Building Self Confidence
By Jim Sullivan
As a hypnotherapist I specialise in helping people to develop confidence
and self esteem.
Perhaps surprisingly, the people who ask for my help are not shrinking
violets and their reasons for wanting to develop enhanced self confidence
are not wholly selfish. Consider a few examples. The names have been
changed.
John works for a large corporate. Diligent, startlingly intelligent and
very ambitious, he found that his ideas were consistently overlooked. This
wasn’t enough of a catalyst to bring him to my door, however. He eventually
grew frustrated, and then angry, that dominant individuals in his company
were able to put their own ideas forward with ease. Worst of all, some of
these ideas, he felt, were positively damaging, but he just couldn’t make
his opposition count. All his intelligence counted for little in his
testosterone-fuelled working environment. It had reached the point where he
felt that he should resign and start again with a fresh company; he simply
didn’t feel that he was adding any real value. A man of great integrity,
John would rather leave than tacitly support such a wrong-headed and
unintelligent approach to business.
John stayed. We worked together to identify his confidence profile, which
was very unusual -- represented by less than 1% of the population. Through
work on his stage presence and physical presence, we were able to
significantly improve John’s effectiveness in being taken seriously, to the
extent where he has recently broken through into senior management.
Jenny came to me because she was lonely. A brief marriage hadn’t worked
out, and she was finding serial dating to be a frustrating activity. Jenny
had come to realise that she wasn’t moving out of her ‘comfort zone’, either
socially or at work. She feared becoming enclosed, locked into a safe
routine which wouldn’t threaten her, but wouldn’t take her life forward
either.
Jenny’s confidence profile was almost the inverse of John’s. Where he had
masses of peer independence, Jenny had almost none, which meant that she was
hugely dependent on the good opinion of others. She needed lots of
reassurance, and had very little faith in her own ability or judgement.
The approach with Jenny was to strengthen her peer independence -- her
ability to trust in her own judgement, independent of the views of others –-
and to build up her self esteem. She has now met somebody, changed her job
and moved house -- all in the space of a year!
What these case studies illustrate is the complex nature of self
confidence. It isn’t like height or weight; you can’t read off a single
value which describes a person. Confidence is complex and to develop, we
need to understand our confidence profile. I have subsequently made my
confidence profile questionnaire available through the Confidence Club
website
http://www.confidenceclub.net
This has enabled me to build up an even larger database of confidence
profiles, and allows people from all over the world to identify their
particular areas for improvement.
Jim Sullivan is a hypnotherapist specialising in confidence and self
esteem development. He works with individual clients, with companies looking
to de-stress their staff and through his Confidence Club website.
http://www.confidenceclub.net
Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/
|
