How to be Confident with NLP, 2nd Edition

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Believe in yourself

“You have to expect things of yourself before you can do

them.”

Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time

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What you have discovered so far

I Self-awareness is the first stepping stone

to building self-confidence.

I How to discover yourself – your true self – through a personal profiler,

31-question, self-test programme.

I Your personal profiler and your beliefs play a major part in determining

your levels of confidence.

What you are going to discover

I How to break the habit of assumptions and misguided illusions.

I How you form beliefs.

I How to build up your self-belief.

Barriers to self-belief

We all carry around beliefs that have become habitual ways of

thinking: these can either limit us or help us depending on how

we embed that belief. Here is a typical self-imposed illusion that

is misplaced and damaging.

Case study: A matter of degrees

Sally Davies and Bob Gordon do excellent jobs and are in middle

management in an international travel organisation. They are not at

senior level yet, but they are capable, valued people, well respected for

What Sally and Bob fail to see is that people with degrees make

just as many mistakes and have just as many negative experi-

ences, but they link them to something other than a lack of a

qualification – something that has just as much impact on their

confidence, but that Sally and Bob are

either unaware of or have chosen to

ignore. What they are doing in their minds

to hinder their levels of confidence is not

unique to them.

“Are you influenced more by other people’s beliefs

than your own true experience?”

The power of belief over experience

It is easy to see how beliefs around education are formed in a

society that consistently reminds us that ‘education is every-

thing’ and ‘you cannot get a good job without a degree’. What is

interesting is that, even when you meet someone who has done

well for themselves without a degree and therefore proves the

belief to be invalid, the belief stays alive and current because so

many other people believe it. So you are influenced more by

other people’s beliefs than your own true experience. Such is

the power of belief and the immense impact your beliefs have on

your confidence levels.

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their commitment and ability to get things done. Yet independently they

feel lacking in confidence because they do not have a university degree.

They both habitually compare themselves with colleagues who have

university degrees and select their own negative experiences as evidence

that they could do better if they had one.

We are not suggesting that education is unnecessary, rather that

a lack of education (or lack of the appropriate education) should

not be used as a comparison with others, and as an excuse for

things not working out, or being a disadvantage. It is equally

compelling that many highly educated people, many academics,

are so caught up in their intellectual prowess that they have dif-

ficulty breaking out of their thinking mode to take action about

anything tangible or practical.

The business world has many high-profile examples of street-

wise individuals with a basic education becoming successful by

applying what they learnt about people and life. As Mark Twain

said, ‘I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.’

Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin global brand, said of his

biggest motivation, ‘I just keep challenging myself. I see life

almost like one long university education that I never had –

every day I’m learning something new.’

Jamie Oliver left school at 16 to enrol in a catering college; John

Madejski is a self-made magnate worth £350 million, ‘I never

passed an exam . . . I put my success down to going to the uni-

versity of life; Bill Gates of Microsoft and Michael Dell both

dropped out of university to pursue the ‘university of life’ and

start up alone in business, as did Gordon Ramsay, Simon Cowell

and the late Dame Anita Roddick.

A survey of small business bosses carried out by YouGov on

behalf of Barclays Local Business Banking in May 2007 revealed

that only 11 per cent believe that having a good education is

crucial to being a success in business (and less than half actually

had a degree). So the argument that educational qualifications

are essential to business success are just as misguided.

Here is another example of self-imposed limitations kept alive

despite evidence to the contrary but nevertheless having an

impact on confidence.

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