1. Confidence
A strange and rather banal start to the list, isn't it?
Yet this quality needs clarification. The fact is that people are not born confident (or at least not only born) - they are made. And you can become such a person at any age, regardless of all previous experience. You can cultivate this quality in yourself and, having acquired it, begin to instill confidence in others. When a person begins to believe in himself, there are practically no things left that he is incapable of. Most doors open in front of him. Life becomes better and happier - and not only for the person himself, but also for his close circle.
What are the causes of insecurity and overconfidence
Self-confidence, uncertainty, and self-confidence are personality traits that are formed in childhood. Improper upbringing or unfavorable external factors contribute to a person developing self-doubt or self-confidence.
Abuse of a child, constant reproaches, the absence of a person in a child’s life who would be a worthy role model for him, or a friend-mentor, betrayal, divorce of parents, death of loved ones, loss of the meaning of life - factors under the influence of which insecurity or self-confidence are laid. .
Self-confident people often have such qualities as anger and resentment, inaction and passivity, deceit and opportunism, etc.
2. Observation
It is believed that the youngest child in the family has an advantage. Psychotherapist Alfred Adler also wrote that such a boy or girl gets the chance to watch older siblings make friends, build boundaries, make mistakes and do things for the first time - and this becomes a wonderful school for him or her.
However, you can develop your powers of observation at any age, even if you were an only child. Do a simple exercise: sitting in a cafe or in a park, observe how the people around you behave.
How they greet each other, communicate, flirt. Do some people smile more often than others, listen more attentively, or ask more questions? Most likely, these are self-confident people - they really pay more attention to the interlocutor, observe him, are interested in his life and problems, and give deeper and more meaningful answers.
Being around a self-confident person makes us feel good and calm, and we ourselves begin to feel a little more confident. And, watching him, we can, over time, become like that ourselves.
How do you know if a person is really confident or plays the role well?
Library » Psychology of success.
Self-confidence » Understanding People David Lieberman
Fragment of the book by Lieberman D. Alien Soul of Darkness? How to read the thoughts of any person. - M.: Peter, 2010.
How do you know who is thinking about what? How to correctly interpret words and gestures? How to attract allies and identify ill-wishers? How to make the secret obvious? These and many other burning questions will be answered not by telepathy, but by psychology. The book describes the application of specific psychological techniques in real life situations. Learn to understand people - and success will follow you relentlessly.
Self-confidence is the first necessary condition for any great endeavor. Samuel Jackson (1709–1784)
Let's say you're sitting across from a poker player. Is he confident or scared? Is your interlocutor as calm as he wants to seem? Or your opponent's lawyer, is he really confident in the outcome of the case or is he just trying to make us all believe it? Use psychological techniques to find out how your interlocutor assesses his chances of success, whether he is confident in himself or has a good attitude.
To better understand the term “self-confidence,” let’s define its boundaries. Self-confidence is often confused with self-esteem, but these are different concepts and this distinction is very important. Self-confidence refers to a specific situation or area of activity. Self-esteem is a person's ability to like himself and feel worthy of receiving good things from life. It may well be that a person respects himself and treats himself well, but feels insecure in a particular situation or under certain circumstances. It may be the other way around.
For example, an attractive woman is confident that she can easily find someone to talk to at a bar. But at the same time, it is unknown how she perceives herself in general and how much she respects herself. A man who respects himself very much may feel like a worthless chess player, but this does not prevent him from liking himself. He will show signs of insecurity when playing chess with a superior opponent, but his self-esteem will not suffer from this.
A person’s self-confidence regarding a particular situation is based on various factors: experience, previous successes or failures, the feedback we receive in response to our actions, and, of course, comparing ourselves with others. Self-esteem can affect self-confidence. Research shows that people with high levels of self-esteem feel more comfortable and confident in new situations compared to those with lower levels of self-esteem. However, the converse statement is not true. A person who places great importance on feeling self-confident may exhibit signs of high self-esteem that are not supported by a true sense of self-respect, which is not always noticeable to the untrained eye. Self-esteem is manifested to a greater extent in what and how a person does (in the manifestation of his free will), and not in what he claims about it. It can be said that self-esteem is actually a degree of ego development.
Self-esteem and self-confidence are different mental energies, which each have their own impact on the human condition. Of course, it would be very interesting to trace what factors and how they can influence self-confidence, but we will leave this issue outside the scope of our consideration. We will only be interested in how confident a person is. How and why he came to this is not so important in this case. So, let's return to the main topic of our conversation and look at how exactly you can determine a person's level of confidence.
When we are nervous or stressed, our ability to concentrate is significantly reduced. Has it ever happened to you that you meet someone at a party and immediately forget their name? Such signs of distraction and inability to concentrate on what is happening are evidence that you lacked confidence at the moment.
