We don’t decide to have low self-confidence
We develop the Low Self-Confidence habit when we’re very young, almost invariably.
It usually begins as a result of how people treat us and communicate with us – plus how we make sense of things which happen to us. Once begun, the habit is maintained by how we think about things that are outside of our Comfort Zone.
But we don’t deliberately set out to do this. We pick up not-very-helpful ways of thinking and acting when we are quite young. And we then, unknowingly refine and develop this negative thinking habit over the following… decades.
Low Self-Confidence is an accident.
It’s not a choice. It is not a weakness. It’s not a ‘condition’.
It’s a way of thinking and feeling which we accidentally slipped into at a quite young age and which then became our normal approach to life and to people!
It became the norm.
It became ‘this is just how I am’.
And this happened by accident.
But it can be changed – by choice.
(Part 1 of the Pegasus NLP Newsletter article on self-confidence looked at how this occurs.)
Using the imagination to programme for failure
The main way in which we built the Low Self-Confidence habit was a combination of
- Reliving past failures: remembering the unpleasant events and feelings over and over again
- Imagining future failures: imagining events being unpleasant or going wrong, imagining failing, imagining being rejected by people, and so on.
And most of us did this over and over again in advance of doing anything that was outside our Comfort Zone.
We were programming ourselves to feel un-confident. And it worked. Because this combination of reliving the past and imagining the future is very powerful.
You can use your imagination to turn things around
Now, in the second part, we look how to use the same very powerful mechanism to replace the Low Self-Confidence habit.
We look at techniques for using our imagination and mental rehearsal skills to regain our natural self-confidence. This article is on our website here: https://nlp-now.co.uk/low-confidence-action-steps
The Pegasus NLP Newsletter
Most articles on this site originally appeared in The Pegasus NLP Newsletter – which has been published continuously since January 2001.
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