8 years ago · Stuart Downing · 0 comments

Ten Simple Ways To Increase Your Confidence

Confidence brings with it the chance to effectively connect with people, the courage to take on new challenges and most of all the strength to be ourselves.

The ways we can improve our confidence are countless. From new experiences, the delight of working alongside others, learning a new skill to quite simply putting faith in ourselves.

How would becoming more confident help you? Recognising and aiming towards your potential is what allows us to grow and mature as human beings, and we need the confidence to take on the opportunities that allow us to do that.

Working with clients across the globe, I’ve helped many people overcome fears, make hard changes and maintain more active lifestyles. A lack of confidence in themselves is what holds most people back. Why don’t you use some simple steps to become more confident in yourself over the course of then next twelve months?

Decide who you want to become

Increasing your self-awareness and defining what it is you want to achieve is a great way to start to increase your confidence.

Why do you want to increase your confidence? Why aren’t you already confident? What will increasing your confidence allow you to do?

The last question is of particular importance. Giving yourself reason to increase your confidence and attaching your level of confidence to your ability to take on new opportunities and grow your competence to achieve your goals in life.

Unleash your potential

Speaking of goals, what about your potential? The vast amount of hours we spend speaking about potential, which in reality is an imaginative force, the perception we have placed upon ourselves that has ultimately been deemed “the ideal.”

Taking on each day as an opportunity to unleash the potential you have is a good way to start increasing your confidence as it often brings you out of your comfort zone and places you in situations where you need to learn, adapt and grow.

Once you come to realise that you have a huge amount of potential and a unique perspective to offer the world, you tend to work harder to do what you can to ensure that you offer the most of your potential to those around you.

Who have you got the potential to become?

Educate yourself

If you want to become confident in any area, you need to educate yourself sufficiently in that area. To truly have the confidence to speak about a subject, you must first seek to educate yourself and understand it thoroughly yourself.

Read books, listen to audio, watch lectures on YouTube, search the website for useful articles and educational material. There is no reason to believe your ignorance is not wilful, particularly in today’s information age where you have every piece of data available at your fingertips.

Be humble (learn from others)

Another person’s perspective can be of incredible value, and it’s not something you can dismiss lightly. No matter who you are, you can learn from others who have either; more experience, wisdom, knowledge, skills or just another perspective on the situation.

If you want to stay confident in the long-term, don’t become arrogant. Ensure that you listen to others intently, with the attitude and belief that they may actually know something you don’t, and you could learn something from them (and the truth is, you probably can).

Speaking from a personal perspective as a therapist, I learn a tremendous amount from the experiences I share with my clients.

Face your fears

There is no better way to overcome insecurity than to face up to your fears. Is there much more I need to say?

You may have been to therapy, you may have heard this before. Facing up to the thing you fear the most and taking the challenge head-on will be one of the most enlightening moments of your life in regards to your confidence levels.

Be truthful

Base your own life on a foundation of truth. There are two primary elements to this piece of advice.

Be truthful to yourself: don’t deceive yourself. Knowingly or unknowingly we all lie to ourselves, and the less we do of that, the better our frames of minds will be. Don’t distort reality, don’t cover up your inadequacies.

Be truthful with others: working on a foundation of truth and respect, you protect yourself from becoming over-committed to the needs of others or becoming too selfish in your own greed and deceit (which can happen to us all..)

How often do you deceive yourself and those around you? Lying and deception fundamentally distorts the psyche and contributes to stress, anxiety, depression and mental health deterioration.

Set yourself free. Tell the truth.

Develop your courage to say no

Do you often find yourself in situations you’d rather have not been in? Are you struggling to say no to others? Do you take on opportunities at will because they’re handed to you? By accepting every opportunity or giving into every demand of other people, you can build up resentment and anger with the fact that you just cannot say no!

I’ve met many people like this within my work. They’re just far too agreeable.

