To exude confidence, it’s important to look, feel and be confident. This is achieved through the intentional use of our posture, our voice tone and our manner of speaking, together with creating a mental image of success based on real or imagined events. Through the use of self-hypnosis, it’s possible to tweak all of these and convince our brain that we are confident.
Why it’s important to appear confident as a hypnotist
When we’re hypnotizing someone, most of the actual work happens outside of the things that we say. The words themselves account for only a tiny portion of what’s going on.
Now I want to be upfront here and state that you do not need to be confident in order to hypnotize someone. However, when we are confident, our success rates massively increase. This happens because when we are confident, our subjects assume we know what we’re doing, which makes it easier for them to go along with us.
Let me give you some visuals to help make it clear.
Suppose there’s a hypnotist who looks nervous… eyes darting everywhere, and he says something like okay I’m going to try to hypnotize you now. Maybe he even stammers a bit as he speaks. He looks extremely uncertain. The hypnosis might work, but he’s going to have his work cut out for him.
Contrast this with a second hypnotist. She smiles at you and gently nods her head, and confidently says those exact same words okay I’m going to try to hypnotize you now. Only it sounds different. You know from the way that she said it that there is no doubt in her mind whatsoever that it will work. Maybe she emphasized the word try… maybe she paused in amusement at the concept of just trying… there are lots of ways.
The way that we say things is far more important than what we say. A well-timed whimsical smile can change the meaning of just about any sentence to the opposite of what the words say. So can pauses, humor, and the words that we emphasize.
Now you might be wondering how on Earth you become confident at something before you do it. As it turns out, this is quite easy to do, when you know how.
The 3 facets of confidence
In order to exude confidence, we must look, feel and be confident. These 3 facets of confidence work together and when we master all of them, we begin to exude confidence automatically.
The good news is that it’s a feedback system. As you master each of these skills, the others automatically improve without you doing anything extra.
This means that even when we have no experience with hypnosis, we can still work on areas that make us appear confident. When we do this, it leads to more success, which helps us to feel confident. In turn, this leads to us being confident.
So what do we mean by each?
Appear confident
When we’re hypnotizing someone, we’ll get much better results if our hypnosis subject perceives us as being confident. It’s entirely possible to look confident without actually being confident.
Initially we can achieve this with a few simple tricks that anyone can learn. And we can use self-hypnosis to anchor them in and help us to remember to do them.
Feel confident
Naturally, if we want to exude confidence rather than just appear confident, we’re going to have to feel it on the inside.
Conveniently, the way we feel is easy to modify with self-hypnosis.
Be confident
Being confident is a little different to feeling confident. It’s entirely possible to feel confident without having any past history of doing something. In order to be properly confident, we really need to have some evidence to back us up.
We can use self-hypnosis to modify our perceptions of our memories so that we assume we’re going to succeed. This leads to confidence.
How to appear confident
There are a few things we can focus on in order to look confident to others.
Gratitude
The first, and easiest of these is gratitude. When we express gratitude to others, it creates the impression that we are confident.
Gratitude has massive benefits that extend beyond simply acting confident. When we take the time to notice the things we’re grateful for, our overall frame of mind shifts towards the positive. Among other things, it leads to better physical and mental health, helps us to sleep better, and improves our relationships with others.
If you don’t already do so, keeping a gratitude journal is highly recommended. This is nothing more than a notebook that you can write in. Each day, take a few moments to pause and reflect, then write down 3 things for which you’re grateful.
Gratitude is one of the things I cover in my book Unconscious Mind Secrets.
To use gratitude to appear more confident, all you have to do is express your thanks to your subjects, or to those around them. The key here is that they can observe it happening in some way.
The easiest way to do this is to develop the habit of thanking your subjects before you begin. This can be as simple as saying something like Thank you for taking this step today. I love helping people, and I appreciate you taking the time to work through this with me.
Naturally, make sure that what you say fits the specific circumstances.
Voice tone
In English we have 3 basic voice tones that we can use. I’ll refer to these as the question tone, the statement tone, and the command tone.
When we ask questions, our voice tone tends to go up at the end of the sentence. This is the question tone.
