By Dr. Vesna Grubacevic
Is shyness stopping you from making friends, attracting a relationship, or having successful relationships with your existing partner, family, friends, and work colleagues? Do you find it difficult to communicate or do you feel lonely or isolated? Would you like to have the confidence to do what you desire so that you can attract and keep an ideal partner and have more empowering friends and family in your life?
Shyness vs Confidence
Shyness is a state of being reserved, bashful, timid, or withdrawn from participating in life and being involved with other people. In contrast, confidence is a positive emotion, which reflects our level of self belief. The greater our belief in ourselves, the greater our level of confidence in ourselves and our abilities. Even if you find it challenging to remember feeling confident in the past, it is possible for you to feel confident in the future because you have all the resources inside of you to succeed. All you need to learn is how to tap into those infinite abilities inside of you so that you can feel how you wish to feel right now.
Here are three tips to help you to transform shyness into confidence:
1. Identify and resolve any emotions or limiting beliefs. Take a moment to sit down and consider your beliefs about people and being around people, as well as your beliefs about yourself and participating in life. Write down all the emotions, thoughts, and self-talk that come to mind. Then look at this list and notice whether your emotions, thoughts, and beliefs are empowering you or limiting you.
Also note where your confidence is lacking—is it always lacking or only in certain situations? For example, is your confidence high except for when you go on a date? What are the beliefs and emotions contributing to the lack of confidence in that situation? Or, do you fear rejection, fear being alone, fear being judged, etc.?
Resolving the negative emotions and limiting beliefs will assist you to develop greater confidence, which will help you to create more empowering relationships with your partner, family, friends, and work colleagues. In turn, this will assist you to really believe in yourself and to more confidently and effectively deal with a greater range of life experiences.
2. Develop new strategies for accessing confidence. It is also useful to have more effective strategies for accessing confidence. Because all our memories have emotions attached to them, any time we want to feel a certain way, all we need to do is to remember the last time we felt that way and we will feel the emotion attached to that memory.
Take a moment now to think about a time in the past when you had high levels of confidence. Perhaps you were doing really well at school or in sports, perhaps you were a teenager or young adult, perhaps you had a strong group of friends or work team, or some other time in your past. As you think about that specific time now, bring to mind that memory with as much detail as you can, and notice the confidence you felt at that time. Notice how you now feel that same level of confidence.
To feel confidence right now all you need to do is to remember a time in the past when you felt confidence and you will feel that emotion. It is much easier to feel the intensity of confidence once the negative emotions and limiting beliefs are resolved.
3. Enjoy appreciating, acknowledging, and loving yourself. Confidence largely depends on the relationship we have with ourselves. If we beat up on ourselves and have a lot of negative self talk, this will reduce our level of confidence. In contrast, when we appreciate ourselves, acknowledge our achievements, and love ourselves, this helps enormously in boosting our confidence. When we appreciate ourselves more, our partner, family, friends and work colleagues appreciate us more in return.
Begin to acknowledge yourself right now, by thinking about your day and what you have accomplished (however small or large). Write down these successes, together with any good deeds you have done for others, including your family, friends, and partner. Good deeds done to others reflect the good relationship we have with ourselves.
Imagine now overcoming shyness and developing greater self-belief and confidence so that you can freely express and be yourself with your partner, family, friends, and work colleagues.
Dr. Vesna Grubacevic is the founder of award-winning company Qt, an NLP Melbourne-based NLP Master Practitioner and NLP Trainer. She holds a PhD, BEc, runs regular NLP training and NLP courses, is the creator of breakthrough behavioural change techniques, author of the self-empowerment book, Stop Sabotaging Your Confidence, and sought-after speaker. For more techniques on transforming your confidence and your success, and for free gifts, visit www.qttransformation.com.