The fact Is that in life, we are faced with making a decision in the pool of unlimited possibilities. We couldn’t possibly take on every opportunity, nor can we please everyone around us. Sometimes we have to do what is best for ourselves, and without the ability and courage to decline the offer to either party with friends, take on a new job opportunity or relocate with your partner, all against your own best wishes and all because you didn’t tell them how you truly felt.

You would be surprised at how fast your life can spin out of control (and into the control of those around you) if you build up the strength to learn to say no.

Over-agreeable people have a tendency to become anxious and resentful at the fact they cannot stand up for themselves. Don’t let that be you, develop the ability to stand up for yourself.

Be open to new experience

There is nothing in this world that allows you to grow your confidence more than being open to new experiences.

True both in your professional and personal life, you must be open to trying out new things to explore the many conceptions of being within yourself. What are you good at? What do you enjoy? Without exploring new experiences, how would you ever know?

It could be as simple as taking on a new project, or exploring a new hobby. Try something new. Don’t be afraid to step outside of your comfort zone. It will allow you to grow and develop your character and you never know, you might find out more about than you realise.

Be decisive and have a definiteness of purpose

How long does it take you to come a firm decision?

Even more importantly, do you stick to your decisions and allow the results to come to fruition before moving on to something new?

Make sure your long-term aims are well conceived. Create the vision you want to work towards. Take the perspective that each decision you make (however small) leads to (or away) from your purpose.

Don’t be impulsive with your decision making, ensure that each decision you make is a step towards your long-term goals. Ultimately this is what will allow you to move forward with a definiteness of purpose.

Recognise your individual worth

Recognising your own self-worth is a hard one. As human beings we all have an intrinsic value that can never be taken away from us. Only through lack of confidence in ourselves would we have a deflated and distorted value of ourselves.

What are you worth? This applies to both your experience, your knowledge and your perspective within the workplace, but also to your time and energy within your personal relationships.

I bet it’s a hell of a lot more than you think.

You can transform the way you think about yourself. You can develop a new image for your existence. You can bring into fruition your vision for the future.

And when you do? Your personal and professional relationships improve. You grow. You build a life that is based upon truth and you contribute the overall well being of your community and society at large. Confidence breeds confidence. What could you do to improve upon your confidence and get a good streak of fortune come your way over the coming months? Get in touch to speak about the personal and professional coaching I offer, you can call me on

8 years ago · Stuart Downing · 0 comments

Escaping Your Comfort Zone: Taking Advantage of Chaos

How often do you do something different? When were you last challenged? What was the last new thing you learned that helped you grow as a person?

We all need the “optimal challenge”, something just outside of out comfort zone that pushes us to become more. There’s lots of studies that suggest escaping your comfort zone is extremely good for you (when you can do it), but also why it’s extremely hard.

Your habits and routine literally become hardwired into you. And they can become very hard to change.

Put simply, our comfort zone is a behavioural space where our activities and behaviours become part of our routines. This helps to lower risk and stress, giving us a natural state of mind in which we can function and perform our routines habits on a daily basis. We all need this and it can not be seen as neither bad nor good, but if we are never stretched out of our comfort zones then how can we ever change our behaviour, attitude and reality?

The problem is that when we do try to leave our comfort zones, we face uncertainty, which manifests as anxiety and worry. Anyone who has ever done anything new or pushed themselves to live up to the challenge knows that it can be hard work, embarrassing and exhilarating all at the same time (for example, if you are doing your first public speech, performing within sports teams or starting a new challenging job role) as you perform at new heights and take on new opportunities that leave you with moments of vulnerability.

Structuring your chaos

So how can we find a balance? How do we escape our comfort zones and learn something new whilst also maintaining structure and order? As we age and become more settled in our ways, we have formed our belief systems and simultaneously learned our place within the world as we slowly begin to accept and reinforce our identity within the structure of society (our status).

We begin to become ordered, and less chaotic. This becomes the comfort zone. We develop our frameworks to live within, daily habits that allow us to function. What do we to happen to allow us to escape our comfort zones and learn something new? We may indeed that little bit of chaos to take us from our order and routine.

