Use this exercise to get at more of what you need to overcome a challenge or solve a problem. Remember yourself through the eyes of someone who knew you when you were younger, someone who resisted you or competed with you, and someone who loves you. Image by Henrik Nordell from Pixabay

This is a short exercise we have been doing at NLP Canada Training to improve our connection when we are on phone or video calls or meetings. It was inspired by Patsy Rodenberg's work in The Second Circle.  Try this one before your next web meeting and feel a more direct, human connection with the people on the other side of the screen.

Confidence is . . .
Begin by thinking of a situation or a specific challenge that requires that you have confidence. Instead of saying, “I want to have more confidence when I’’m with clients,” pick one part of the process that regularly makes you wish you could speak and act with more confidence. Write that on a postcard.

As we hear the different situations where this team wants to act with more confidence, we understand that confidence involves a lot of different skill sets. It’s no wonder that it’s hard to feel confident before you’ve developed skill and experience. To speed up the process of building confidence, we need to understand how confidence shows up in our experience.
Here’s an NLP approach to confidence. Confidence is a state. A state is a word that describes how you experience the world and it includes: your physiology, your thoughts and beliefs, and your perceptions.

Confidence is
•a physical feeling of strength combined with
•a focus on something you want to be or to achieve combined with
•a heightened awareness of cues in your situation that will help you achieve what you want to achieve.

We can create a working model of confidence by remembering times when you have had each of these three experiences, and using a single anchor to trigger all three memories at once.
You can use a marble or other small object as an anchor for all three components of confidence.

This podcast features a version of a very old story, loosely based on the retelling by Hugh William McKibbon called The Token Gift. It uses this story of exponential growth as a way to think about our feelings about the math we hear as experts explain the probabilities of various outcomes. In a time when math is at the heart of a global crisis, it's important to recognize our emotional reaction to the math so that we can use both math and our emotions better.