If you want to feel more confident in yourself, there are a number of things that you can do, ranging from dressing for success to role-playing to practice your social skills.
However, while such tactics can help you to feel better in some social situations, and certainly can help to improve your confidence to some extent, lasting self-confidence comes from within, which means you need to change your self-concept to one of a truly confident person.
This basically means changing your mindset, and replacing your old self-concept with a new one.
Our images of ourselves are usually formed in childhood, and as a result many adults' confidence levels are affected by old limiting beliefs that they don't even know that they have.
The way to develop a genuinely confident mindset that isn't dependent on the situation in which you find yourself is to replace these beliefs with new, more empowering alternatives.
This means reprogramming your subconscious mind.
It is old beliefs stored in the self-conscious that affect how we see and feel about ourselves.
Various methods may be used to accomplish this, including things like hypnosis.
Perhaps the easiest method to use at home however, is to combine meditation with visualisation.
When you enter a meditative state, your brain slows down, and your conscious thoughts become less dominant, or quieten down altogether.
Once you enter this kind of deep relaxation, you can more powerfully visualise yourself as the confident person you want to be.
This doesn't just mean seeing visual imagery in your head, but rather capturing the 'feeling place' of confidence, and imagining how you'll react in situations that currently cause you anxiety.
Visualisation is most effective when all of the senses are employed.
With regular practice, visualisation can be extremely effective in helping to change your beliefs about yourself, and thus the way you feel about yourself too.
However, some people find it difficult to meditate and relax enough to visualise effectively.
This is unsurprising, as most people in Western society haven't been taught to meditate or to value such mind control skills.
Fortunately, a solution is at hand in the form of brainwave entrainment, which can help anybody learn to relax deeply and quiet their minds without having to spend years learning conventional meditation techniques.
Brainwave entrainment involves listening to a recording which features repetitive sounds of specific frequencies.
Thanks to the 'frequency following response' - a natural phenomenon in which your brain tends to match the frequency of the sounds it's hearing - you'll find it easier to enter a meditative state and your visualisations will become much more powerful.
The amount of time it takes to change your self-image and increase your confidence using meditation and visualisation varies from person to person.
With daily practice however, you may experience improvements in a matter of weeks, or even less in some cases.
This is a small-time investment really, when you consider that your new confidence will last a lifetime.
However, while such tactics can help you to feel better in some social situations, and certainly can help to improve your confidence to some extent, lasting self-confidence comes from within, which means you need to change your self-concept to one of a truly confident person.
This basically means changing your mindset, and replacing your old self-concept with a new one.
Our images of ourselves are usually formed in childhood, and as a result many adults' confidence levels are affected by old limiting beliefs that they don't even know that they have.
The way to develop a genuinely confident mindset that isn't dependent on the situation in which you find yourself is to replace these beliefs with new, more empowering alternatives.
This means reprogramming your subconscious mind.
It is old beliefs stored in the self-conscious that affect how we see and feel about ourselves.
Various methods may be used to accomplish this, including things like hypnosis.
Perhaps the easiest method to use at home however, is to combine meditation with visualisation.
When you enter a meditative state, your brain slows down, and your conscious thoughts become less dominant, or quieten down altogether.
Once you enter this kind of deep relaxation, you can more powerfully visualise yourself as the confident person you want to be.
This doesn't just mean seeing visual imagery in your head, but rather capturing the 'feeling place' of confidence, and imagining how you'll react in situations that currently cause you anxiety.
Visualisation is most effective when all of the senses are employed.
With regular practice, visualisation can be extremely effective in helping to change your beliefs about yourself, and thus the way you feel about yourself too.
However, some people find it difficult to meditate and relax enough to visualise effectively.
This is unsurprising, as most people in Western society haven't been taught to meditate or to value such mind control skills.
Fortunately, a solution is at hand in the form of brainwave entrainment, which can help anybody learn to relax deeply and quiet their minds without having to spend years learning conventional meditation techniques.
Brainwave entrainment involves listening to a recording which features repetitive sounds of specific frequencies.
Thanks to the 'frequency following response' - a natural phenomenon in which your brain tends to match the frequency of the sounds it's hearing - you'll find it easier to enter a meditative state and your visualisations will become much more powerful.
The amount of time it takes to change your self-image and increase your confidence using meditation and visualisation varies from person to person.
With daily practice however, you may experience improvements in a matter of weeks, or even less in some cases.
This is a small-time investment really, when you consider that your new confidence will last a lifetime.