When we make statements, our voice tends to remain flat. This is the statement tone.
And when we give commands, our voice tends to go down. You may have heard this referred to as command tone down.
It’s possible to hypnotize someone by doing nothing more than repeatedly switching between these different tonalities. I go over how to do this in my book Artful Hypnotic Anchoring.
For now though, be aware that when you use the command tone, you will automatically sound more authoritative, which will convey confidence to those around you.
To practice, grab any recording device and record yourself asking some questions, making some statements, and giving some commands. Then listen to the recordings and develop the ability of consciously hearing those different voice tones. Most people never consciously notice them, and once you do, it becomes possible to start to consciously control exactly when you use what tones.
When you can intentionally use the command tone at just the right time, such as when you give an embedded command, your hypnosis results can skyrocket.
Voice tone is so powerful that often all I will do when hypnotizing someone is go into hypnosis myself, then say anything at all while using my voice tone with intention.
Pausing
When we’re speaking, a lot of us use filler words such as like, um, er, and so on. These filler words convey uncertainty and doubt.
To eliminate filler words, replace each of them with a pause.
This is easy to do with self-hypnosis.
First, hypnotize yourself. If you don’t know how to do this, I give instructions on how to hypnotize yourself, and how to build an anchor so that you can do it on demand in my article How to Hypnotize Yourself Instantly.
Once you’re in hypnosis, imagine a typical interaction with one of your hypnosis subjects. Each time you notice yourself using a filler word, wind yourself back in time a few seconds, and intentionally replace the filler word with a pause. Repeat 3 times for each instance.
Repeat the entire process until pausing becomes a habit.
When we pause in place of filler words, we tend to look more thoughtful, and it gives our subject time to process whatever we’ve just done, as well as building expectancy. This all leads to them perceiving us as being more certain.
And when we’re perceived as certain, we start to exude confidence.
Speaking deliberately
There are lots of different ways of speaking. You can speak quickly or slowly. Or you can mix it up.
When we speak deliberately, we allow every word to ooze meaning.
Now often when we speak deliberately, we’ll be speaking more slowly, and we’ll have more pauses. This provides ample opportunity for people to jump in. As a rule, only those who are insecure will do so. Which means that when we speak like that, we are automatically conveying confidence.
To practice speaking deliberately, start off by making the way you pronounce each word sound like the meaning of the word. For example, you might stretch out the word ground to make it sound big and round, just like the ground is. Once you’ve got this down, dial it back a bit so that you sound almost normal.
Next, slow down your speech and introduce thoughtful pauses. It doesn’t matter if you’re actually thinking during these pauses.
You will have to play around with these to get them right. I was once in a corporate meeting where I was influencing people to upgrade the network by intentionally slowing my speech down whenever I referenced it. At some point during the meeting, one of my colleagues asked me if I knew I was slowing down my speech every time I talked about the specific network link. Naturally, I looked at him and said yes with a wry smile.
So expect to get caught out occasionally, and when you are, simply acknowledge it and move on.
The network was upgraded.
Overall, when you speak slowly and with intention, and you pause thoughtfully, you will look and sound more confident.
How to feel confident
One of the nice things about confidence is that everything we can do to make us look, feel or be more confident will tend to lead to the others.
When we start to speak deliberately, not only will we sound more confident, we’ll also start to feel more confident.
And when we run through things while in self-hypnosis, we’re training our brains to expect success. This leads to us becoming more confident.
There are a few things we can do that will directly work with how confident we feel. They’ll also lead to us appearing more confident at the same time.
Power poses
Our bodies and minds are an integrated system. Every state of mind carries with it a set of mannerisms, postures and ways of being in the world. And vice versa.
Now most of us can easily change the physical things we do at any time. This means that we can influence the entire system by simply changing the way we hold ourselves.
Take a few moments to think about how people carry themselves when they are confident. Head held high, back straight, generally quiet, moving slowly and deliberately. There are quite a lot of individual parts that go into it.
Once you’ve identified each of these parts, try them on and check in with yourself to notice how you feel.
What you’ll notice is that when you do each of these things, it impacts your mental state. Some of them are tiny impacts, while others are massive.
