3 Things To Know About Confidence To Consistently Crush Your Goals

Henry Ford’s most famous quote might be, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — you’re right.” Unfortunately for us, he doesn’t tell us the secret to the “think that you can” part.

If all it took to be successful was to believe that we are capable of something, there might be a whole lot more millionaires out there. There must be something more to the “believing that we can” than meets the eye.

Have you ever had the experience where you felt like you prepared for something to the point of exhaustion, only to feel like you failed at the thing you were preparing for?

Or have you ever felt as though your DNA has certain qualities that help you be good at some things and have doomed you to be terrible at other things?

What about when you feel that something good is about to happen, or something good?should?happen, or a lot of good things have been happening… and you sense in the pit of your stomach that something bad is about to happen, almost as if to?“balance out the karma?”

These are all signs of a lack of confidence. Lacking confidence is a normal part of being human. Every single one of us can relate to one (and likely multiple) of the scenarios described above. The good news is that confidence can be cultivated and harnessed. We can carry confidence with us throughout the day and even store “confidence-reserves” for when we need to call on our confidence later on.

Sound crazy? Well I am not one to make claims without backing them up. Here are 3 science-backed aspects of confidence that you?need?to be aware of if you want to go out and crush your goals more effectively, faster, and with loads of confidence.

(I will list the resources, articles and studies at the end of the article for further reading and supporting evidence for those who would like to deepen their understanding of these topics relating to confidence and consciousness.)

"The good news is that confidence can be cultivated and harnessed. We can carry confidence with us throughout the day and even store 'confidence-reserves' for when we need to call on our confidence later on."        

1. Confidence-as-an-emotion and confidence-as-a-feeling are two different things.

When you think of confidence, do you think of someone you know who you would describe as “confident?” Do you think of a task you are extremely confident doing? Or do you think of all of the ways you observe a lack of confidence in the people in your life? Do you think of a lack of confidence that you notice in yourself?

Generally speaking, when we think of “confidence” we think of doing things in an effective way. Or we think of someone having a sense of certainty when they take an action as if they already know what the outcome is going to be. All of this is related to confidence but does not tell us what confidence actually is.

The way that we perceive confidence, and the way that we behave when we are confident, are two different things. If we are going to learn about confidence, we need to be clear about what we are learning.

We can typically think of an image of confidence more easily than coming up with a definition for it. Knowing what confidence looks like is the “emotion” of confidence. It is how we interpret somebody else being confident; they look or sound confident. This does not necessarily tell us how they are feeling internally, however. How did they get to that state of being… which led to them expressing that confidence?

Maybe you have had someone describe you as confident and you thought to yourself, “I’m just being me? There isn’t anything special about what I’m doing?” Or how about when you were entering an intimidating situation and you put quite a bit of effort into “coming across as” confident, but inside you wanted to melt away and run from the situation?

Again, you should be able to see how perceiving confidence and feeling confident are two very different things.

Confidence in the form that we want to master… is a feeling.

Quick note on feelings: Feelings are an expression of our subconscious mind’s interpretation of an experience.

Put another way; when something happens in our environment, our subconscious mind interprets that event and informs you how to “feel” about it. That “feeling” is an expression of the?subconscious mind’s?interpretation of what just happened.

Confidence as a feeling, then, is a sensation we have that tells us about our level of certainty that something is or is not going to happen. Note that it doesn’t matter if what is going to happen is “good” or “bad.” Confidence is often associated with positive traits or characteristics, but really confidence is a completely neutral phenomenon. It is simply a matter of?what?we are confident about. We can be confident about good things and bad things. Confidence itself is simply a measure of how certain we are about?what is going to happen.

