Cultivate GREATNESS | Personal Development

Do you know how to handle everything that life throws at you? Do you forge ahead with confidence and enthusiasm? Are you extremely confident in your capabilities?

If you answered yes to all of these questions, then you are a super self confident person and you do not need my help. For the rest of you, I have tips on how you can become that self confident.

I think that I am quite self confident, but when I attempt something completely new I sometimes have a small bit of doubt about my capabilities to handle the challenge. Most people do. That is why we should all strive to become super self confident individuals.

You probably think that doing this is going to involve some difficult magical formula. Well you would be wrong. Actually it’s quite simple. As most worthwhile things do, it does require some effort on your part.

To improve your self confidence, you must always be in a learning mode. When you are learning things, you keep your mind sharp and your attention focused. Practice making decisions and work diligently to ensure those decisions end with the intended result. The more success you have with this practice, the more self confident you will become.

I will give you and example of one of the things I did to build my self confidence. Back in the late 1960’s, when I was on Highway Patrol, I used to practice estimating distances. I got so that I could look down the highway and estimate the distance of a sign or a building on the side of the highway and never be out more than a tenth of a mile in a 5 mile estimate. Most of the time I was within a few feet.

In 1969 when I was prosecuting court cases for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) four days a week, I was driving the judge to a court case in a neighboring town. She had her car in the repair shop getting it fixed because another driver came through a red light and hit her car. I was explaining to her how to clock a speeder and I gave her a demonstration using the vehicle ahead of us as a “suspect vehicle.” I then told her about practicing estimating distances. She wanted to test me. I told her to lean over so she could see the odometer. I then looked down the highway and said, “Now!” She recorded the odometer reading and I aid, “Do you see that sign away down the road?” She said, “That little dot on the right?” I said, “Yes, and it is 4 miles from where I said now.” She looked very skeptical. When we were close to the sign I told her to lean over and look at the odometer again when I said, “Now.” She did. When she sat up she looked at me with new respect and said, “It clicked over to 4 miles just as you said now. You couldn’t have been out more than two or three feet. I told her that when I was on Highway Patrol, not only did I practice myself, but that I trained all the junior members how to do the things I had just shown her.

After that, whenever a police officer had given testimony in her court that he had clocked a speeder at a certain speed and that he had been at a certain distance behind this suspect car, if the defense counsel questioned this, she would interrupt and say, “These men are professionals, they know what they are doing, find another line of defense counselor there is no dispute in this regard.”

My practice had made me confident that I could prove to the judge that I could estimate distances accurately. If I had failed, it could have had a negative impact on the cases I prosecuted. However, my self confidence in my estimating abilities was so great that I knew that I could do it well. I did, and as a result prosecution of speeding cases became much easier because the judge knew how well we did it.

So practice what you want to accomplish and you will become so good at it that your self confidence in your abilities will soar. As soon as you become self confident in one area of your life, pick another and practice on it.

As you can see from my example, it doesn’t take a magic formula to become super self confident, it just takes practice. Just as you would practice your golf swing or your tennis serve to improve your game, you must practice the areas of your life that need improvement.

I used to have difficulty with public speaking. I’d have nightmares the night before I had to speak. To get over this, I enrolled in a public speaking course which forced me to practice doing it daily during the month long course. By the end of the course I enjoyed getting up in front of a group of people and talking to them. If I haven’t done it for a while I will get a few butterflies when I walk out in front of the crowd, but after the first few words it all goes away and I have a great time.

Practice, practice, practice is the magical key! Do it and you too will become super self confident.

Copyright Gilbert Griffiths - http://http;//www.rockettosuccess.com