Confidence problem

[Teacher]

A lot of people's problems arise - as it turns out - from insecurity. “I don't know what to do”, “I don't know where to go through life”, “I don't know if I want to start this relationship or not”. However, this uncertainty is often the result of another certainty (certainty about something else). “I know that she hates me”, “I know that I am stupid”, “I know that no one can love me”, etc.

Although problems often arise from uncertainty about events, I would like to discuss problems that are the result of strong confidence. Let's take a look at a simple example. Someone has a phobia of water because a person almost drowned one day. Such a person behaves with such confidence as if his categorizing a full bathtub as deadly is a certainty.

The standard NLP technique for treating phobias uses changes in the perceptual characteristics of memory to make the event less real. A person with some kind of phobia usually remembers the past event associated, as if it still continues to happen to them, so the recollection causes him a very strong emotional reaction. By asking him to change this memory and make it a distant, black and white, small and flat film, a person will be able to look at it dissociatedly, from the side, as if it is happening to someone else and will be able to remember this event much more calmly. This procedure uses some of the characteristics of the perception of the unreal to reduce confidence, while altering the volume of the experience to make it less emotional. After the phobia problem is resolved, a person can calmly look at a bathtub full of water and have much less confidence in the danger of it. At the same time, a person should be aware that there are some contexts in which this can be dangerous.

Some people are devoured by jealousy because they imagine their partner's relationship with someone else, even if they have no proof of it. They behave as if these images are real and they are confident in them, as if they were "holding a candle."

I can also create an image of my wife with another man, but since this seems very unlikely to me, I can calmly react to this image and easily push it aside. I know that the image can be true, but I have very low confidence that it is actually true. If a jealous person is taught to create such images, as I create them, his jealousy will noticeably decrease. Many other useful NLP techniques use a similar practice of changing the characteristics of perception, which are called submodalities, since they are smaller elements of information representation systems - modalities.

Once someone is experiencing a loss or missed opportunity, it will be much easier for them to come to terms if they are not very sure that this is a disaster. You may remember some significant loss in your life in the past, but now looking back, you can understand that it was not so scary, or that on the contrary, it opened up many wonderful prospects for you. If you knew this then, you would not be so worried.

When someone has a problem, there are always two parts to it. The first aspect is content. This is how someone perceives and understands events that bother him, like fear of water, jealousy, or loss. The second aspect is confidence that this understanding is real and true. Instead of realizing that our understanding is always limited and simplified by the "map" of reality, he believes that this map is reality.

Another aspect of confidence is that other people may suffer as much or even more than the person who is overly confident in something. Think of all the death, persecution, despair and destruction that exists in the world, which is a consequence of the overconfidence of the leaders of states - dictators, religious fanatics, revolutionaries and politicians. And they are all absolutely convinced that they are right. The doubts of Thomas of Aquitaine and other saints and thinkers were recorded and studied. Hitler, Stalin, and most other past and present world leaders seem to have never had any doubts at all.

When people are firmly convinced that their perception and understanding is reality, then it is very difficult for them to even consider the possibility of alternatives, let alone accept them. When someone is very confident in something, it will be very useful to reduce this confidence, in order to at least open up the possibility for a different perception and understanding of events.

(c) Andreas: “Six blind elephants” Chapter. Confidence