For example, let’s say that you are a guest at someone else’s house for dinner and they serve food that you do not like. You will begin to feel something (that feeling is coming from your subconscious mind) which is intended to inform your behavior. You may communicate your dissatisfaction with the dinner being served. Or perhaps you have a certain perception about the hosts that make you want to pretend to enjoy the food, and so you eat it despite not liking it. Regardless of your behavior, it is the feelings you are having that prompt you to behave the way that you do. Confidence, then, is?the measure of your sense of certainty?that your behavior will produce the outcome you desire. If you are confident that:

A. The hosts would not expect you to eat food you don’t like and would love to make you new food, then you’d likely take the first approach of informing them that you do not like what was served in the hopes you will eventually get served something more suitable to your taste.

B. If you are confident that the hosts would feel disrespected if you expressed your dislike of the food that they cooked and an unpleasant interaction would follow your expression of your dissatisfaction, then you’d likely take the second approach of pretending to enjoy the food.

In either scenario, your level of confidence about what “might happen if”?is what determines the route you take. It can be said that you are confident that the hosts would be happy to make you different food, just as it can be said that you are not confident that pretending to like the food is the best optimal outcome in that situation. Of course this works in the reverse, too.

Most situations are not this cut and dry; humans spend a great deal of time considering possible outcomes, and as we consider the possible outcomes, we are measuring the likelihood of a certain outcome will occur. This measurement of the likelihood of an outcome is the feeling of confidence. Confidence as a feeling can be synonymous with certainty. If certainty is 100% confidence, then confidence can be thought of on a spectrum where most of the time we fall somewhere between 0% and 100% likelihood that something will happen.

When we talk about wanting more confidence, what we are talking about is wanting to feel more certain. Typically, we desire to feel more certain that good things are going to happen. We feel that being confident that good things will happen will increase the likelihood that good things?will?happen! Naturally, we don’t just want to feel like something good is going to happen, but we also believe that?feeling?like something good is going to happen will actually help make something good happen!

Going forward, it will help for you to recognize that you are already confident; you are just confident about things that are not helping you create the life that you truly want to be living. You are probably very confident that the life you are living now will continue the way it has been going leading up to this point. Or perhaps you are confident that if anything changes, it will change for the worse, not change for the better. When people say “I want to feel more confident” really what they are saying is “I want to feel more confident that good things are going to happen.”

"Confidence itself is simply a measure of how certain we are about?what is going to happen."        

2. 3 steps to train and harness confidence in a matter of seconds

Knowing that confidence is a feeling and that feelings are the subconscious mind’s expression of its interpretation of events… then we know we need to reprogram our subconscious mind to interpret events in a more beneficial way. Fortunately, this can be done quickly. The good news is you are already doing this for yourself on a daily basis! The subconscious mind is already behaving in the way that you programmed it. The bad news is you probably programmed your subconscious mind unconsciously through osmosis of your environment, which was likely NOT optimized for the future you truly desire. What we need to do is redirect this superpower of subconscious programming to be aligned with your desires in mind. Then, we need to cultivate confidence that the future you envision is not only possible… but is genuinely coming true on a daily basis. Here is a short and easy way to start doing this in 3 steps:

Step 1. Take a large inhale for five seconds, then suck in one more inhalation as best as you can at the top of the five-second inhale… then release with a sigh, “Ahhhhh.” Now recite these words “Everything is exactly as it should be and is leading me to my purpose.” Repeat 3 times (or more if you feel called to) until you remember that your higher power is taking care of you. If communicating with your “higher power” isn’t your thing, then remember that the?best version of you?is safe and is already heading in the direction of your true purpose.

Step 2. Use the emotion-of-confidence (the outward expression and perception of confidence) to show your subconscious mind what you want to feel like. We will do this with a power stance — put one foot in front of the other about shoulder-width apart. Put your hands on your hips, straighten your back and look towards the sky. Hold the pose for at least 10 seconds, and recite to yourself, “I am LITERALLY stepping into my purpose!” Your subconscious mind will mirror the emotions you are demonstrating by triggering the?feelings that it associates with those emotions. This is to say; appear confident on the surface and your subconscious mind will mirror confidence right back to you. This is the physiological phenomenon behind “fake it ‘till you make it.” (While the message has been misconstrued by many to justify being dishonest and non-authentic, the physiological basis and psychological sentiment behind the message is helpful for our purposes.)