Early in psychology, we were exploring how to bring people out of their comfort zones and how our behaviour and habits are formed. In 1908 (The Yerkes-Dodson Law) psychologists studied anxiety levels and performance, and found that a small amount of anxiety is actually a positive thing for your performance. It has been further proven within studies ever since.

Anxiety primes our body for action, and sometimes that actually what we need to have the energy and the sense of being alert enough to push ourselves outside of our comfort zones, to push ourselves to learn something new, create a new routine or challenge ourselves. Called “optimal anxiety”, there is a place where our performance is aroused due to a low level of anxiety and stress caused by the unknown and unfamiliar.

There are more studies that suggest we actually perform higher if we are slightly stressed, and in my opinion it is because we are having to consciously think and learn new skills in order to adapt to our environments. If we are slightly pushed to learn new things (but have a structure in place in order to perform the routine activities) every day then we are in a state of constant learning and development. It helps us be more adaptable as human beings overall but also increases our happiness as we witness our own growth.

Small amounts of threat keeps up engaged and performing optimally

Believe it or not, the anxiety we are almost always trying to avoid can actually be helpful (in small, appropriate doses). If there is no loss that we can conceive, if there is no threat to run away from, then how can we be motivated to ever make a change or escape our comfort zones and challenge ourselves?

Keeping some chaos in your life is absolutely critical to your growth. You must give yourself a structure to work with. This “chaos” could simply be one small change to break up your routine that could completely change the way you live your life. A new job role, starting at the local gym or picking up a new hobby could be all you need to be in a state of optimal anxiety, which leads to higher performance.

Don’t forget to keep to remember to maintain the structure of your life and ensure that your lifestyle is stable and healthy. I should not have to mention that too much chaos can bring with it large amounts of anxiety, which can manifest themselves into many disorders such as panic disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, PTSD and many other personality disorders.

Create a balance. One foot in the structure, one foot in chaos. A healthy and stable lifestyle with the ability to adapt, journey through new experience, learn new skills and continue to grow as an individual. You should try to push yourself to new limits, challenge yourself to take on new opportunities and make positive, impactful changes in your life. If you want to speak to me about how I could help you as an hypnotherapist and personal coach, call me on 07825599340.

8 years ago · Stuart Downing · 0 comments

Self Awareness & Self-Development: Two of The Same?

Self-awareness and self-development are both parts of the same package. As we learn more about ourselves, we are slowly tearing back layers of mental barriers that we’ve attributed to our experience we call life.

Our limitations are our own making. Looking at those who we believe to be successful in society, they are extremely self-aware. They have developed a true (authentic or congruent) image of themselves: their strengths, weaknesses, areas of improvement and most of all who they can become (their true potential).

They go on to escape their comfort zone, take full advantage of opportunities. Consequently, their confidence grows over time, each small success furthering their ambition, drive, and aim but also affirming to their belief that it is possible to achieve their goals.

It could be that experiences also allow us to break down these mental blocks and barriers, further strengthening our ability to shake our belief system and re-build ourselves into the new image we have developed.

Could your self-awareness aid self-development?

You can fool yourself into thinking that you undoubtedly know yourself, but it would be naive to believe that you have a true understanding of what you want in life, not to mention the intent and cause of all your behaviour and actions.

Identifying what you want to achieve and how you’re going to get there is what I would describe as self-awareness. You are aware of your limitations, though you are not bound by them. You know that you have potential to grow. As we develop our awareness of our own wants, wishes, desires, we discover what it would take to make us feel fulfilled within our lives.

How can you further your understanding of yourself? Your own personality, your traits and who you are?

Johari’s Window remains an excellent tool for self-awareness and self-development, taught widely in Western culture within psychology and management and leadership.

An exercise in self-development, the participants describe their own traits from those within a set of adjectives. Those around them (his most familiar peers or those within the group setting) would subsequently describe them, using the same set of adjectives.

