Confidence profile

Here is a report of my confidence profile. Since it is reported by the analysing website it it is in the second person.

"You are a crusader. When you believe in a particular course of action, you are not afraid to make your views known. You perform at your best with an audience. You would describe yourself as 'shy', and identify closely with performers who use their performances to obscure their shyness and insecurity.

People notice you. You are not afraid to take charge of difficult situations when you feel that this is necessary. Your personal qualities seem contradictory to some of your friends and colleagues; they have difficulty understanding how you can have such presence, and yet also project so much insecurity.

You can achieve significant gains in your personal life and career through personal development. Improved interpersonal skills will help you to form and sustain personal relationships which bring you joy. You have the capability to become a leader; by enhancing your sense of self worth you may find that you become a better listener, more empathic to the needs of others. This increased awareness of, and responsiveness to, the emotional state of others can help you to manage working relationships with a much lighter, more assured, touch.


Peer Independence

Peer Independence is the quality which enables you to hold a position which is contrary to the consensus. It is related to moral courage and integrity.

A person with a high level of peer independence has a high degree of resistance to peer pressure. They do not readily follow a crowd unless there is reason to do so, they have the courage to state unpopular truths and are free to develop independent lines of reasoning. High levels of peer independence coupled with other dimensions of confidence can be highly influential in developing leadership characteristics.

Benefits of Peer Independence

You can't be a leader if you're easily led. Everyday life demands many instances of quiet leadership - whether influencing others, or simply choosing to direct our own actions.

If you wish to advance your career, you will need to become comfortable with doing more than your peers, and doing it better. Even this modest ambition requires strength, to resist the pressure to conform to social norms. If you wish to find a life partner you may need to break out of a social 'rut' and explore life in a more adventurous manner. Followers don't have adventures; they wait for invitations.

In order for your life to become more of an adventure, you need to free yourself from the restraining influence of friends, family, colleagues. Their life patterns and choices need not define yours. A peer independent person is able to enjoy friendships and love without losing their individuality.

Qualities of Peer Independent People

An individual with high levels of peer independence displays some or all of the following traits :

originality of thought
leadership
willingness to listen to opposing views
moral courage
integrity
credibility

Peer independence is almost synonymous with honesty, because peer independent people have a strong relationship with objective truth. Peer independent people are regarded as highly credible, and often make exceptional salespeople and senior managers. Many scientists and engineers exhibit high levels of peer independence; it is not yet clear whether this is a result of their training, or whether this quality attracted them to science and engineering in the first instance.

The Life of Your Choice

Peer independence isn't an 'all or nothing' quality. We all have it in some measure. The greater our reserves of peer independence, the more readily we can make choices. Accepting personal freedom is a challenge for many people, yet it is at the heart of any process of personal growth.
In order to understand how we can enhance our peer independence, we need to understand how its converse - peer dependence - develops.

We exhibit peer dependence for three principal reasons :

as social animals we are 'programmed' to respond to social cues
we may have come to value our own judgements and beliefs less than those of other people we fear conflict.

Enhancing peer independence is achieved through the following processes :

building up resistance to social cues; becoming less susceptible to dominant individuals increasing our respect for our own judgements, views and beliefs reducing the anxiety experienced when acting beyond artificial, peer-defined limits accepting our freedom.

Accept Your Freedom


Status Confidence

Status Confidence is the ability to deal with people as equals regardless of their social status.

This quality is developed through two complementary strategies :
raising one's social status from within becoming less sensitive to social dominance cues.

Benefits of Status Confidence

In an ideal society, none of us would be affected by status. We would be perfectly relaxed being ourselves, living our lives without tension or conflict. In the human world, with its coded status markers, the best we can hope to achieve is to be comfortable in our own skin, and relaxed in our dealings with others.

Possibly everybody falls short of their potential. Perhaps none of us can truly say "I am what I am". Every time we adjust our message or our values to accommodate dominant people, we diminish ourselves. For some of us, this becomes an ingrained habit.