Step 3. Lastly, smile as best you can and recite to yourself, “Everything that has happened and will happen is leading me closer to my purpose.” Remember that you get to decide the meaning of things, nobody else can tell your mind what something means. It is YOU who decides whether it is “true” or not. You have the power to link every event in your life to your purpose and you get to choose the meaning behind each of these events.

Repeat steps 1–3 as often as needed until you remember that you ultimately decide and choose how you feel. Confidence is a choice away. Confidence in our terms is a feeling on a certainty spectrum — arrive at the level of confidence that you want, then act in the way that you need to.

This exercise is an example of the impressionability of the subconscious mind. It is constantly in a dance with the pre-frontal cortex (the conscious mind) as they send signals back and forth to each other. Which one speaks louder usually becomes the dominate context from which you live your life. If you are feeling a lack of confidence a lot of the time, your subconscious mind is likely hijacking your conscious mind regularly because it believes your conscious mind is incapable of keeping you safe. This exercise shifts your focus from your subconscious mind to your conscious mind and invites your subconscious mind to mirror your conscious intention to feel confident.

Your focus is your vote for which voice is louder: conscious intention or subconscious reaction? It’s your choice. Hint: Intention leads to more confidence.

"This exercise is an example of the impressionability of the subconscious mind. It is constantly in a dance with the pre-frontal cortex (the conscious mind) as they send signals back and forth to each other. Which one speaks louder usually becomes the dominate context from which you live your life."        

3. 4 steps to master confidence as a conscious phenomenon

Just as we can train and harness confidence in a matter of seconds, we can prime our subconscious mind so that its default reactions, interpretations and expressions have a foundation of confidence as opposed to a foundation of fear, anxiety and cynicism.

The short 3-step hack I shared in section 2 above can help us situationally in a pinch, but it is exhausting to have to perform a confidence ritual multiple times per day. We want to automatically feel confident that we have what it takes to achieve any outcome we choose to achieve. We want our default wiring and programming to be primed for confidence! To accomplish this, we’ve got to be intentional about setting some time aside to cultivate this confident energy. This energy will gradually build the neural circuitry required for us to behave in a desirably confident way as a default reaction to things.

I will give you some ideas for your own confidence ritual, but first you have to understand why this works so that you are CONFIDENT that your confidence ritual will have the desired effect. See what I did there?

Consider a condition called Hemispatial Neglect Syndrome. This condition plagues about 250,000 patients per year, most commonly after a stroke. In Hemispatial Neglect Syndrome, patients lose awareness of information on one side of their body. They don’t lose the ability to process information on one side of their body, they lose?awareness?of that information. For example, a patient known as P.S. looks at two images in front of her: Both images are of the exact same house, but one of the houses has flames engulfing the left side of it. To P.S., because she has no awareness of information on the left side of her field of vision, both of the houses look exactly the same. She cannot tell the difference between the two images. However, when she is asked which of the two homes she would rather live in, she selects the house without the flames engulfing it. She cannot explain why, but she can reliably, over and over again, select the house without the flames when asked about question of safety and habitability. Scientists have realized that while she is not aware of the information her brain is processing, her brain is in fact processing the information, which is actively and accurately leading her to select the safer home.

This is to say: You do not need to be aware of the information you are processing in order to process it. The feeling of “knowing” that many of us associate with processing information is not necessary to “know” the thing. Your brain will process information with or without your awareness of it. It’s just what it does. Your experience of processing that information is simply a byproduct of consciousness. More and more evidence is suggesting that consciousness is not required to process the information, it is simply the mechanism by which we have?awareness?of the process. Imagine looking through a window at a factory, observing all the machinery and operations that are occurring. Looking through the window is not what makes the factory operate; you are just an observer. Consciousness is more like the observer looking through the window and the factory; the factory is our brain.

