How To Feel Your Confidence

When you’re experiencing a strong emotion – confidence for example – whereabouts do you feel it?

And when it’s there, is there anything else about it? Does it have a size or a shape?

And when it’s there, and it’s that size and that shape, it’s like…. what?

Your answer to that question will probably be some kind of metaphor or analogy. It might be a very obvious metaphor: “It’s like I’m on top of the world”; or it might still be quite vague: “It’s a strong feeling in my shoulders and chest.”

But it’s likely you were able to answer the questions. And given that they’re quite strange questions, that’s pretty remarkable. It points to the fact that, at an unconscious level, we think in metaphor – by comparing one kind of thing to another kind of thing.

I’m currently teaching my Advanced Metaphor Mastery group to explore body-metaphors for emotions, and they’re having a great time!

I think there are at least three reasons this stuff is fun:

• When you explore these metaphors (normally by using Clean Language questions), the emotion gets stronger. So I get them exploring happiness and joy and excitement, and they discover how to deepen those feelings for themselves and their clients.

• There’s so much to discover. It’s likely that your metaphor for confidence will share similarities with other people’s metaphors – a great many people will experience it as having up-ness, for example. But the details of every person’s metaphors are different. Ask a few simple questions about the metaphor – “What kind of top?” for example – and very soon the fascinating differences will emerge.

• Emotions are infectious! When you work with happy people, you get happier. When you work with confident people, you get more confident. The book Connected by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler explains how this works.

So, if you want to feel more confident, why not team up with a friend to explore your metaphors for confidence? Or book a free consultation with me, here.