COMMUNICATING WITH CONFIDENCE

Monday, 18 February, 2008
“In communications that are difficult or draining, find something to appreciate about the person you're dealing with, or find a feeling of compassion or kindness. This will clear your mind and give you the coherence you need to know what to say next.” - Doc Childre and Howard Martin



Fearlessly Communicating and Talking with Confidence.


A fear to speak from poor confidence can manifest in huge forms of resentment, ill will, and anger which in turn destroys relationships, happiness, and success. You can probably see that talking with confidence is strongly related to assertive communication. Rarely do you see a person who lacks confidence asserting themselves.

There’s a difference with not engaging in an argument for the sake of the relationship and not engaging in an argument because you are afraid. When you have an unhealthy fear you will avoid communicating yourself, become emotionally hurt, and nothing good will result. You’ll know the truth in side of you if an unhealthy fear and a lack of confidence exists. You’ll be unhappy, extremely frustrated, scared, and feel like you want to explode. You’ll hardly voice your opinions and emotions in conversations because of fear. That was me. I was miles from communicating confidently.

In addition to this type of fear, other common forms of poor communication confidence is the unknown and fear of judgment. These are in situations like meeting new people, public speaking, or giving a presentation. I too suffered from all these fears and believe this type of fear is a pandemic in society. Many people go to public events and are fearful of communicating with others.



Becoming confident is far more about working on your inner self than what you verbally express. Verbal and non-verbal messages that express your confidence will be created once you develop confidence with your inner self. I’ll teach you later on how your inside becomes your outside which is known as the process of manifestation.

Birth of Fear

The hidden psychological barrier I earlier referred to is fear. The primary attribute in you that is stopping you from communicating confidently is fear.

Fear is the acid that eats away confidence. Fear is the one tonne bolder that holds back a person from being confident. Fear is the Achilles of self-confidence.





The psychological trap is created when praise and blame is put on the person instead of the person’s behavior. Constant praise or blame directly communicated to a person leads them to being dependent upon it. The praise and blame becomes their behavioral “life support”. They cannot live without getting the feedback of others and living up to other people’s standards. Praise and blame leads to poor self-reliance and diminishing levels of confidence. It leads to fear of rejection, approval, and disapproval.

Let’s firstly look at what fear is then we can further analyze how it is created and ultimately remove it from your life. Fear is defined as an unlikable emotion towards a perceived real or fake threat. Read that out loud again. It is a perceived real or fake threat.

Perceptual Process

According to psychologists, the psychological process known as “perception” where we interpret the world around us has three stages.

You are firstly exposed to the information. When in a conversation, exposure is being next to the person whom you can hear. Exposure is just a matter of coming within range of the stimulus.

Secondly is attention. It occurs when a stimulus activates one or more of our human senses. In our conversational example, you have attention to the person when you think about what is said. If the person begins to bore you or you are afraid of what the person is thinking of you, you are not thinking about the exposure and so the perceptual process would stop at this stage as you are not paying attention.

The third stage of perception is interpretation. It is the process of adding meaning to the stimulus through your thinking or feelings. The thinking often analyzes the stimulus against past experience. As a conversational example, if a guy recently abused you, you will interpret what he is saying differently than someone who is a great friend with him. You can see how interpretation and experiences can affect your confidence in situations.

You are better equipped in becoming more confident by identifying what experiences and thinking is affecting your interpretation of the situation. It is analyzing the situation as to why you are not confident.

Also, if you are feeling unhappy or other “negative” emotions when interpreting the situation with your feelings, you are more likely to experience negative actions such as poor confidence. It is the interpretation stage of the perceptual process which is the major focus in overcoming fear and building confidence; how you derive meaning from or “interpret” the world. The unconfident person interprets a person’s unwillingness to communicate as he or she being hated. In the exact same situation, the confident person interprets a person’s unwillingness to communicate as independent of himself or herself provided that is the truth.

Real or Fake Threat

The perceptual stage of interpretation leads us nicely into the second point in the definition of fear which is a “real or fake threat”. We fear because threats are damaging to our mental and physical well-being. Fear is a safety barrier used to protect us psychologically and physically. If it was not for fear, we would all walk into a pit of snakes without a concern for safety. We fear pain and suffering. Fear protects us but too often it holds us back from reality and excelling in performance with whatever we do. We are especially held back when a psychological fear is present like fearing rejection when meeting a new person.

The interpretation stage in perception tells us that different messages and understandings can be drawn from the same situation. How we interpret the world around is entirely dependent on our perception. We see the world through our perception. Gustave Flaubert said, “There is no truth. There is only perception.”



When you have feared something and acted despite of the fear, how often have you found it to be the truth? It hardly ever is! Fear literally evaporates when we take action. Franklin Roosevelt in the 1933 first Inaugural Address said “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” We all subconsciously make-up garbage.

As feelings, thinking, and experiences are used in interpreting the situation, it makes perceptions a very shaky and unreliable source for the truth. What you interpret from a situation is not necessarily reality and will most likely be no more then an invisible psychological barrier in developing confidence to communicate. You are most likely giving birth to fear through “make-believe” thoughts. What you fear will usually not exist!

