A lack of confidence is one of those aspects of human make up which often provides hypnotherapists with a large part of their fee income because many other issues suffered or expressed by an individual appear to stem from low self-esteem or a lack of self-confidence.
What many of us tend to forget is that by the time we’ve reached our late teens or 20s, we are the product of:
- A set of genes.
- An upbringing.
- Parental “No,No” conditioning.
- Social class
- A set of values.
- An education.
- Our environment.
Those factors have shaped our character and attitude to the world. Yet there are those who appear to think that they are able to change all that through psychological techniques - and they are right, to a degree.
Are You Hardcoded to Lack Self Confidence?
There are literally thousands of books on the subject of improving your self-confidence with most of them ignoring the fact that some of us may have been born with a predilection to low self-esteem. In other words some of us may be hardcoded to lack confidence and yet many treat a quiet personality or low self-esteem as some sort of illness or disease.
One thing that we must remember as hypnotherapists is that whatever we help a subject with, there is a certain element of exponential decay which means that eventually they are very likely to return to square one, depending on the severity of their condition - and that repeated exposure to hypnosis is needed to trully improve one's self-esteem.
Confidence is a Case in Point.
I have referred to cut-and-paste confidence because we live our lives in a cut-and-paste world where we somehow expect to be able to acquire knowledge and to a certain extent a cure by the expedient of (figuratively) cutting and pasting.
That is to say taking a technique which may or may not apply to ourselves and then ‘giving it a go'... and guess what? Many times, we are wasting our time.
Many of us lead our lives as desk jockeys and couch potatoes with a rapidly decreasing attention span - shorter than that of a goldfish - and even when we need to acquire knowledge or any fact, the information is now at our fingertips which means that we can acquire it use it and then forget it.
Books, courses etc on self-confidence tap into the modern phenomenon of instant gratification and unsurprisingly, success rates are measured in very small fractions -although the evidence usually produced by individuals involved in this industry tends to be anecdotal.
Cut and Paste Confidence - It Could Still Work.
There is obviously little harm in using a mental cut-and-paste method in order to acquire facts.
Finding a piece of information then cutting-and-pasting it into the brain is very useful for a short-term ‘fix’ and it can all be achieved without processing the information.
Unfortunately, because confidence is a function of the factors listed above, the cut-and-paste technique cannot work, except to once again provide a quick short-term solution or more accurately, a ‘Mask’ which is pretending to be a behavioural change.
Because the neural paths which generate confidence are so ancient and well worn that it is nigh on impossible to create new ones and at the same time shrink or destroy the originals.
So, a cut-and-paste approach to behavioural science is definitely not the way forward.
What can work however is hypnosis - here you can download hypnosis mp3 for confidence.
It tends to consist of a patchwork of cutting and pasting quotes and techniques from a randomly chosen collection of past teachers, gurus and practitioners and has absolutely no basis in science.
Confidence is one of those nebulous things which has never been measured.
Staying on the cut-and-paste theme, you will notice that in order to increase confidence and self-confidence, the commercial cut-and-paste formula is exactly the same no matter which experts you listen to or which self-improvement manuals you read. It is something along the lines of:
- Identify your goals.
- Identify barriers.
- Visualise.
- Focus
- Achieve!
In other words, it is always a very superficial ‘technique’ for what can often be a very fundamental issue.