The exciting part is we can both observe the factory AND get into the control tower to make tweaks to how the factory is operating. Now that you understand a bit more about the nature of consciousness, let’s make some tweaks to increase our confidence!

You’ve seen how we can elevate confidence in seconds through behaving in a pseudo-confident way that our subconscious mind will mirror back to us, producing feelings of confidence. Now we will outline a confidence ritual that when performed consistently will leverage the process of neuroplasticity to prime your mind for confidence.

Step 1. Identify a time of day in which you will set aside 10 minutes for this practice. Ideally, this is performed within the first hour of the day after waking up. The second best option would be to perform this in the last hour of the day right before bed. These are the times of day when your subconscious mind and conscious mind are most clearly communicating with one another and new neural circuits are forming most efficiently. A third best option would be at some point during the day when you are relaxed and already in a state of learning/open-mindedness.

Step 2. Once you’ve entered into this 10-minute time block, spend the first 2–4 minutes building brain + heart coherence. This is a physiological state where your nervous system is firing much less information, at a much slower rate, and is receiving proportionately more information from your heart and other organs (basically your brain gets in coherence with other organs in the body when the exchange of information shifts so that there’s more information coming into the brain rather than coming from the brain.) Every organ in your body has between a hundred-thousand neurons (heart/liver/kidneys…etc.) and up to millions of neurons (stomach/intestines…etc.) so that they operate in a way conducive to keeping you alive. But most of the time your brain is so focused on trying to predict the future, or fix the past (your traumas and your desires) that it never slows down enough to receive the information that your other organs are trying to communicate to it. In essence, all of that “thinking” produces an electric storm in the brain which interferes with the signals coming from the rest of your body. Your brain simply acts as a tyrant telling the rest of your body “I’m the boss, listen to me, I know what’s best for you.” In reality, the brain is an organ just like the rest of your body, no more and no less important to survival. We need to calm the brain down, allow the electric storm of thoughts to subside, and allow the rest of the body to feel heard and express itself.

The most efficient way to do this is with breath-work or transcendental meditation. There are many resources available to learn these practices.?Here’s a free one from my website called box-breathing , a very easy form of breath-work to calm the mind. After you’ve achieved a base level of coherence, you should feel a bit more relaxed. Depending on the time of day, you may need to dedicate more or less time to achieving this state of relaxation. Typically, the earlier in the day you perform this ritual the easier it will be for you to reach coherence.

Step 3. Select a talisman, which may be some sort of stone, a piece of paper that you’ve written something on or other material item you can hold in your hand. Recite the phrase, “Everything is exactly as it should be and is serving me on my mission.” The talisman serves as a physical stimulus for your subconscious mind to associate with the words you are speaking. Over time, the talisman acts as a trigger for your subconscious mind, which gets you into a meditative and impressionable state faster (recall how the brain is processing information even without your awareness). The faster you get into the coherent state, the stronger the circuitry becomes, deepening your belief in the words you recite.

Step 4. Finally, identify a task, goal or block of time on your calendar that you want to feel confident for and transfer your focus onto that. I like to have my physical calendar/planner in front of me so I can visually see the block of time I want to focus on. With talisman in hand, stare at the block of time and recite, “I am so grateful for the opportunity to move closer to my purpose.” At this stage of the ritual, really attempt to deepen your connection with your body. DO NOT THING OF THE “HOW” when it comes to the task or goal you are thinking about. Simply focus on feeling grateful for the opportunity to move closer to your purpose. Breathe deeper, relax your muscles, and perhaps most powerfully of all, smile at that time block on your calendar (recall the way in which your subconscious mind mirrors your conscious mind.) An additional phrase to recite while looking at the time block might be, “Whatever happens is what is supposed to happen for my greatest good. I trust you [Higher Power/Higher Self].”