Self-confidence assessment
Now we will take a closer look at what a confident person looks and talks like. As a result, it will immediately become clear who is confident and who is not. Depending on the situation, we can resort to one or more techniques and pay attention to certain signals.
To correctly determine a person's level of confidence, you need to look for signs that a person is only pretending to be confident. We, of course, know what is inherent in the behavior of a confident person: a smile, eye contact, etc. However, all this is very easy to depict, so we will talk about not so obvious signs that are still noticeable.
Sign 1. Physical condition
At a moment of very strong fear, when a person feels extremely uncomfortable, you can observe two different options for his behavior: either he will become extremely absent-minded, his eyes will run from side to side, he will make a lot of chaotic movements, he will become overexcited, or he will fall into a panic. stupor, like a rabbit in front of a boa constrictor. Let's see what else can happen to a person when he experiences fear.
“Now in the heat, now in the cold.”
A person's face in a situation of fear may suddenly turn very red or pale. Also pay attention to your breathing rate and increased sweating. In addition, try to notice whether the person is trying to control his breathing and calm down. Attempts to cope with this condition can be noticeable by deep breaths and loud breathing.
Chills and trembling voice
. Your hands may shake from fear. If a person hides his hands, he may be trying to hide this uncontrolled movement. His voice may crack or sound unnatural.
When we worry, we take everything literally. When we lack confidence, our brain is too busy and we cannot notice the hidden meaning of what is being said. For example, in difficult situations we do not perceive sarcastic expressions because the ability to think indirectly requires additional energy expenditure.
Difficult to swallow.
In a situation of fear, it becomes difficult to swallow saliva, so you should pay attention to this too. Actors who want to portray grief or fear often use this technique to show that they are "choking" from emotion. Clearing your throat may indicate the same thing and is a sign of nervousness. Anxiety causes mucus to secrete in the throat. A speaker who is nervous will often clear his throat before starting a new sentence.
Changes in voice.
The vocal cords, like other muscles, tremble when a person is nervous and stressed. Therefore, the voice breaks down and becomes higher.
Blinking.
When a person is nervous, the frequency of blinking increases. In the News of the Week newspaper for October 21, 1996, Joe Tese, a professor at Boston College of Neuropsychology, described his observations of the presidential debate between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton in the first round of the presidential election.
The normal human blink rate on television ranges from 31 to 50 times per minute. Bob Dohle blinked approximately 147 times per minute, that is, 3 times per second. When asked whether he thought the country had improved over the past four years, he blinked even more frequently. Clinton blinked an average of 99 times per minute, and the highest blink rate (117 times per minute) coincided with a question about the increase in drug abuse among young people. Tese also noted that, according to his observations, in five past election campaigns, the candidate with a higher blink rate lost.
Sign 2. Focus of attention
Let's imagine an athlete, musician or artist in the process of performing a number. He doesn't think about himself at all, he is completely absorbed in what he is doing. He doesn't think about the pain in his body. His task completely absorbed his attention. For example, a basketball player who wants to hit the basket. Extraneous things do not exist for him at the moment. He is absorbed in the goal and does not think about himself. He is not aware of himself and does not feel himself; his intention is in the foreground. If a person begins to pay attention to himself, his self-awareness distracts him from what he is doing. At each moment of time, attention is divided between what is happening around and the perception of oneself.
A self-confident person is able to devote his full attention to an object and allow his “I” to disappear. A person who is nervous constantly monitors himself because he is anxious and afraid of losing control over himself. The only thing that can help him is attention to his own actions. He literally watches his every step, what he does and says. What we usually do automatically, such as folding our arms or choosing a pose, becomes a subject of attention and control. All his actions become conscious. Imagine what kind of attention resource this requires. It simply may not be enough for what a person is trying to do. This way you can recognize that a person lacks confidence.
During an interrogation, meeting or date, a person wants to smoke. If he is calm, confident and feels that the situation is under control, he does not need to monitor the movements of his hand at all. And if a person doubts that he can perform this habitual action automatically, looks at his hand, at the cigarette, then it becomes clear that in this situation he feels insecure.
Let's continue to look at the psychological mechanisms of self-confidence. When a person masters any type of activity, he goes through four stages: unconscious incompetence
when a person does not realize that he cannot perform an action properly;
conscious incompetence
, when a person realizes that he lacks the proper skills and abilities to be effective and successful;
conscious competence
, when a person understands that he can act quite successfully, but for this he needs to constantly control his actions,
unconscious competence
, when a person can perform the right actions and this does not require his full or even partial attention.
Let's consider an example: a person who masters a gearbox while driving a car. This example illustrates all four stages well. Actions that at first seem completely incomprehensible eventually become an automatic skill.
The second, third and fourth stages give us an idea of what is happening to a person's competence and self-confidence. (We don’t take the first stage into account, since the person doesn’t even understand what he should do.)