Low status confidence is an inhibitor. We have no idea what we could achieve if only we could resist the social forces which conspire to keep us within our respective pigeonholes. Because social pressure does hold us back. Social pressure is the voice which says "don't have a go - you might end up looking foolish". Social pressure tells you that you shouldn't ask that man or woman for a date because he or she is out of your league. Social pressure tells you that your current job, income, home and leisure pursuits are 'appropriate' for 'somebody like you' ­ and you'd better not aspire to anything too different in case you get ideas above your station.
Social pressure also has its benefits, of course. We are a social animal and our finest, most noble impulses spring from this sense of being part of society. Co-operation is part of the human success story, and a truly status confident person is able to exercise leadership when required, and to be an excellent team member when that is more appropriate. Status confidence allows us to select the role which is most appropriate to the moment.

Raising Status Confidence

You communicate your social status constantly, primarily through body language and voice tone. This communication is unconscious; it is felt rather than known or consciously controlled.Your status changes over time, partly in response to internal perceptions but primarily as a consequence of being treated differently by others. It's another example of virtuous or vicious cycles. The way in which you behave reflects your self perception of status. This is either accepted or challenged by the people around you. If you encounter a person who is displaying dominance greater than your self perception will support, you will back off from a challenge. If somebody you perceive as being lower in status than you raises a challenge to your dominance, your self perception will allow you to reject their challenge.

The net effect of this continuous exchange is that we become locked in to a particular status level. People above our level will generally 'win' any challenge, while people below our level will usually 'lose' any challenge, so our current status is continuously reinforced.

The challenge is to adjust our unconscious, completely hidden, perception of our own status. This can be achieved through work on two fronts :
sending strong messages of raised status to our unconscious mind
becoming comfortable with resisting challenges from dominant individuals.

The key to both objectives is the use of hypnosis to impart direct and indirect suggestions. The Confidence Club hypnotherapy CD 'Developing Status Confidence' is based on the following principles :

use of role models to support visualisation of self in higher status roles
reduction of unconscious resistance to raised status direct suggestion to boost self esteem reduction in anxiety experienced when dealing with dominant individuals.

Raising one's status confidence is a long-term goal rather than a short-term boost. The benefits are significant and lifelong. Your existing level of social status is the result of many irrelevant factors ­ genetics, your birth order, your early experiences ­ and remains largely static because social pressure acts to make it difficult for you to change unaided. There is no good reason for you to accept the accidents of history. You are free to change. Expressing your freedom is not an act of defiance. You are free because you are.


Physical Presence

Physical presence is the quality which allows us to occupy space without tension. It is also the quality which draws people to listen to us, to follow us, to acknowledge our existence. In military circles it is sometimes referred to as 'command presence'.

We don't all wish to be top dog all the time. However, an understanding of the physical attributes which enable us to communicate dominance is essential, if only to help us to recognise what is happening when another person mysteriously dominates a group, or when we fail to inspire others to act, or when we appear to be invisible. Developing enhanced physical presence is a key to being taken more seriously, in work and in our personal lives.

We continually communicate through body language. An excellent example of physical presence at work is the experienced schoolteacher who enters a room and the room falls silent. A less experienced teacher might enter the same room without any discernible effect on volume levels. This happens even if the experienced teacher is new to the school - he or she has no 'reputation'. What is happening here?

If you are privileged to be able to observe this process in action, you may notice two consistent themes :

the experienced teacher is more 'still' than the novice
the experienced teacher strongly expects the class to become quiet

It's a sobering thought that our expectations - unvoiced thoughts which we believed were constrained within our skulls - are actually being communicated to the world at large. But that is what we do, every second of every day. We communicate. We transmit information which rarely makes it to our conscious awareness.

Humans are natural communicators. We transmit status information all the time. We also transmit details of some of our intentions, such as our willingness to fight. Most of this is quite unconscious, and its influence is not just on the people around us - our body language also helps to set our internal perceptions. As difficult as this may be to grasp, the way that you behave outwardly will influence your self perception. Therefore you can either experience a virtuous cycle ­ positive body language raising your self esteem and generating more of the good stuff - or a vicious cycle in which your slumped shoulders and 'victim' posture reinforce and sustain all your worst feelings.

