In my last posting I shared with you the importance of your confidence in your competence. As one of the factors in the model for self motivation, your confidence in your abilities has a powerful impact on your motivation. If your confidence in your ability to achieve a dream is low you will not be motivated to pursue that dream.

Fortunately for those of us who struggle with self confidence, there are several strategies in my book, iMotivateMe, we can use to boost our self confidence.

One such strategy is called stories of achievement.

Research shows that you can increase your expectancy for success and therefore your motivation, by increasing experience with success. This is so powerful because the result of those positive expectancies is improved performance and success rates, which result in even higher expectancy of success and higher levels of motivation.

What we do, therefore, in this strategy is experience our successes.  We do this by taking some time to get in touch with our experience with success.  We do this by writing success stories, what I call “stories of achievement.”  A story of achievement is a recitation of a situation that occurred in your life of which you are proud, a situation that reflects positively on you, on your character, your skill, whatever.  Try to find one that relates to your vision, that change you want to make in your life. This will create a clear image of successfully manifesting your vision.  If you can’t find one that relates, don’t worry about it; think of one that doesn’t.

The situation that occurs to me when I think about stories of achievement in my life is a presentation I made on juvenile law relating to human sexuality.  It was my first public speaking experience, and it went amazingly well, standing room only, and being asked to present it a second time, as word had gotten around and more people wanted to experience it. It is probably the experience that made me aware of my vision, to be a professional speaker, given people information that will help them improve their lives.

When I find myself feeling insecure, I have this story all ready to go to improve my confidence in myself and my speaking abilities.

This is a strategy I strongly urge you to spend some time on, spend a hour or more, quietly, with a piece of paper or a turned on computer.  Try to come up with at least three Stories of Achievement. We all have these stories; the more modest of us might have to work a little harder to dig them out.

Bask in these positive experiences.  They will positively impact your successability and, as the model for self motivation teaches us, will super charge your motivation.

The second factor in the model for self motivation is successability, your confidence in your competence. The model for self motivation tells us that if we increase any of the three factors of self motivation, we automatically increase our motivation.

Successability is how strongly you feel that you will be able to achieve the change you want to make in your life, that change you have identified as your Vision.

The higher your confidence is, the stronger will be your motivation. If you already feel very confident about your abilities, good for you! Your motivation will already be high.

Why is confidence so important? There are many reasons, but I’m going to write about two important ones. The first is that it is human nature to not want to waste our time, at least not on things that are not a lot of fun or give us pleasure. Why would I want to forgo delicious desserts if I thought it wasn’t going to make a bit of difference on how much I weighed? Why would I spend a couple of hours drafting a new resume if I thought I wasn’t ever going to be able to find a job? I wouldn’t!

A second reason is that confident people keep going when the going gets rough. If the change you want to make is even a bit difficult, you will, at some point, stumble. It’s almost guaranteed. So how you respond to a stumble or to a roadblock, will determine whether you make your dreams come true.

Albert Bandura, one of the greatest living psychologists, pointed out the four major differences between people who are confident and those who are not:

1. Confident people approach difficult tasks as challenges and in fact look forward to accomplishing them, while non-confident people perceive difficult tasks as threats and shy away from them.
2. Confident people are able to maintain sustained effort in meeting challenges. Rather than seeing setbacks and failures as devastating, they quickly recover and proceed toward their objective. Non-confident people see themselves as incompetent when setbacks or failures occur, and they tend to give up.
3. Confident people have lower stress because of their confidence in their ability to deal with situations that may arise. Non-confident people easily become stressed and depressed because of their perceived lack of control over events.
4. Confident people set higher goals for themselves and are more committed to achieving them. On the other hand, non-confident people tend to do and be the opposite.

I don’t know about you, but being confident sure looks like the choice I would make every time. And that is what is so good about confidence: how confident we are is a choice. Maybe we don’t have a lot of confidence when we start on a project, but there are definitely steps we can take to increase our confidence.

In my next blog posting, I will share a couple of strategies you can use to increase your confidence. See you then!