When we are plagued by a lack of confidence, it is almost impossible to live the life we want to live. If you think about it, the most successful people in our society have one thing in common: they believe in themselves and their ability to achieve their goals.  Although even highly successful people probably have days when they feel a bit of self-doubt, it is hard to imagine someone like Barack Obama achieving what once seemed like an impossible dream, of becoming the first African-American President of the United States, without a large dose of confidence.

The same is true for all of us, even if our goals are less ambitious. Without self-belief, we are unlikely to get that dream job, loving relationship, financial security, or any of the abundance we would like to experience in our lives.

Using NLP to boost your confidence is the first step towards achieving your life’s ambitions, and enhancing your experience of the world and the experience of others around you.

A lack of self-confidence is often rooted in the fear that being confident would cause pain, either to you as an individual or to other people. Common thought processes surrounding this fear (however subconscious they may be) include:

• “If I am too confident, people won’t like me”
• “If I feel too good about myself, that will make others feel bad”
• “What if I become confident and then all my plans fail? Then I will look like a fool!”

These thoughts come from anxieties surrounding the possibility of failure or rejection, and may lead to an unconscious desire to sabotage our own success. By learning NLP, you can turn your fears around and transform them into confidence.

Begin by identifying a solid motivation for changing your habit of low self-esteem, and recognising the thoughts that lie at the heart of your fear of being confident. Let us imagine, for example, that you want a new relationship and are being held back by your fear of rejection. You can use NLP to turn the pain of rejection that you fear into pleasure, at the thought of what you will gain through being confident:

• Think about the extraordinary things that will enter your life if you release your fears
• Really picture yourself in that place of abundance, imagining all the details clearly – the love you will receive, the wonderful places you will visit, and the experiences you will have as a result of your new found confidence. It is important that you truly experience the joy of having whatever it is you desire
• Now picture what it will be like if you don’t have this love and joy in your life. Again, you really need to feel and experience the absence of what it is that you want

If you go through this process, fully immersing yourself in the experience of both having and not having what it is that you will gain through confidence, your brain will automatically start to reach for the more positive experience and your behaviour will change accordingly.

We as human beings instinctively seek pleasure and avoid pain, so by consciously changing our pleasure/pain associations, we can enter into new behavioural patterns that benefit our lives and help us to fulfil our dreams.