Prepare for the Worst Case Scenario





Think about the worst situation that will occur than psychologically deal with it beforehand.Having developed the worst case scenario, prepare yourself to encounter the situation with this worst possible outcome taking place then figure out what you can do to stop it from happening. This not only helps you deal with it should it occur, but it increases the likelihood of your success.

Being Needy and Seeking Approval

I’d say the most common fear unconfident people have is the need for other’s approval. When you give out the need for approval, people will sense that you are needy and unconfident. No one likes to be around these needy people. The need for approval is determined through the unconfident person’s perception so what may seem like reality is in fact unreal. You think you need another person’s approval, but confident people do not need this.

When you rise above the need to be approved by other people your confidence will soar. Your uncertainty will stop, your worrying will stop, and your fear of acceptance will stop once you do not need other’s approval.






Surprisingly, once you do not need approval from others, they will actually approve of you! It’s all about your inner game creating your outer game. A person who knows they do not need other’s approval will give out the message that they are confident and happy with who they are. Now that’s something other people will like!

Clarity Forms Confidence

An interesting characteristic you will notice in people who lack confidence is when they do talk just by listening you are able to tell they lack confidence. They will often talk quietly, mumble, and have poor body-language.

To many times people had to ask me to repeat what little things I did say because of my soft and unclear voice. When you are asked to repeat yourself you develop frustration thinking “Ah, why don’t they just listen?” but the problem lies in you and not them. Acknowledge that you are responsible otherwise you will never solve your problem.

When you let others overrule you, when you forgo your personal needs continuously, and when you have to repeat yourself because you mumbled all because of low confidence levels, you subconsciously condition yourself to talk less confidently. So when you talk less confidently: others begin to overrule you more, you forgo more personal needs, and you lose MORE confidence! It becomes tougher. It is a downhill spiral that can easily take you all the way to the bottom.



The true tip is making 100% effort and no excuses when doing this. When you are tired or unhappy you will want to revert back to your old ways but you must not if you want to improve. You must have zero tolerance for laziness and always put in your fullest effort to communicate confidently. Also, learn to open your mouth more as you “accentuate” every word that you speak.

When you are relentless and make every effort to talk confidently, you are practicing good habits. When you practice good habits, the behavior is reinforced and you are more likely to repeat the good habit. This rule is true for any habit whether good or bad. The communication learning process will rapidly increase if you make every effort to talk confidently and practice good habits.

Accepting of Others

It is a common characteristic in those who are stubborn or righteous to lack self-confidence. You may perceive these stubborn people as being overly confident but they actually lack the confidence to welcome other’s point of views. These people shield themselves from other’s opinions by failing to listen. They lack the confidence in their own perspectives to welcome other people’s input continuing with their stubborn ways. Confident people are welcoming and not fearful of others.

Confident Non-Verbal Communication

Once you develop verbal clarity you can take the next step in developing fearless communication which is looking at your body language. You need to have high self-awareness in order to be aware of your body language. It is a matter of knowing what you do in certain situations. When you have poor body language others can see fear in you. On the other end, when you communicate confident body language, everyone – especially females – can feel it. Women love confident body language and can see a confident guy from a distance before he even speaks.









Stop worrying. Live in the present and do not talk negatively to yourself. It is as simple as that. Do not beat yourself up with negative self-talk and criticism. You don’t verbally bash your best friend so don’t do it to yourself.

When verbally beating yourself up, you feed your subconscious mind bad “mental food”. Your mind deserves nutritious positive thoughts. The effects of negative self-talk are damaging to your confidence, esteem, and overall success. How can you expect to win against the world if you’re the only person on your team and you’re against yourself? You can not do that. It is near impossible. You can not expect to develop unstoppable confidence and self-esteem fighting yourself.

Ensuring You Become Confident

I did not and you certainly will not make a giant leap to becoming unstoppably confident. You won’t wake up one morning feeling transformed. It is a progressive journey that takes time. You will stuff up but you can actually enjoy it if you are aware that you will make mistakes.

Just like the need to be aware that a marriage will not be perfect before entering into it, you will enjoy progressively becoming more confident and the likelihood of you achieving unstoppable confidence will increase if you accept mistakes. Screw ups are a part of life.

An extremely powerful message that will reassure you that you are developing and becoming more confident, deals with your thoughts. I have repeatedly explained how your outer game is reflected with what goes on inside of you. To know if you will become confident in the future, look at your mind today. To see who you are today, look at your thoughts in the past. In general, your future is created from your present against the backdrop of the past.

If you are not confident today, it was because of your thoughts in the past. If you are changing your thinking processes today you can project your mindset onto who you will become in the future. This means in the future, who you become will be because of your thoughts now.

Your future is created from your present against the backdrop of the past.It may seem obvious that working on your confidence now will mean you become more confident in the future, but there are two usual problems people experience.

The first problem is motivation. It can be extremely demotivating and depressing to be unconfident now so you can easily expect to not be confident in the future.

A second problem is people often do not realize that who they are today is because of their past. I actually encourage you to memorize “your future is created from your present against the backdrop of the past” as it will provide a great source of inspiration to keep developing yourself.

Practice, Practice, and Practice

The last point I want to make is encouraging you to go out and practice what you have learned today. Dale Carnegie said:

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”