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!

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.