7 Steps to Increased Self Confidence

A 30-DAY COURSE OF HYPNOTHERAPY, NLP, MINDFULNESS & MORE

This course has been designed to increase your self-confidence by helping

you change your moment-to-moment thoughts and deal with past issues.

After reading this introduction you can start the course at any time. Just

begin by using the session that has been made for the particular day of

the week. So, for instance, if you were to start on a Sunday then you would

listen to the session entitled ‘Sunday - Focussing on the Positive’. This is a

thirty day course, so you’ll listen to each recording four times over the first

twenty-eight days, and then for days Twenty-Nine and Thirty you should

listen again to Friday’s session - ‘Developing Self-Compassion’.

If you are unable to listen to a session on a particular day you can either

extend the length of the course accordingly, or if you prefer, you can catch

up by listening to two sessions on one day.

Throughout the course we shall be using hypnosis, so it’s important to

appreciate that this is a natural state which you go in and out of a number

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of times per day – for instance, when you become involved in a movie or a

book, and as you drift off to sleep. In fact, when you’ve day-dreamed

someone may have come up to you and said “You’re in a trance today.”

They were probably joking, but technically they were right!

Clearly hypnosis is an everyday state and when you allow your mind to go

into this natural state your thoughts will become slower and your mind

more open to things said to you, which is why hypnotherapy works.

An Overview of the Sessions

Let’s now explore the contents of these sessions to discover how they’ll

help you increase your self confidence.

Monday – ‘Acceptance through Mindfulness’

So what is Mindfulness? It’s a state of mind in which you experience things

as they are. Normally as you go through your day you are continually

being affected by judgements: The bus is late – that’s bad; your partner

complains – that’s upsetting; a friend offers you help – that’s very kind; and

so on. Such judgements are necessary so we know how to react to what

happens in our lives – we complain to the bus company, and we thank our

friend for her offer.

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The problem with judgement, however, is that it gets in the way of our

looking at something as it is. This can prevent us from dealing effectively

with an issue – particularly one involving strong emotions. For instance, if

we are furious with our boss then this may prevent us from thinking

clearly and handling the situation well; we may even behave in a way that

loses us the chance of promotion. Ideally in such circumstances we would

be able to think of the issue without any emotional burden – we don’t

need to do this for long, but for sufficient time to come to terms with it

and find possible solutions. ‘Mindfulness’ helps us do this.

This state of mind has been recognised around the world as offering great

benefits to users – so much so that it’s now often combined with the most

successful of all the psychological treatments, Cognitive Behavioural

Therapy. Although Mindfulness has been practiced for thousands of years,

it’s only now that research is starting to show the impressive benefits it

offers in terms of developing our mental focus, helping us achieve

calmness, and promoting acceptance. Because of these attributes we shall

be using Mindfulness throughout the course to deal with a range of issues.

Tuesday – ‘Developing Self-Acceptance’

Tuesday’s session is perhaps the most important of the whole course. Self-

acceptance gives us a very different relationship with ourselves than the

approach that most people use by trying to raise self-esteem. Rather than

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constantly judging ourselves as though we’re entrants in a competition, we

treat ourselves as people – valuable and special for the sole reason that

we are people.

There is research which shows that when things go wrong treating

ourselves in an accepting and understanding way leaves us more positive

about doing better in future, and increases the chances that we will

succeed. In other words, self-acceptance, a state of mind that never uses

self-punishment, is more than just a pleasant way to treat yourself - it’s the

best way to help yourself.

Wednesday – ‘Dealing with the Past’

Wednesday’s session is about dealing with the past, although in a sense

this is not what we shall be doing, because the past is gone - it no longer

exists - and so can’t be dealt with. What we shall really work on is dealing

with the thoughts and feelings attached to memories.

For anyone with a lack of self-confidence there is liable to be a memory or

a group of memories that partially explain their problems and contribute

to them. Fortunately, there are now some wonderfully effective methods

of addressing these, and doing so comfortably.

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Thursday – ‘Thinking in a Confident Way’

Thursday’s session is designed to help you develop thought processes to

improve confidence in your daily life.

The techniques we employ will address the thoughts that weaken your

self-confidence, replace them with helpful ones, and enable you to act in

more confident ways. These changes will have a knock-on effect in that as

you think and act in a more confidently you will also feel this too.

This session will help you enjoy your successes and cope more easily with

your failures. A fear of failure is often driven by poor self-confidence, and

this session will help you to let this fear go. You will also find that it

encourages you to persist when something is challenging.

Friday – ‘Developing Self-Compassion’

Friday’s session will help you add something called ‘Self-Compassion’ to

the strategies we’ve mentioned already. Self-compassion is particularly

helpful when things in life are difficult. It’s a way of relating to yourself that

will give you good, positive feelings, no matter what is happening in your

life.

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Saturday – ‘Valuing Your Life and What You Do’

When we lack confidence we can develop negative attitudes towards

ourselves and our achievements. To counteract these problems,

Saturday’s session helps you to recognise your worth as a person and the

worth of what you do in your daily life. The objective is to help you develop

a heightened awareness of these things so that eventually you do this

automatically. When this happens your subconscious mind will give you a

better, healthier self-image and a greater appreciation of your worth.

Sunday – ‘Focusing on the Positive’

Sunday’s session is not the positive thinking advocated in many self-help

books. Rather, it’s an approach designed to produce a more positive

outlook towards life but acknowledges that life gives us things that we like,

and things we dislike, and helps us cope with both.

It is important to understand why people need to work on being more

positive. To understand this we can think of our ancestors. For hundreds

of thousands of years these people lived dangerous lives: on average they

were dead at twenty-seven. There were many causes of such an early

demise: hostile tribes, ritual sacrifices, wild animals, starvation, and so on.

So to survive these people had to be vigilant, constantly looking out for

what could be a danger. This does not mean that there was no time for

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the positive things in life – there certainly was – but the automatic bias in

our ancestors` minds was towards the negative.

In the modern world we’re liable to maintain our ancestors’ level of

vigilance because our brains are almost identical to theirs. The focus has

shifted, though: Because the real dangers are relatively few, we tend to be

concerned - not about the threats posed our physical being - but about

those to our sense of self. We worry what people will think of us (and even

what we’ll think of ourselves). As a result we still have the anxiety of a

cave-person: anticipating danger at any moment, and yet the feeling is

triggered by trivial concerns that we might say the wrong thing at the

wedding or we won’t find our credit card at the supermarket checkout.

Given how our ancestors were, this focus on trivial, non-threatening

problems is inevitable – unless we can train our mind to respond more

positively to the amazing lives available to us now. We need to change our

focus of attention, to be able to look for what’s good in our lives rather

than what’s bad or what could be bad; our mind is perfectly capable of

recognising problems and dangers without our striving to do this. We need

to be able to begin a project, give a talk, introduce ourselves to someone

we don’t know, etc, without poor self-confidence letting us down.

This session will help you make that switch so your mind has what we

might call a ‘default setting’, not for the negatives in life, but for the

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positive. As you do this you begin to see more opportunities, enjoy social

interaction more, and increase your chances of attaining your full

potential.

When you’re ready to start the course, choose the session appropriate for

that day, settle back, relax, and help your mind to make these changes. We

hope you enjoy the journey!

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