And In The Real World

It is very important that you practice in the real world and not just in your head, because visualisation without real life practice isn’t very much use at all.

This is something many people do simply because it is easier and they feel like they are doing something constructive, when in reality it is just a method they use to avoid confronting some painful emotion.

Practicing what’s in your head in real life also helps you to refine the image you have, by giving you feedback on your actions so you can improve the next time you try to act out your visualised self.

Without this feedback, the image your have of your confident self will remain nothing more than a fantasy image, and unless you live in a fantasy world, it won’t do you much good at all.