Bear in mind that it can take 90 seconds for a state to shift, so you may have to hold the pose for that long to notice any effects.
Experiment with different poses and postures, and notice how each one makes you feel.
There are a few common ones, but it’s far better to identify your own. When we take on those poses that make us feel confident, those around us tend to assume that we are.
Smiling and nodding
When we smile and nod, we automatically fire up states of happiness and agreement. Both of these lead to us feeling confident.
The key is to be deliberate and gentle. Rather than a huge, beaming grin, try a gentle, knowing smile while you nod almost imperceptibly.
As with everything else, check in with yourself to notice how each action makes you feel.
How little can you smile to feel that confidence?
To what extent does your confidence go up as you nod more slowly?
Experiment and find out.
Overcome fear with self-hypnosis
One of the biggest things standing the way of feeling confident is doubt and uncertainty.
Naturally, this doubt and uncertainty is eroded as we gain more success, and become more confident.
However, we still need a way to get over the initial hump.
The easiest way to do this is with self-hypnosis.
All you have to do to overcome that doubt and uncertainty is hypnotize yourself, then imagine the entire process of hypnotizing someone. Walk through the entire thing in your mind’s eye. Finally, when you get to the end, notice what it’s like knowing that you succeeded.
Repeat as many times as needed.
How to build confidence
So far we’ve covered a few things you can do to firstly appear more confident to others, and secondly to feel more confident inside yourself. But how do you actually build confidence?
The truth is that the way you build confidence is through repeated success over time.
Now, if someone were to try to implement everything in this article all at once, it’s almost certain that they’d fail. The human mind can only handle a tiny number of things at the same time.
The key to success is to choose one thing at a time, and work on it until it becomes a habit. Once something is a habit, it starts to happen automatically without us thinking about it.
So for each thing we’ve covered in this article, work through it and make it into a habit. Bear in mind that some of the things we’ve covered involve the creation of many different habits.
There are probably a dozen or more different poses you can adopt in power poses alone.
When we work through each thing individually, it becomes easy. Even if you can only manage one a day, you’ll still have all of them habituated within a couple of months.
Next, if we want to exude confidence, it’s important that we notice ourselves succeeding.
So for each of those individual things we’ve covered, practice it, and pay attention to when you start to do it automatically. Then celebrate a little. The act of celebrating tells your brain that it was an achievement, which leads to exuding confidence.
Then, to really lock it in, hypnotize yourself and attach a symbol or gesture to that feeling of confidence and success. When you do this as a part of your celebration, you’re building an anchor that you can then use any time you’d like to feel confident.
That’s really all there is to it. Break things down into steps so small that you can’t fail, practice each one until it becomes a habit, and then celebrate.
How to use self-hypnosis to become confident
If you really want to exude and radiate confidence, you can get there much more quickly by using self-hypnosis to help you to practice.
Each of the things we’ve covered in this article can be practiced by hypnotizing yourself, then running through the situation in your mind’s eye.
For example, to build the habit of expressing gratitude, hypnotize yourself, then imagine that you’re about to hypnotize someone. See yourself thanking them, and run the actual words you will say through your mind. Repeat a few times until it starts to happen automatically.
Then find a subject and intentionally thank them. After doing this a few times, it should start to become a habit.
The same is true for every other item in this article. Practice it by hypnotizing yourself and seeing yourself doing it in your mind’s eye. Then do it in real life a few times to start to make it into a habit.
If you’d like to know more about hypnotizing yourself so that you can exude confidence, I’ve written an article in which I give a method that just about anyone can use to reliably hypnotize themselves. Then I show you how to attach an anchor to being in hypnosis so that you can hypnotize yourself instantly on demand.
How instantly? When I do this to myself, I can move from just about any state into hypnosis in less than a second.
As you might imagine, this is a huge time-saver when you want to hypnotize yourself repeatedly. And you’ve possibly noticed that when you follow the instructions in this article, you’re going to be hypnotizing yourself a lot.
Hypnotizing yourself is also the first step when you’re hypnotizing others, so if you don’t already have a means of quickly moving yourself into hypnosis on demand, go and read my article on instant self-hypnosis right now, then come back here and use it to look, feel and become confident.
