More content coming 🙂 Keep watching this space!
[jbox color=’red’ title=’Update box’] We’ll update this list when we publish new blogs. It’s the start of the month, so there’s only one other post so far 🙂- Confidence is how you feel – assertive is how you act. I’ve unpacked it in a blog post here – in particular showing how the nerves tools I give people get them started.
- Whether you should seek confidence from inside or get external support
- Getting worked up to get more confident (a little bit at a time)
- How to be confident in the ‘heat of the moment’ is here
- Let’s look at confidence – but without the calm
- The confidence of knowing you’ve done the best you can – and being even better next time
- Being confident when you’re losing (and playing tennis! 😉 )
- Confidence in the tech… or about the tech… or… something.
No doubt about it, the flat out winner whenever we ask what the most common problem is for presenting is ‘nerves’. Actually that’s a bit of a lie… what we get told is lots of stuff but as soon as we probe even a tiny bit, nerves is the winner. It seems it’s such an anxiety-inducing issue that people are too nervous to even admit they’re scared.
Never fear, we’re about to do something about that with Confidence Month!
[jbox color=’red’ jbox_css=”border:6px solid #7c7c7c;padding-left:2em;”] To make sure you don’t miss anything, you could sign up here – but we hope you’ll not miss anything anyway as we’re going to try vey hard to share all we can, everywhere.[/jbox]
What is confidence Month?
It’s an absolute blitz we’re having on everything we can do to help with the problem of people not being confident enough to make presentations – or feeling very nervous when they have to do so.
Why Confidence Month?
My birthday and Hallow’een 🙂 Okay, we’re half joking but why not? After all, on a personal note, it’s not as if confidence on stage has always been natural to me:
What’s included in Confidence Month?
We’re going to give you anything and everything we can in the month. We’ll publish an updated list here as we develop it, but watch out for new videos on:
[/jbox]Please, please – if you like it, share it! We’ll cross-post to Linked-In and Google+, too
What’s in it for us?
Two things. First and foremost, it’s all about feeling good about what we do. Secondly, if you like what you hear we’re hoping you’ll like it enough to buy some proper training. The online program for handling nerves is only £85 – a no-brainer. But like I said, first and foremost it’s about sharing what we know about nerves and confidence.
What’s is confidence, anyway?
That’s a question for another post, in more detail, but for now, let’s take this definition: it’s how you feel when you’re reasonably sure you can handle the situation you’re in. The Oxford English Dictionary says is “The feeling or belief that one can have faith in or rely on someone or something”. I guess that means what I’m really talking about in Confidence Month is self-confidence – the feeling you can rely on yourself. But it’s not a blanket feeling, is it?! It’s context dependent! I can be reasonably confident driving my car down the A19 but I’d be fairly un-confident driving that same car around the Nürburgring ! I’m a specialist presentations trainer, so many of the tools and techniques I’ve researched and developed are designed to help in high-pressure, public and social situations.
So for me, confidence month is about helping anyone I can, to be more certain they can rely on themselves in public situations. Fair enough?
Is there a magic bullet for reducing nerves?
In short, no.
The slightly longer (and more useful) answer is that although there isn’t, the nearest thing there is is to get your breathing right. It’s all about breathing from the diaphragm, rather than using just your inter-costal muscles. To help, we’ve released a huge chunk of our signature presentation skills training (the big one!) as free. Just go here, and sign up for the free trial to get access to the breathing training (as well as other bits we’ve included just for the fun of it!). Then just sit back and relax… oh.. and practise!
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