Over time, as you consistently deploy this ritual, you ought to tweak it in the way that your mind prompts you to. Every human is different in the way that they express and exude confidence, so you will notice a subtle desire to personalize this ritual, which is exactly how it should be.

Once you own this ritual and make it yours, you will notice a profound shift in the way you relate with confidence and understand it as a conscious phenomenon. Anybody can cultivate the feeling of confidence if they understand the underlying neurology that actually leads to the feeling itself.

Your job now is to go out and crush your goals! Achievement is a confidence multiplier. The more confident you feel, the more well-being you will experience as a result. And I genuinely believe that your well-being is your greatest contribution to humanity. Go contribute, my friend.

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Citations and resources:

Section 1 — Confidence-as-an-emotion and confidence-as-a-feeling are two different things

Book: “The Feeling Of What Happens; Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness” By Antonio Damasio — He is currently the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, as well as Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at the?University of Southern California .

· Pg. 37 “The powerful contrast between the covertly induced and outward posture of emotion and the inwardly directed and ultimately known status of human feeling provided me with an invaluable perspective for reflection on the biology of consciousness.”

· Pg. 80 “Assuming that all proper structures are in place, the processes reviewed above allow an organism to undergo an emotion, exhibit it, and image it, that is, feel the emotion. But nothing in the above review indicates how the organism could know that it was feeling the emotion it was undergoing.”

· Chapter Emotion and Feeling, pg.35–81

Book: “Awaken The Giant Within; How to take immediate control of your mental, emotional, physical and financial destiny!” — Anthony Robbins- American author, coach, speaker, and?philanthropist .

· Pg. 371, “Our experience of this reality had nothing to do with reality, but was interpreted through the controlling force of our beliefs: specifically the rules we had about?what had to happen in order for us to feel good. I call these specific beliefs that determine when we get pain and when we get pleasure rules.”

· Chapter 16 Rules: If you’re not happy here’s why! Pg. 369–393

Section 2–3 steps to train and harness confidence in a matter of seconds

“Whole Brain Living; The anatomy of choice and the four characters that drive our life.” — Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, PHD

· Preface — Peace is just a thought away, “We have the power to choose moment by moment who and how we want to be in the world. That ability , like every ability we have, ids dependent on the cells in our brain that perform that function. Our brain is a magnificent tool that is the home of our thoughts, emotions, experiences and behaviors. When we understand at a cellular level what is going on in the relationship between our thoughts and our emotions, we no longer have to be bound by our emotional reactivity…we have much more power over what is. Going on inside of our heads that we have ever been taught.”

· Chapter 8: The brain huddle: Your Power Tool For Peace… pg. 149–172

More Confidence in 2-minutes — Ted Talk W/ Amy Cuddy —?https://youtu.be/r7dWsJ-mEyI

Section 3–4 steps to master confidence as a conscious phenomenon

“The Neurobiology of confidence”

TY — JOUR

AU — Ott, Torben

AU — Masset, Paul

AU — Kepecs, Adam

PY — 2019/07/03

SP — 038794

T1 — The Neurobiology of Confidence: From Beliefs to Neurons

VL — 83

DO — 10.1101/sqb.2018.83.038794

JO — Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology

ER -

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334209759_The_Neurobiology_of_Confidence_From_Beliefs_to_Neurons

· “New experiments will now be able to identify neural circuit mechanisms for how the brain implements confidence based algorithms to guide behavior. We anticipate that a mechanistic understanding of confidence and metacognition will bridge a psychological understanding of the mind and its disorders with its neurobiological basis in human and nonhuman animals.”

What is consciousness? — Michael S. A. Graziano ; TedEd Video —?https://youtu.be/MASBIB7zPo4

· 0:10–2:00 Discussion on Hemispatial Neglect Syndrome