Career benefits

In virtually all professions, it is an asset to project a commanding physical presence, if only for a proportion of the working day. Very often we also need to tone down our command presence - for example, in caring professions when we wish to empathise with our clients - so it is helpful to develop some conscious awareness of the signals we are transmitting, as well as unconscious mastery of the skills involved. A person who does not project a high degree of physical presence will often be overlooked - literally and metaphorically. It is no accident that so many business and political leaders are imposing individuals with large body frames - nature has given them a head start in the physical presence stakes, and they have simply exploited this natural advantage. Perhaps the greatest benefit to be derived from developing greater presence is the increased likelihood of being taken seriously. It can be highly frustrating to have one's ideas ignored when colleagues with less to contribute seem able to put their point across with much greater force.

Unconscious mastery

The key to developing physical presence is the acquisition of an unshakeable belief in one's own value and worth. People who are reluctant to project physical presence are signalling some deep-seated insecurity, a sense that they do not feel 'worthy' to occupy so much space. Note that this is context-dependent - you will project far greater presence in some situations, with some people, than in other contexts. As a secondary gain, it is also extremely valuable to reset our non-verbal communication - body language and tone of voice - to reflect our growing physical presence. There is a risk that our non-verbal communication will undermine our growing self confidence, by continuing to project our old, outdated sense of self worth. So the challenge is to develop an unshakeable belief in your own worth, uncompromised by situation or the presence of highly dominant individuals. Such fundamental change may appear to be something of a challenge - how do you increase your sense of worth? In fact it is an everyday occurrence, albeit on a small scale. We all experience minor triumphs and disasters which impact on our sense of personal worth. Consider the way you feel when somebody unexpectedly gives you a small 'thank you' gift in return for some act of kindness which you had forgotten? On the other hand, consider the way your self confidence can be damaged by an insulting comment - even one which comes from a total stranger who has no knowledge of you. The reality is that one's sense of worth is continually fluctuating. We may consider it as being analogous to a bank account. Harmful experiences are like withdrawals, whilst beneficial ones are like deposits. We could wait for our sense of worth to be topped up spontaneously - or we can act decisively to change things for the better. Building a powerful sense of personal value requires an unravelling of some of our existing beliefs about ourselves. Our conscious beliefs are easy to identify, but strangely difficult to change. This is because they stem from unconscious beliefs to which we have little conscious access. The unconscious mind is in control.

Body Language

We can learn body language just as we learn to drive, or swim, or walk. At first it appears unnatural and forced, but with practice we are able to utilise new skills unconsciously. The great benefit of body language training has been touched on earlier, but deserves to be repeated : the signals which you send to the outside world also form your inner perception of self. It sounds totally insane, but it's absolutely true. Smile, and you feel happier. Stand up when you make a telephone call, and your language becomes more decisive. By exercising conscious control over your body language, you can ensure that the messages you send inwards, to the deepest levels of your psyche, are positive, constructive messages.
Reprogramming your body language takes time and subtlety. You could read books on the subject - you may already have done so - with little to show in the form of changes to your day to day actions and responses. The difficulty here is with internalisation - we are all so attuned to body language that it's actually quite difficult to bluff it. If you are only making changes through your conscious mind - deciding how to stand, or walk, or what expression to have on your face - this will be perceived by others as false. More tellingly, your internal commitment to these changed behaviours will be slight, making your new position fragile and vulnerable to challenge.

The only certain way to reprogram our body language is from within. The most effective path to such internal readjustment is through light hypnotic trance. Deep trance is valuable for dealing with values and beliefs; light trance is ideal for work with behaviours. Changing our body language is a behavioural adjustment, requiring a combination of conscious awareness and unconscious programming.

Posture
Use of head position to signal dominance
Eye contact
Purposeful movement
Relaxed awareness
The Self Worth qualities developed through the CD include :
Ancestral links - Respect for self and others
Deletion of past failures
Developing future focus
Leadership values



Stage Presence

Stage presence is the quality which allows us to hold a very public position in a relaxed manner. It is the quality which allows us to remain ourselves under intense scrutiny from others. Individuals with a high level of stage presence have a distinct advantage in a variety of professional and social situations.

