Anne Millne-Riley - Confidence Guru--Discover a Confident You!

This book is dedicated to my wonderful
Aunt Evelyn for all her enthusiastic
support and encouragement of my
endeavours it has meant so much!

Grateful thanks to Ian, Joe and Sam for your ongoing love,
encouragement and support.

Thank you Tina for the cocktails and the inspiration!!

As a professional Confidence Coach I have enjoyed years of experience working with clients from all walks of life; actors, professional sportspeople, company directors, prison officers, dinner ladies, and salespeople. They all wanted to build and develop their confidence so that they could live the lives they wanted to live and be the people they wanted to be their true inner self. I love my work, partly because having originally begun my career in a completely different field, (in the world of advertising) I eventually found my true calling my true congruent self, and now live my life doing what I enjoy.

The journey to where I am now has taken many years, and I wish I had learnt everything I know now a great deal sooner! However, working with others in this way has been very rewarding. It is such a privilege to work with someone who is struggling to enjoy being themself, to then watch them blossom, becoming truly confident over the following weeks.

I decided to write this book to further the work I do regularly with my clients and to share the strategies and experiences of others. Through their experiences you can begin to change the way you feel about yourself and your abilities right NOW. If you can invest a little time and effort into developing yourself through the pages of this book, it will be worth every moment of your time and energy. Imagine working towards the career or lifestyle of your dreams and knowing that you can achieve it?

We can all be confident But there is a catch! You may have read books and articles in the past that have been helpful and given useful tips or insights into how self-confidence can be achieved. You may have found some of these helpful in one way or another, but here we are you and I still with work to do on the subject. Am I right?

Here is the catch: To improve confidence we must take actions and stretch ourselves at times. However, you will be surprised how quickly self-confidence can be developed as long as you take that leap of faith and actively work on the confidence building strategies in these pages. This book is designed to coach you to self-confidence and coaching itself is a very proactive process.

Now dont panic! Taking action can be painless and gradual, and you will never have to do more than you feel able to do. We will be taking small steps, I promise! I will touch on procrastination and motivation in chapter three, but essentially the reason many of us lack confidence is that we never take any meaningful action towards building that confidence and resilience. Taking action and working through the exercises given in this book will help you to recognise your inner resilience, your inner confidence and will help you to discover or reclaim that unique and wonderful YOU.

It may interest you to know that (like the majority of people) I have not always been so self-confident myself. I came from modest beginnings and sometimes struggled through childhood without the support and encouragement many take for granted. I had to become independent and worried about keeping a roof over my head at a young age. However, I brought myself up in many ways determined not to miss out on the things that other young people might enjoy. I was the first person in my immediate family to attend university and built my own business, partly whilst being a single mother. I am aware that despite my less than salubrious start I was extremely fortunate compared to some of the clients that I have met during the course of my career as a therapist and coach and yet all found the strength and fortitude to become their confident self. My point is that confidence can be achieved by anyone, regardless of their background or upbringing. My confidence came about by developing skills and strategies which helped me to enjoy being me and I have shared my change programme with thousands of others. This book contains these very strategies so that you can find confidence too!

All case studies in this book have been written to protect clients identities and all names have been changed.

As a Confidence Coach with many years of experience, I am asked to work with clients regularly who wish to improve their confidence or self-esteem. I have learnt that confidence means different things to different people and so it is always important at the beginning of this work to define what the term confidence actually signifies in the minds of those individuals. Here are some of the common statements I hear every week.

To be able to get on with my life without worrying about what others think of me, my work, or how I look.

To be able to attend meetings at work and contribute my ideas without the fear that someone will laugh at me or think Im stupid.

To feel good about myself, to be able to look in the mirror and like what I see.

To appear confident and professional in an interview to speak at my daughters wedding without going to pieces to feel less shy in social circles to be able to chat to women without feeling embarrassed and so it goes on. An individuals definition of confidence manifests in so many different ways.

The Oxford Dictionary defines confidence as A Positive feeling gained from a belief in your own ability to do things well . Most of us do not need to be the best but simply want to have the self-assuredness to be our true self and you can achieve this far more easily than you might think.

I have heard it said so many times that we are born confident. We did not sit around worrying whether people liked us or whether we appeared stupid in front of our peers back in nursery school. At four years of age, kicking a football around in the back garden, we may have believed that one day we could be the next David Beckham or singing to music in the bedroom, that we might become the next Adele so what happens to change that feeling of self-assuredness?

The truth is that we are to some extent a product of our experiences and we learn as we develop that not everyone in the world thinks we are beautiful or clever (like Grandma may have done). This comes as a shock at some point when we are young and eventually we begin to realise that we cannot presume to have equal approval and admiration from everyone we encounter. We begin to question what is the truth of the matter; are we, or are we not great?

We begin to evaluate ourselves and our abilities by comparing ourselves to others. We compare ourselves to those around us who we would most like to emulate: the most popular, the most intelligent, the most attractive (in our perceptions). This invariably can lead to a less positive perception about who we are and what we have to offer. We realise that no matter how many times we can skip with a skipping rope someone else can always do more. As a child, with a childs evaluative brain, this does not sit well with us. Before we began to consider confidence as a concept, we felt we could be the best the most beautiful or the most intelligent. Whether that was true or not did not seem to matter. We felt it and it had given us a certainty about ourselves and our abilities and so of course, we liked who we were.

I will never forget seeing my son, who is an accomplished athlete, run for the first time at a professional running club. He had never lost a race in his young life, from nursery to primary school sports days, he was always the winner. It was expected by everyone in the school and he was known for it. Then one day after asking to join a local running club, aged six, he ran against other accomplished runners for the first time. He was so excited. I warned him that this was a level playing field and that it was possible that he might not win this time. He came third. As a proud mother, I was very impressed. My son, however was so disappointed that he had not won, that he did not return to the club for some time. He began to say to everyone Im no good at running.