My mother started showing me how much worse I'm doing this semester since she stopped pressuring me all the time to do things. I've been worrying about whether or not I'll make it out in the real world with all of my spacing-out and lack of attention…if I can actually live up to the high standards of society…
I'm honestly unsure if I'll be able to…
Not trying to sound flaky or wimpy, but it really feels like I might not be ready…though if I'm not ready, then I feel like a useless bum…
It seems like I put a lot of effort into things, but they still turn out very bad…
Then I was dealing with anxiety over having to present myself perfectly for an interview. What if nobody ever likes me?
Then, I'm so disorganized and forgetful…what if I make a horrible mistake somewhere?
I know I'm not the only one with anxiety…
Please, somebody give me advice on becoming more productive and confident…
Self-confidence takes work. I can describe easily enough how to get it, but you still have to do incredible amounts of work to actually achieve true confidence.
Example:
Most Olympic athletes are children; they are in their late teens or early 20s. To be the best in the world at something, they have to have confidence in themselves. What do they do to gain that confidence before a tough competition? Take the example of a downhill skier. When he arrives at a competition, he is generally allowed some time to familiarize himself with the course, i.e., walk the course, examine it closely, and then do a practice run or two on it. But that’s it. He's often not given any more access to the course until it’s time for him to hit the starting gate and run the race, and that interim period may be a couple days. But in the couple days between the first familiarization with the course and his race, he’ll run through that course hundreds or even thousands of times in his mind. He’ll play out every inch of that course in his mind in slow-motion at first, and then faster and faster, over and over, until every neuron in his mind and cell in his body is prepared for that course.
Okay, so a couple exercises:
Role-playing for predictable experiences
With some predictable experiences, say like a job interview, you can look up how such things work and find sample questions on the Internet, come up with some rote answers, and then practice your posture, demeanor, and lines hundreds of times. It’s even recommended to film yourself practicing, so that you can see yourself from the outside. In this case, it’s like the Olympic athlete running the course over and over in his head: It’s all very rote, and it works best for a standardized experience (like a job interview).
Walk-throughs for unpredictable experiences
With novel or unpredictable experiences, find someone knowledgeable and ask them to give you a walk-through. The idea here is that you are so unfamiliar with the situation that you don’t even know where to start; the entire experience seems like a monolithic obstacle. So you want to get someone (a coach, a mentor, a counselor, a specialist) to break it down for you and walk you through it. Knowledge is power.
An acquaintance of mine was worried about a legal procedure; it turned out that she was terrified of being cross-examined in deposition. So I gave her a walk-through of some generic deposition questions and showed her how to handle those questions. With that info, she could start generating her own questions and answers relevant to her situation and feel fore-armed. (In the end, it turned out that she wasn’t deposed; but gaining that confidence that she could handle the procedure if needed allowed her to move forward with the legal procedure to a successful conclusion.)
Another acquaintance of mine was a married mother with three very young children. She felt that she needed to separate or divorce from her husband, but she had no clue where to even start or whether she would spend the rest of her life in poverty, lose the kids, or what. So I told her what a divorce lawyer would want to know about her in the very first interview, then gave her a breakdown of a typical financial settlement with kids. It gave her confidence to go down and talk to a lawyer and start the separation process. (Ultimately they didn’t divorce; armed with info from the lawyer, she was able to confront her husband and push through enough changes that they could remain together.)
Visualization and affirmation exercises for building upon past experiences that have gone poorly
Visualization and affirmation (V&A) exercises are about getting a handle on a situation that has gone poorly by generating alternative scenarios and building useful rules from them.
For example: Relax alone in a relaxed setting, remember back to an emotional incident during the day, and run a bunch of scenarios to visualize how you might handle the incident differently. In other words, replay the incident in your mind and feel the emotions that you felt at the time of the actual incident. Then use the V&A exercise to rewrite the script of what happened: practice assertiveness skills, determine where to establish personal boundaries, or whatever. Stephen Covey talks about V&A exercises in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People†(from Habit 2), and I have used his label for them.
To sum up: These are just a few examples of mental exercises that one can use to build confidence. If you want more, then hit the self-help section of a good bookstore. Personally, I got a lot out of the book I mentioned in the last section: Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.â€
As in much of life, success depends on how much work you want to put into these things. Any top athlete will tell you: More practice = more confidence = more success.
