«  
  »

Super Confidence Part I

How nice would it be to have confidence all the time? To be ‘on a good day’ every day and be able to take on every challenge in life with a strident step and a smile on your face? Confidence makes dealing with life’s little twists and turns a hell of a lot easier and can even make them seem fun; a rollercoaster in which you are safely and comfortably strapped, enabling you to sit back and enjoy the ride.

To me life is all about maintaining this feeling. Despite all of those other things we place value on – the cars, the fellas, the money – it all comes down to one thing. You. The bottom line is that when you’re sitting there in your car alone, driving somewhere, you are just with yourself. You, with you, in your head. And you live with you 24 hours a day. So, for better or worse, you can’t get rid of you.

Now, just think for a moment about living with another person 24 hours a day. You eat with them, you sleep with them, you get in the bath with them, you even go to the toilet with them! Imagine how much of a strain that would be on your relationship with that person. But, when you think about it, you actually live with yourself in just the same way!

Just like any strenuous interpersonal relationship, we have to care for and nurture our relationship to ourselves in order to preserve its strength. The healthier this relationship becomes, the more apparent that good health becomes to others, increasing the levels of confidence you experience and exude.

I call this relationship with yourself, and the resulting confidence that arises from it, your Personal Power Pack (PPP). Learning how to keep this power pack charged is the key to super confidence. Now, I might not be the most physically fit person in the world but I like to think that my personal power pack is in fairly good shape. And the principle is the same. Just like physical fitness, your power pack has to be worked on and maintained in order to act efficiently.

This all revolves around something called ‘Emotional Intelligence’, or E.Q. In a similar way to ‘intelligence quotient’, or I.Q., your E.Q. can be gauged based on several criteria:

 1)       Knowing how you feel: being aware of your emotions, how they make you feel and what that means.

2)       Knowing how others feel: being aware of other people’s emotions; how they feel and how they make you feel and what that means.

3)       Knowing what to do about it: being aware that emotions are manageable things that do not have to exist outside your ability to control and effect them.

Having a solid grasp on these three principles relates directly to a person’s emotional intelligence levels. This does not mean that a person with a high E.Q. level is necessarily a highly emotional person, but rather that they have a greater understanding of how to assess, manage and effect emotional dialogue; both internally, with themselves, and externally, with other people.

Interestingly, in terms of business, selling is tightly bound to E.Q. levels and the contagious nature of emotion. How you feel influences how others feel in a business relationship just as much as in a personal relationship. Although we tend to think that life, and business in particular, is all about logic and reason, rationality does not have the ability to directly influence people. Facts such as 2+2=4 have no power in this context and, as I mentioned in my last blog, you cannot rely on facts and figures alone to make a sale. Business relationships are based on emotional synergy and maintaining healthy levels of confidence can only bode well for your business.

 If you are miserable, you will infect people with misery and if you are confident, energetic and happy, you will infect people with confidence, energy and happiness. Your confidence becomes their confidence in you. And that’s all there is to it!

I will be running a series of blogs on this topic over the next three weeks so check back every Monday to see how you can learn to manage and develop your own Personal Power Pack.


March 3rd, 2010 | Tags: | Category: Cheries Thoughts

28 comments to Super Confidence Part I

Leave a Reply

 

 

 

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>