You are talking with a colleague. Suddenly you notice her picking up a can of lemonade. She looks at her hand as it brings the jar to her mouth, then watches the reverse movements of the hand. Your colleague is nervous and therefore unsure that she can do what she has done a thousand times without close attention - take a sip of lemonade. A distinctive feature of uncertainty is the transition from unconscious to conscious competence, that is, attention to habitual automatic actions increases.
If you know what to watch for, confidence or lack thereof is easy to spot. Just pay attention to whether the person is focused on himself and his actions. Consider the following example.
A lonely man walks into a bar, hoping to meet a woman there. If he considers himself attractive and confident, he will consider women at the bar. If he is not sure of his attractiveness, he will be most worried about how they perceive him. In other words, the focus of his attention shifts depending on the degree of his self-confidence. Lack of self-confidence leads to the fact that a person begins to consciously control the simplest actions. At the same time, movements become clumsy and mechanical, and attention is focused on the impression he makes on others.
We often encounter this from our own experience. For example, when a person is confident in what he is talking about, his main task is to convey the meaning of what he said to the audience and he cares little about how he looks. When we are interested in getting things done, we first want to be sure that others understand us correctly. If we ourselves are not confident enough, we pay attention to our words and actions and think about how they will be perceived. We watch our every word and movement.
Additional Features: Perception Management
When a person is nervous but doesn't want to show it, they can use something called perception management
, presenting a certain image to others in order to achieve the desired result.
Above we discussed what you need to pay attention to in order to understand whether a person feels confident or not. Now we'll look at something else. We will look for signs that indicate he is trying to project
confidence. We know that trying to feign confidence is not confidence. If he wants to fool you by hiding those signs of insecurity we discussed above, you will catch him if you know what a person who is bluffing looks like.
Sign 1. Overcompensation
A person who wants to influence the perception of others overacts and tries beyond measure to appear confident. If you look for this sign, you will see it quite clearly. Things like this always catch your eye. Remember, a confident person is not interested in how they are perceived. He is not concerned with his image, while someone who is involved in managing perceptions tries his best to impress others.
The card player has made a large bet and continues to raise it. Does he really have good cards? If he is bluffing, he will try to appear confident. He will bet his money quickly. But if he really had good cards, what would he do? He would have thought a little, would not have rushed to place a bet, showing that he was not so confident in his cards. Mike Caro, a well-known authority on poker strategy, mentioned such points in his book Poker Tells (2003). This kind of thing is quite human: someone who is bluffing should look confident, and someone who has a really good chance of winning will pretend that he has a weak card.
Whether it's a poker game or real life, if a person wants to manipulate, he will always try to give an impression that is the opposite of what he really is. In this example, the one who is bluffing will feign confidence and bet the money quickly. And the one who has a good card will wait some time to show that he is thinking about what to do.
This principle applies in any situation. If someone reacts too quickly and without thinking, they want to demonstrate that they are confident, although in most cases they are not. On the contrary, a confident person does not need to prove it to anyone. Anyone who wants to look confident or otherwise will diligently portray this state and it will always be a little over the edge.
Law enforcement officials note that a person who is lying (and therefore insecure) often wants to show an interest in cooperation. When asked the simplest question, he feigns intense thought. In this way he is trying to prove that he wants to be useful to the investigation.
Another manifestation of overcompensation may be a person’s desire to show his psychological superiority.
The man walked the girl to the door of her house, and she said to him: “It’s late, and I’m going to go to bed.” If he likes her but lacks confidence, he'll think it's a ploy to get rid of him. He may answer something like: “I’m tired too. I wasn't going to stay anyway." This is his way of trying not to seem discouraged. If he simply says, “Of course you are tired,” this means that he is not trying to control perception by explaining something that is not being asked about.
Sign 2. Unnecessary gestures
Any unnecessary gestures in a serious situation show that a person wants to appear calm and confident. For example, law enforcement officers know that a suspect may yawn to convey complete calm and even boredom. If a person is sitting, he can slouch or stretch, showing complete comfort. Or he may pretend that he is absorbed in some nonsense, such as shaking off specks of dust from his clothes, and therefore nothing bothers him. The only problem is that the one who is unfairly accused will rather show understandable indignation and will not pay attention to the little things or to the “correct” image.
An investigator meets with the parents of a girl who may have been kidnapped. The father tells him that maybe the girl is already dead. After a while he takes a cup of coffee. If, in addition, he says: “I am so grateful to you, I just need this after a hard day,” he is clearly trying to control perception and trying to seem polite and delicate, which raises serious doubts about the reliability of this whole story.
Another example of deliberate behavior is an attempt to demonstrate differences. A person suddenly suddenly changes his usual behavior, although there is no reason for this. In this case, he is also trying to portray something that actually does not exist.