Confidence Club makes a distinction between 'acting' presence ­ the ability to project a contrived personality ­ and true stage presence, in which you are free to be yourself. We can help you to be true to yourself in a wide range of public situations. You can dramatically reduce the degree of tension you feel, which in turn will allow you to respond naturally, honestly and with integrity. Simply by remaining calm ­ and by displaying this through body language and voice tone ­ you will find that others listen to you and are more willing to accept your message.

Benefits of enhanced stage presence

We all need to exercise leadership from time to time, whether in our jobs or in voluntary or community roles we undertake. However, many of us shy away from opportunities for personal growth because an element of 'performance' is required.

In career terms, stage presence is an essential quality if we are to be able to put forward our position to groups of people. Probably most of us have experienced the situation where we have been wonderfully persuasive on a one to one basis, and then completely failed to win over a larger audience.

Socially, many of us are happy to stay in the background. We may even have constructed a world view in which we associate reserve with virtue, and possibly we are suspicious or condemnatory when we encounter highly polished performers. Yet a full social life demands that we expose ourselves to public view. Attending a party is a form of social exposure. Meeting new people, indeed any new activity we undertake requires us to step up to the plate and expose ourselves. Even if you have no desire to be the life and soul of the party, even if you quietly distrust people who are very outgoing, nevertheless you need to become relaxed about exposing yourself to the scrutiny of others, simply to be able to participate fully in life.

There is another key reason to develop stage presence. Your integrity sometimes asks a lot of you. Being true to yourself may require you to deal with difficult interpersonal situations for which you have had no prior preparation. Perhaps you are in a shop where a youth verbally bullies a child. The shop is full and everybody drops their gaze - group dynamics have taken over. Will you speak out? Can you conquer social pressure and remain calm under (social) pressure? Stage presence is about much more than presentation and window-dressing. It is intimately wrapped up in the process of becoming true to your core values.
A person with no stage presence can only be honourable in thought, not deed, because we act with and through others.

Losing the stress

Do you find public speaking stressful? Do you believe that it is possible to speak in public without stress? In order to understand how to remove stress from public performances, we first need to recognise where the stress comes from. The key to stage presence is to understand that we become tense when we perceive a threat. That threat may be physical or psychological, real or imaginary.

Size of group + Context = Perceived Threat

Perhaps you perform perfectly well in front of one person in a friendly context. You may not regard this as stage presence - an audience of one wouldn't keep theatre alive! ­ but it's simply a matter of degree. Maybe you are fine speaking socially to a group of three or four, then you are asked to make a formal presentation to 60 people, with a great deal riding on the outcome. Is it any surprise you feel tense? Your previous experience may not have prepared you for this level of escalation.

What is wrong is the degree of preparation. You wouldn't go from jogging a mile one week, to running the London Marathon the next. The slope would be too steep. Yet you know that you could run the marathon, if you prepared properly.

Psychological preparation is the key to developing high levels of stage presence. You can work your way up the scale from small informal gatherings through to formal speeches in front of huge audiences. Effective preparation will enable you to see each successive challenge as part of a game, something to look forward to rather than something to dread.

The Burden of Experience

We all have to deal with past experiences. If you have experienced a sense of personal failure, or simply tension, in public speaking or making presentations in the past, this will generate tension for future events. Your natural stress response includes a sharpening of your memory-making processes. When we are under stress, our brain chemistry actually changes quite markedly. One of the effects is that we lay down particularly strong unconscious memories of the event which caused the stress. This is a protective mechanism ­ it's there to help us to recognise dangerous situations. If this only happened when we did something which was physically damaging - say, putting our hands near a flame ­ we might not have any complaints. However, the same mechanism 'protects' us against psychological harm also, by recognising situations which have hurt us in the past.

You can see the problem. If you have suffered severe performance stress in the past, you will go into the next presentation or speech with a strong sense of foreboding, exactly as you would if you were going into battle. By eliminating our unconscious memories of failure, and reinforcing our memories of success, we can cut down the tension we experience whenever we make a public presentation. In effect, we need to treat public speaking as a phobia to be eliminated.


Social Confidence

Social confidence is the quality which enables us to remain true to ourselves whilst interacting with individuals or small groups of people.

