5 Weird Confidence Building Exercises

Imagine for a minute if you were totally confident in yourself……………..

What would you do today that you were not doing yesterday? What could you achieve if you were completely self confident?

Now, I don’t mean you have to be good at everything, but you’re willing to give everything a go, just try it and see what happens, and if you fell flat on your face you would either walk away from it having tried it, or you would try again until you got it right.

Well, there’s a few things holding us back from being confident, and believe me, every single person reading these words right now has the ability to have total confidence in themselves. What’s holding us back? It’s your thoughts, beliefs, habits and actions.

If I were to say to you ‘Let’s climb Mount Everest for charity’ what would your immediate thoughts be – maybe it was ‘I could never do that’, ‘I’m not fit enough’, ‘I don’t like heights’, ‘I don’t like the outdoors’, ‘I don’t like the cold’, but someone who was totally confident and they were interested would probably say ‘Okay, let’s give it a go’ or ‘When do you want to do it’. Wouldn’t that amount of confidence in yourself be amazing.
3 Attributes of truly confident people:

1. They don’t mind trying new things, even if they’ve never done it before.
2. They don’t let what others may or may not think influence their decision to do something.
3. They have let go of their inhibitions and don’t mind letting their guards down.

I’d like to share with you 5 weird confidence building exercises

1. The Wrong Shop exercise

• This exercise will give you a strange sense of power and control over yourself and make you really drop your guard to feel confident.
• Walk into any type of shop and ask for something totally weird, that the shop does not sell. For example walk into a newsagents and ask if they sell the latest 42 inch flat screen TV, or go into an Apple store and ask for a PC, or McDonalds and ask for a KFC Bucket.
• The aim of this is to let go of your inhibitions and get over yourself, be willing to make a fool of yourself and learn to not care what others may or may not think about you. This is an exercise I tried myself on a number of occasions a few years ago and it’s totally liberating. I first heard it from Jamie Smart who was coaching some telesales people who were anxious about cold calling.

2. Ask for a hug

• Stand in the middle of a busy street, hold up a plackard asking for a hug for a special occasion and get someone to film it.
• Overcome that fear of rejection and to release your inhibitions. Watch the video below to learn more.

3. Be wrong on purpose

• A lot of us are so hung up on always being right and feel really self conscious when we have been found out to be wrong about something, and can feel really embarrassed. This exercise is designed to let go of that altogether.
• Whenever someone asks you a question about anything, give them the wrong answer on purpose, but make it so wrong that the other person knows it’s wrong as well, for example If someone asks you ‘Oh who was that actor in that film’ you might say ‘Oh! that was Christopher Columbus’ You’ll most likely get strange looks.
• If you do this often enough it will get you over always feeling the need to be right. Of course when you are wrong always admit it and drop it.

4. Radical Honesty

• Whenever someone asks for your opinion on something, be totally honest with them. However, when you first start being completely honest, always say to the person ‘Do you want my honest opinion or do you want me to say what you want to hear?’ that way it takes them off guard, but they will always say honest opinion.
• People come to nice people for an opinion when they know what the answer will be, but people go to honest people when they want a valued opinion.

5. Learn to feel uncomfortable

• The only way to grow as a person is when you are outside your comfort zone. Nobody ever grows inside their comfort zone.
• The next time you are asked to do something, or think about doing something that you feel uncomfortable with, say yes to it immediately. For example if a friend asks you to a party that you know will make you feel uncomfortable say yes immediately to it. You don’t have to stay all night, but show up, feel that uncomfortable feeling and then leave shortly after.
• If you can do this all throughout your life, you will never be afraid to try anything.

http://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/blog/5-weird-confidence-building-exercises/

You Need A Better Story

Everybody gets stuck. Life can be difficult, painful, and confusing. It's in those confusing seasons of life that we often find ourselves the most stuck, unable to change and move forward with our lives. I hate being stuck.

Solving Stuck
Like you, I've been stuck a lot. What immediately comes to mind is graduating college with no plan, the first and the second time my mom was diagnosed with cancer, that time my girlfriend broke up with me when I was just weeks away from proposing marriage, discovering a dead body in a lake, waking up one day and realizing I'd somehow become thirty pounds overweight during my twenty something years, and that terrible day when I was left unemployed for the first time in my life with two young sons, a pregnant wife, a mortgage, and a chest full of fear.

I've noticed that my tendency (and the tendency of everyone on the planet) is to solve stuck by doing something. We set new goals, write a to-do list, read a self-help book, and try to get un-stuck. Now, there's some merit to this. We certainly need to take action. But, at least for me, I've found that the problem of stuck runs much deeper than what can be fixed by a new exercise program, a change of scenery, or the latest method for improving my self-esteem. I need something bigger.

Finding A Story
A few years ago I read a quote that changed my life. Here it is:

The same impulse that makes us want our books to have a plot makes us want our lives to have a plot. We need to feel that we are getting somewhere, making progress. There is something in us that is not satisfied with a merely psychological explanation of our lives. It doesn't do justice to our conviction that we are on some kind of journey or quest, that there must be some deeper meaning to our lives than whether we feel good about ourselves. Only people who have lost the sense of adventure, mystery, and romance worry about their self-esteem. And at that point what they need is not a good therapist, but a good story. Or more precisely, the central question for us should not be, 'What personality dynamics explain my behavior?' but rather, 'What sort of story am I in?' - William Kilpatrick, Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993

I realized I'd been asking the wrong questions. I'd been asking questions that were too small. When life got hard and I got stuck I tended to ask questions like, "How do I fix this?," "What's wrong with me?", "What do I do now?" Instead I started asking myself, "What sort of story am I in?"

Stories are powerful. Whether we're conscious of it or not, every single one of us believes some kind of a story in order to make sense out of our lives. Human beings are meaning makers. No matter our culture, background, or beliefs, we need to make meaning of our lives and the story of our life only begins to make sense when it's understood under the banner of a bigger story. We need a story that is big enough to make sense out of both the beauty and the brokenness in our lives and in our world. Or, in other words, we need a story that's big enough to get us un-stuck from whatever life throws at us and to keep us moving forward in the plot.

You Need A Better Story
Change and forward movement in our lives isn't merely a matter of trying harder. It's a matter of believing and living more deeply into a big story in which we each have an important role to play.

Your life would actually be a lot better if your life could become less about your life. If you could see that your life is part of a larger plot than simply "the story of me," then adventure, mystery, and joy would reenter the picture. Most of the stuck-ness in our lives is a product of an over focus on our lives. We spend so much time looking in, when we ought to be looking out and up. The late Austrian philosopher, Ivan Illich, was once asked about the most revolutionary way to change society. He answered the question this way:
Neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society, rather you must tell a new powerful tale, one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story, one so inclusive that it gathers all the bits of our past and our present into a coherent whole, one that even shines some light into our future so that we can take the next step... If you want to change a society, then you have to tell an alternative story.-- Ivan Illich, "Storytelling or Myth-Making? Frank Viola and Ivan Illich," Proclamation, Invitation, & Warning, July, 2007

What our larger society needs is the same thing you need: an alternative story. A bigger story. Ditch the small goals, anxious to-do list, and the self-help craze of the month. Instead, get your heart wrapped into a better story and watch what happens.

What sort of story are you in?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/justin-buzzard/you-need-a-better-story_b_3397077.html.