Your Most Confident Self

In this section you will find hints and tips from some of the world's greatest confidence experts, and most confident people. And we'll also be taking some of the guidance you can find in our book, "Building Self-Confidence for Dummies", a few stages further; so you can become a real expert yourself.

Here's what Walt Disney had to say about the importance of confidence:

"I can't believe that there are any heights that can't be scaled by a man who knows the secrets of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in four C s. They are curiosity, confidence, courage, and constancy, and the greatest of all is confidence."

So, what would it mean to you to live a life of total self-confidence? This may not be something you have ever considered in detail, so answer the questions in our quick quiz How Confident Are You? and you can make a start. Simply answer whether you believe each statement is more true that false, or more false than true and follow each link for immediate feedback on your answers. Spending 15 minutes on this will help to reorient your thinking on confidence, then come back here to find out more about how you can learn to deliver your most confident version of yourself into the world.

How do “great” people view confidence? Here are some quotations, the first is from one of America's great poets, Ralph Waldo Emerson "Self-trust is the essence of heroism." And how about that most eminent of Englishmen, Dr Johnson, compiler of the first dictionary in the English language: "Self confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings." Or this one from the Chinese Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War: "Know yourself and you will win all battles."

Great aren't they? It seems all cultures have understood the magic that self-confidence unlocks in human lives, but how do you get it, and keep it for your own great undertakings? That's what the resources you can access through this site will help you do.

Back to the question on what it would mean to you specifically to live a life of confidence? Before you began to work with the material you found in the book or the web site this might have been a difficult question for you to get to grips with. Surely how confident you feel depends on the situations you are facing. You might feel confident enough lying in the bath thinking about how you are going to wow your audience at your forthcoming wedding speech but, come the day, you could be feeling a total wreck, barely able to string together a coherent sentence. Your confidence, you could argue, is entirely dependent upon context.

Whilst this is obviously true to some extent, it's a little more complicated than you may think. We know from many studies that when you feel confident this shows up in measures of your physical body (heart-rate, breathing, perspiration, etc). And we also know, from psychology and medicine, that the interrelated states of your mind and body affect each other in both directions. For example, thinking about something scary will usually speed up your heart-rate and make you feel more alert, whereas if you are feeling nervous then a few minutes of deep breathing will help to calm you down.

You may now being to see that the way you use your mind and body determines how you are feeling. In the bath you think a certain way and create one set of bodily responses; when you are about to make that speech you too often think, and your body responds, in a very different way; in an unhelpful way.

The secret to being more confident is to get better at managing your mind and body and the way they combine to create your feelings. This means learning to manage your states in as many different contexts as you are likely to need to lead a full and powerful adult life. In our book we cover some of the main areas (physical, communication, appearance, workplace, raising children, romance and relationships), but there are many others that we didn't have the space to cover. You decide where you want to feel confident, and you can use the tools we provide for you to manage your feelings in all these situations.

So, it turns out that your confidence is much more about you and the way you are managing your moods and feelings, and much less about the situations in which you find yourself. This should be wonderful news to you because you can learn how to manage your states, giving you the possibility of genuinely feeling and acting with confidence in any situation in your life. This can free you to live the life of your dreams.