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Five daily habits to increase your
confidence
Building your confidence doesn’t happen overnight,
it’s more of a drip-feed activity that starts with the things you do every day.
Habits have a way of repeating themselves, so get into good habits and you’ll be
off to a flying start.
1. Start Each Day Alert and Ready for Action
‘Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man
healthy, wealthy, and wise’ according to Benjamin Franklin. You have 168 hours
in a week, and you’re likely to spend about a third of those hours in bed. It’s
your choice as to how you create the quality of the remaining two-thirds of each
day.
Do you ever have those days when the alarm goes off, you put it on the snooze
feature, it goes off again, and again, and you eventually turn it off or hide it
under the pillow? How does your day pan out when you get up late and head out of
the door in a manic rush? Just notice, though, what happens when you have a calm
and relaxed start to the day, when you have got out of bed at a reasonable hour
and then take things in your stride.
Confident people love life so much that they don’t want to waste a minute of it.
Start your day ‘on the front foot’, that is, ready and prepared to proactively
engage with the day and you won’t waste the rest of it trying to catch up with
yourself.
2. Concentrate Your Mind on the Page
Studies in the workplace show that it takes up
to 15 minutes to get your concentration back after a phone call. Just a few
interruptions and your day drifts aimlessly away. You may not be a Zen meditator,
but any drill that teaches you to stop your thoughts wandering and to arrive in
the ‘here and now’ pays dividends.
Writing pages is a useful concentration habit to
develop. This is all you need to do:
Take three sides of paper of A4 size or smaller if
you prefer. Write whatever comes into your head. There is no right or wrong way
to write, you don’t need to feel inspired by great creative verses. Just write
anything, it’s strictly stream of consciousness stuff: ‘Hello blank pages, I
haven’t a clue what to write, but I’m writing anyway.’ Continue until you have
filled the pages. As if by magic, something useful emerges from the page. Some
people write such pages every day; others write them as and when they feel the
need.
The discipline of writing your thoughts on a blank page acts as an invaluable
brain dump in the morning to quieten the busy and logical part of your mind and
get you centred and creative.
3. Put Your Best Sunglasses On
Imagine if you had got up this morning and put
on a pair of rose-coloured sunglasses. You’d be travelling through your day
armed with a warm, healthy glow. Everybody and everything you see would take on
a pinky hue. In a way, every day you do put on a pair of sunglasses. They act as
a filter through which you perceive the world. It’s just that you may not be
aware of what type of filter you have chosen.
By choosing your sunglasses for the day, you decide how to frame your
experiences that day. You decide if it is going to be a day that is rich and
precious, full of interesting experiences, or one of constant battles to be
fought. Your experience begins in your own head. As you start each day, decide
which sort of glasses you’re wearing.
As examples, here are some to try on for size: My glasses for today will be. . .
savour each moment to the full . . . look for the best in the situation . . .
find the humour in unlikely situations and people . . . enjoy the sounds/aromas/tastes
around me.
4. Exercise Your Body
Strange as it seems, you can go to the gym
feeling tired, exercise, and come away feeling energised. Your brain loves
exercise. In the past few years, researchers have contradicted the commonly held
belief that you’re born with a fixed number of neurons and produce no more
during your lifetime. Even adults can grow new brain cells, and exercise is one
of the best ways to achieve this.
The good news is that exercise doesn’t have to be too vigorous. Just walking
sedately for half an hour a day improves your scores on abilities such as
learning, concentration, and abstract reasoning. Senior citizens who walk
regularly perform better on memory tests than their counterparts who sit around
more. Likewise it’s been found that schoolchildren aged 10 and 11 who exercise
three or four times a week get higher than average exam grades.
Find a form of exercise that you enjoy and do it regularly.
5. Operate from a Position of Generosity
What goes round comes round. Whatever you give
out has a habit of coming back to you in some way or another. Confident people
act from a position of generosity and abundance. They give what they can, when
they can and whether it’s their time, talent, money, energy, or love.
Aim to give to others and remember to give to yourself too. Generous thoughts
nurture your mind and attract generous people to you.
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