Benefits of Social Confidence

We all wish to be popular, to be known for who we are, to have fulfilling relationships and to be able to live our lives in an atmosphere of love and deep friendship. Indeed, we all need a certain level of love and friendship in our lives simply to remain healthy.

Social confidence provides the ability to share one's innermost experiences. Relationships grow from shared experience. Even everyday activities - food, music, ordinary pleasures ­ become drenched in meaning when two people realise that they are not alone in the moment.
Social confidence provides the ultimate freedom. When we grow in social confidence we draw strength from people all around us. Sartre said 'Hell is other people'. He must have had low social confidence, because all of our joy comes from other people. Social confidence is the quality which allows us to enjoy the presence of others.

Empathy and Congruence

Social confidence is closely related to two key psychological qualities :
empathy
congruence
Empathy is the ability to put oneself in another's shoes. It is about appreciating what a person is feeling, rather than what they are thinking. Empathy is a skill which can be learned and developed. It is important to note that individuals who lack empathy are not necessarily unkind or uncaring. Sometimes low self esteem makes it difficult for us to expose ourselves sufficiently to empathise. Furthermore, some of us are socially handicapped through a low level of awareness of normal social cues - we have difficulty 'reading' other people.

Congruence is a term coined by the late Carl Rogers, a pioneering therapist who is often described as the father of the counselling movement. Congruence is a measure of the extent to which your experiences, your feelings and the face which you present to the world all match one another. It is also a measure of the extent to which you are true to yourself, regardless of the value systems imposed by significant others - your family, for example. A highly congruent person is not vulnerable because you can peel away layer after layer and still find the same personality showing through.

Being happy in your own skin, and free to be yourself regardless of the stresses which are applied to you, makes it possible for you to achieve good 'contact' with others. Good contact is essential if you are to develop friendship and love. We meet thousands of different people every year, yet the number of people we really know may be extremely small. The more congruent we become, the easier it is for us to expose our true nature and hence to develop deep friendships.

Socially confident people make it safe for others to open up, because they are open to themselves.

Qualities of socially confident people
A socially confident person displays the following qualities :

awareness of the mood and feelings of others
awareness of one's own feelings
acceptance of oneself
ability to live in the present moment
ability to expose oneself in order to achieve good 'contact' with others

Developing the qualities of empathy and congruence can transform a person's social confidence, and with it their social skills. A socially confident person has no difficulties mastering social skills because every interaction is a learning experience. We can even throw away the rule book because true empathy means that we are tuned in to the person we are with, to such an extent that we can intuitively find the right way to express our feelings. You may have noticed how close friends can spend time in companionable silence without discomfort. Tuning in to other people releases us from mere social conventions.

Values, Beliefs, Behaviours

What are your true values? When you are stripped to the core, which values really define who you are and what you stand for? Perhaps you have never really given this much thought - it may not be something you feel comfortable discussing. Yet you are your values; they express what it means to be uniquely you, at a far deeper level than any ideas or opinions you may express.

We may consider our personalities to occupy three distinct levels - values, beliefs and behaviours. Values are the core principles which define us. Our beliefs are those ideas which we believe to be true, and which we use on a day to day basis to direct our actions. Our behaviours are the things which we do and say.

Congruence is the alignment of all three levels - values, beliefs and behaviours - to reflect a unified whole. It follows that we need to take time to reflect inwards, to appreciate the nature of our core values and to allow these to shape our beliefs and behaviours. We all make compromises during this process, in order to accommodate social pressures. However hard we try to be true to our core values, we will nevertheless identify with a particular 'tribe' within society and find our behaviours reflecting the social norms within this group. This is natural. As long as we start from the inside and work outwards, we can make such accommodations without doing serious harm to our unity of being. The danger comes when we take the social group as our touchstone and try to build our personalities from the outside in. This is a perfect recipe for incongruence, and helps to explain why adolescence is such a troubled period for so many of us.

Developing social confidence


awareness of the mood and feelings of others
awareness of one's own feelings
acceptance of oneself
ability to live in the present moment
ability to expose oneself in order to achieve good 'contact' with others

This is a process of personal development from the inside out to achieve lasting benefits. True social confidence is not reflected in brash behaviour, but in a sense of inner security which enables the individual to respond naturally and openly in any situation.