A real estate agent meets his potential client on a Sunday morning. The client is dressed in a suit and tie, has his cell phone, and is waiting for an “important” call. He has no money.
Technique. We create a threat situation
If we are not confident enough in ourselves, then in a threatening situation the signs of anxiety will become more obvious. When a person is surrounded by people who he thinks are better looking in every way than himself, his self-confidence decreases. This is always true, even if there is no reason to worry.
If we provide a person with information that may cause them concern, we can accurately assess how comfortable they feel in the situation. If there are changes in behavior - for example, he becomes aggressive, rude, inconsiderate or shows signs of nervousness, then he feels insecure here.
The investigator questions the suspect, and the suspect appears confident.
It is unknown whether he is guilty or not, but his alibi is ironclad. Then the investigator informs the suspect that another witness is about to come and everything will immediately become clear. The suspect will remain calm if he thinks he has nothing to fear, or he will become irritable and restless if he is unsure of himself. © Lieberman D. Alien soul of darkness? How to read the thoughts of any person. — M.: Peter, 2010. © Published with permission of the publisher
3.Ability to adapt
As children, many of us think that the school “clown”, the main “clown” in the class, is very confident in himself. This is mistake. Most likely, such a child has very low self-esteem, and he needs the attention of others - no matter what the cost.
And, on the contrary, there are people whose very appearance in the room makes everyone instinctively turn around - not because they dress brightly or behave provocatively. Their confidence simply attracts attention.
But the main thing is that such people adapt perfectly to situations and circumstances. This means that they easily find a common language with children and adults, people of different social status and position, without doing anything special for this. Except by watching.
What is confidence and where does it come from?
Confidence is a person’s psychological state, expressed in the absence of doubt and anxiety in anything. The latter may mean an object, phenomenon, judgment, past and future actions.
For example, we are all sure that the earth is round because everyone knows a lot of arguments in favor of this fact. If you need to prove your point of view in a dispute, it will not be difficult to do. We will tell you that there are people who flew into space, we will remember the names of scientists and people who traveled around the world.
4. The ability to pretend
Confident people are great at pretending, but not because they like to lie. They just know that this is the best way to get comfortable in a new role or in a situation that is nerve-wracking.
They may pretend to be relaxed and confident in a new company or when speaking in public - and sooner or later they actually begin to feel so. Or pretend that others initially like them, and actually gain everyone's sympathy.
So it's worth trying out their approach the next chance you get - for example, when you find yourself at a party where you don't know anyone, or when your boss asks you to give a presentation.
What affects confidence
Confidence is not formed out of nowhere; prerequisites must be formed for its emergence. Essentially, confidence is a combination of experience and positive thinking. If a person does something for the first time in his life, it is almost impossible to be sure of the result. And vice versa, what we constantly encounter does not cause us fear and anxiety. That is, the strategic task is to have experience in performing the event and there will be no problems with confidence.
Young children do not experience fear until they encounter the first troubles in life. Moreover, we have the ability to overcome troubles; by nature, we are all winners. A one-year-old child learning to walk will fall hundreds of times, but will still try again and again. There is no fear or uncertainty in him, or rather, all these feelings are not developed. Parents and the environment begin to develop them. It is negative experiences that develop complexes, fear and uncertainty. If all your endeavors are criticized, then you will soon realize that everything new is scary and you will not try anything. The process of forming an insecure personality has begun.
Simply experience will not help you, you need successful experience, positive experience, confirmation of your competencies and talents. Negative experiences will kill self-confidence. Once a person gets burned once, his confidence decreases. Therefore, it is very important to be able to correctly analyze the experience gained. Even mistakes and failures can be used and benefited from.
5.Striving to become better
Probably, each of us has thought at least once that literally everyone around us lives a richer, brighter and more prosperous life than we do. And there are two ways: give up and give up on everything, or try to become that “best version of yourself.”
Confident people don't give up. They find a landmark and strive towards it. They become the very people who know what to do in a given situation - or at least pretend until they do it right.
What is the difference between self-confidence and self-confidence?
At the same time, there are often people who have neither beauty nor extraordinary abilities, and who, with their self-confidence, inspire others with the opposite. This character trait is called self-confidence, and it should not be confused with self-confidence. Self-confidence means faith in yourself, confidence in your own self, which is supported by knowledge and skills.
Self-confidence is a negative character trait. A self-confident person is unreasonably confident in himself and tends to overestimate his capabilities. Self-confident people are usually too touchy and proud, but at the same time they tend to provoke conflict situations, argue about any issue, and strive for dominance, fame and power over people.
Psychologists believe that self-confident people are people who are very insecure. And their self-confidence is a defensive reaction. They try to hide their insecurity with the help of ostentatious arrogance, equanimity, bravado and even aggressiveness.
