It’s mind blowing how many times I will coach a client and we’ll reach the conclusion that whatever they’re not getting in their life is the result of a confidence issue. When you know how to gain confidence, you can open up a lot of possibilities in your life.

On the other hand, who truly knows how to gain confidence effectively? There are hundreds of articles, books and trainings on gaining confidence, but do you see many people making substantial progress in this area?

The Deceiving World of Gaining Confidence

When it comes to the advice on how to gain confidence, I think the 80/20 rule applies very well: about 80% of the advice you’ll find out there creates 20% of the results and 20% of the advice creates 80% of the results.

To put in another way, there is a lot of self-help junk out there which does little to improve self-confidence, yet it spreads like the plague. For this reason, my aim with this article is to focus on and bring out those methods for gaining confidence that provide the best results.

These are confidence gaining methods that:

• I’ve applied personally with consistent success;
• I’ve seen my social confidence coaching clients apply successfully as well;
• Are in line with what is now known in the filed of psychology about human emotions and human learning.

Developing Yourself

Your mind is always trying to gauge your level of skill in specific areas in order to generate the optimal level of self-assurance. This is why the first thing I think you want to consider in how to gain confidence is constantly developing yourself.

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If you want to be confident as a speaker, develop your speaking skills. If you want to be confident as a bowling player, develop your bowling skills. The people who invest time and energy in a systematic way in their personal development are also the people who gradually gain more confidence.

There is a catch though: even if this is the first important step, it can be insufficient. Often, our self-image doesn’t keep up with our skill level and our personality. This is why, for example, highly competent and successful people can still have an inferiority complex.

So you may find yourself needing to address your self-image issues directly. I see this phenomenon all the time with my coaching clients seeking to gain confidence and improve people skills, and it is a sign it’s time to do some belief-change work.

Test Your Beliefs

Here’s a common occurrence: let’s say you lack the self-assurance to express some of your opinions because you believe others will find them weird and they’ll judge you for them. So you keep those opinions to yourself, which only reinforces the belief that it’s bad to express them.

A lack of self-confidence often becomes self-sustaining because we never test out the beliefs which support it. If you were to give yourself a push and actually express those opinions, you may find out most people actually find them intriguing, not weird.

This is what I call testing your beliefs in reality. Just because you believe with certainty that something will happen doesn’t mean there is solid, real-life evidence that you are right. Most of us believe strongly in many silly things.

The effective way you can find out if your beliefs are grounded in reality or not is to test them out. Get out there, face your fears and you may be surprised what really happens.

If you want to overcome your limiting beliefs, you simply must watch my video presentation on conversation confidence. It will show you exactly how to crush your insecurities, using a scientifically proven method. Go here to check it out.

Move From Irrational To Rational Thinking

These is the cherry on the cake, and the thickest layer at the same time. I’ve been noticing for some years now a huge correlation between self-confidence issues and irrational thinking. And I don’t mean negative thinking, I mean irrational thinking.

The people who struggle with confidence in some areas interpret some things or they see part of themselves in an unrealistic manner. Those who are scared shitless most of the time have such a way of dramatizing and misinterpreting things I don’t even want to talk about it.

From my perspective, a large part of the answer to the perpetual question “How to gain confidence?” is this: change the way you habitually think.

This is not one single action, it’s a gradual process: it means identifying your irrational thinking, combating it, finding and applying more realistic ways of interpreting events. You can find the guide for this in my free conversation confidence presentation.

As you do so, you’re slowly changing your cognitive schemas and you will naturally improve your confidence from that.

As a coach, I take pride in providing real results for my clients, gaining confidence included. I do so by encouraging them to aim high in their growth but be highly skeptical when choosing the methods they use. That’s how to gain confidence effectively.

Image courtesy of bejealousofme