“What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight – it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”
~ General Dwight Eisenhower

I was quite taken by this quote, as you might tell. I’m not the biggest dog in any fight. Heck, if there were a fight, I’d be somewhere else. In my earlier days, confidence was a central issue in my life. I wasn’t willing or able to interact and make friends, so I spent most of my childhood alone. It wasn’t until several years later that I found that almost everything we do can be a fight – as long as we are willing to be a part of it.

In school, my fight was with my examinations. I remember after having acquired really good skills when I was 13, I came in top of the class at 14. But when I was 15, a nearly flunked out of class with 3 passes out of 8 subjects. That was pretty heavy! I was somewhat devastated and this wasn’t even my final paper! I remember going home and writing on a bunch of flipchart papers, all my goals and words of encouragement and posted them all around my room so that I could see them everyday. The following year, I beat the odds coming in top 4 in my class (I tied with the smartest guy in our class, heh) and went to a school of my choice.

Even then, I was beaten down because my next challenge was leadership. I had literally zilch in leadership experience. While I was in Junior College (17 years old at that time) I was nominated and voted in as President of the Student’s Council. Unfortunately, we went though quite a tumultuous time. Quite a number of situations left our leadership team disheartened and it came to a point of time where many were keen on quitting. Fortunately, I did have some really good buddies in there and they were supportive enough to give me the reason to keep ‘fighting’ on.

In 1995, one of my first speaking gigs came on. It was an absolute mess, considering I was partnering another senior trainer and the audience liked him far better than me. When the evaluation sheets came back, I was literally broken. However, I took the pain to read it and figure out what else I had to do and I had never faced such a terrible evaluation ever.

I suppose all these stories illustrate one thing. Sometimes, it’s not a matter of what you do but the spirit you carry when you take action. We were all meant to experience sadness and joy, failure and success so that when the negative side of experience hits us, we learn to appreciate the positive side and work harder toward it. After all, it’s not the destination that counts, but rather the effort you put in and the thrill of the fight, isn’t it!

I just read this while waiting at the airport for my flight to Jakarta:

“Participants are 52 per cent more likely to be lonely if a person to whom they are directly connected (at one degree of separation) is lonely,” the authors write.

At two degrees of separation, they were 25 per cent more likely to feel lonely. At three degrees it was 15 per cent and at four degrees the effect disappeared. This pattern – what the authors term the “three degrees of influence rule of social contagion” – also appeared in the obesity, smoking and happiness studies.

I think I’ve always known this to be true of many things other than just obesity, smoking and happiness. I believe that the social modeling instinct we are born with causes us to model the people and environment around us. Would you be surprised that millionaires hang around millionaires? Or that promiscuous people hang around other promiscuous people? Or depressed people mix more with depressed people than others?

After all, once you ‘learn’ this skill, you tend to have the capability to pass it on in your behavior and attitude, isn’t it?

We all have thought viruses. This points to one final conclusion – what are you interested in ‘catching’? Watch out for the people whom you hang around with!

Ah, the wonders of the internet. After getting some mails, I find that many are concerned with the issue of social interaction, so I decided to discuss confidence in a social setting.

According to Carl Jung, we have two sides of our character – the introvert and the extravert. If you take this knowledge into account, you will begin to understand how social confidence is built.

Introversion-oriented people tend to stay in smaller groups, often speaking one-on-one with others and focusing a lot on their work related topics because that is what preoccupies them the most. Extraversion-oriented people will tend to speak randomly about a good number of things and often end up covering a broad number of topic areas in a social interaction.

If you are generally introversion oriented, it will mean you carry off a deeper conversation over a longer period of time in greater depth. However, it does not mean that you will be able to do this across all social situations, only people whom you are able to have some kind of connection with. Most introverts don’t feel comfortable in situations that dictate a broad number of discussion topics.

Generally, extraverts have a better capacity for socializing across different contexts. However, what’s the difference that makes the difference for them?

1. Talking to think. Most of the time, extraverts say what is on their mind, and if they have a well-developed set of social skills, they will know what not to say so that they don’t just blather off everything they feel. This gives an illusion of spontaneity, but in reality, introverts are often not sure of the consequences when they share their inner thoughts.
   
2. Connection with the outside world. Have you ever noticed that people who are introverts seldom, if ever, talk about their environment or the things that happen around them? To mimic what extraverts can do, you need to connect with the outside world and read broadly about things. When initiating contact with people, it’s easier to then pick a recent topic you’ve seen or read about that can create a shift in interest around you.
3. Social awareness. This is a skill I picked up in my training as an NLP Trainer. If you are aware of what people need, who has been speaking or what has been of interest to others, you can start connecting other people and be the nexus of the party where people know you for knowing others. It’s not difficult to maintain awareness of others, as long as you are attentive to them, and truly interested in what they want to share (or at least, don’t ask about things you are not interested in listening to in the first place). If you need, you can even learn some memory skills to master the ability to remember people’s names  over the long term (which, I have mastered only to a certain level, I must admit).
4. Emotional state flexibility. Ah, what would confidence be if it weren’t an emotional state you can control? Change the way you speak and carry yourself and you might find yourself being much better able to speak and interact with appropriate emotion. After all, you want to blend in with the emotion at hand. If people are all serious and you’re clowning away, you’ll be as out of place as a person in a situation that is humorous and you’re just serious.

Ok! There I have it – my top 4, from a very much psychological perspective. If there are further questions, let me know and I’ll furnish you with more answers where possible.

Just recently, a fairly senior manager of a local company approached me and asked me a very surprising question. He asked how he could become more confident in front of his customers.

Now, mind you, this is a manager who has had over 12 years’ experience in the same industry. You would have thought he had the capability to achieve this by now! However, confidence is not just about a skill – it’s a state or a feeling that you need to experience.

So, what really goes on when you are not feeling confident? There’s a certain sense of uncertainty. You’re fearful that something might go wrong. Or, you start thinking of expectations that you can’t fulfill. Ultimately, it leads to a louder and louder nagging self-doubt which often messes up performance.

The simplest way to get rid of a confidence problem is to look beyond the problem. If you’re fearful of something, you’re likely to be afraid of the consequences and the embarrassment it might cause. What if it no longer caused you embarrassment but instead a way to learn from your experience in a fun and memorable manner?

Being in the public speaking industry, I’ve found quite a lot of opportunities to completely embarrass myself. You know, things that detract from the regular training style. You’re all well dressed, then you open up a marker that stains your clothes. Falling on stage! (luckily I haven’t actually done that yet) Or, you drop the marker cap, which jumps like a grasshopper across the room under your participants’ seats while you stoop down to grab it. Or perhaps you want to play a particular piece of music but the MP3 player was damaged… and the list goes on.

So, you’re afraid of approaching new people and speaking to them. Then, the best way to eradicate that fear is to do it, and find out the worst that could happen. Usually, nothing much does happen. The only thing then is to figure out what skill you’re missing. Can’t do the small talk? Can’t seem to fit the group? Well, it’s all about strategy, and you’ll have to open up yourself to more research.

What else might you know where people feel a lack of confidence? Post them here, maybe I could address them.