The words used by both parties (both the individual and those around him) would be placed upon the “Arena”, those that the participant described themselves as that others did not use would be placed within the area “Façade”, the peer’s observations that the participant did not recognise would be in the adjacent area “Blind Spot” and then there is the “Unknown” which represent the characteristics, talents or abilities that nobody may be aware of.

How do you think self-awareness affects your progression in your career, your relationships with others and your personal life? By being open to new experiences and embracing opportunities, it is possible to discover parts of yourself you never knew existed.

Could we work together to enable you to achieve your dreams? Contact me on to speak about how I could encourage you to change for the better.

8 years ago · Stuart Downing · 0 comments

Escaping Nihilism: What To Do When Nothing Matters

Do you often feel like life is meaningless? Existential Nihilism is the viewpoint that deems the world as having no meaning or purpose. From this perspective, all existence is senseless, free will is denied and all thought and feelings are believed to be the effects of prior causes.#

It can be easy to get swooped into nihilism. As we lose faith in something, it indicates to our inner-selves that things can indeed fall apart. All those little failures from peers and the realisation that life is associated with suffering, that can quite easily tear our psyche apart.

Here’s a scenario to consider:
Imagine being a married, religious couple who are straight-forward Christians – only to find out your partner has been partaking in an affair for the last four years and you were none the wiser.

Just one experience in your life that you have failed to think through logically (and expressed your emotions appropriately) can build in resentment, bitterness and anger at not only your ex-partner but all members of the opposite sex and perhaps society itself. If you fail to deal with these new ideas, over time they become your perspective on life, your ideology.

You may not only lose faith in your partner, but yourself, your own ability to judge situations clearly, the religious ideology that marriage is sacred that you’ve forever upheld, perhaps even society itself for promoting promiscuity. There is a wide range of conclusions that someone might draw just from that one act alone, developing a completely new ideology based on their betrayal and contempt.

There is a logical conclusion (at least based on a negative and destructive ideology) that “life is suffering” and “everything is corrupt.”

In my humble opinion, living in the 21st Century (particularly in Western civilization) there is no call for us to be screaming corruption. There are many reasons we could point to that allude to the fact we are living in the most prosperous age of humanity.

Taking the viewpoint that life without objective meaning or purpose can have negative consequences as it provides you with an excuse to neglect the long-term, your personal responsibility (not only to society but to yourself). Although it does have its benefits (the alleviation of all responsibility), such an attitude can manifest into depression, anxiety and social withdrawal

We could delve deeper into history and philosophy to find the brilliant inventions and discoveries of the past thousand years that have allowed us to develop the technology that keeps our communities thriving every day, not to mention thousands of years of cultural development that has come alongside it and although corruption still exists, there is no denying that today’s society is the fairest and honest we have ever lived in.

There are some ways you can take back personal responsibility, let go of the ideology that life is meaningless and develop a real understanding of a life you feel is worth living

Analyse Your Ideology

Looking at the corruption throughout the world is so easy in this ever-connected age, where our access to information is such that we can Google news about anywhere in the world, anytime.

This gives us free access to information that affirms our ideology. The truth is out there for anyone to see just how much corruption does exist throughout the world.

Similarly, there are many positive things happening throughout the world that could choose to occupy our minds with.

Within the last decade, there have been more lifted out of poverty than ever before. There are many positive, life-affirming events that happen every day. People save lives and conflicts are resolved, ultimately it is up to you where you choose to focus your attention.

Start Where You Can

• How are you with your loved one?
• What about your family?
• How clean and tidy is your own home?

All the above questions matter.

Nihilism could be your own interpretation of life due to some unfortunate circumstances that you’ve had to go through. It could be an experience (or several experiences) in your life that has somehow manifested into this belief that “nothing I do matters.”

This can in-turn allow you to neglect responsibility for your own life, which can be extremely detrimental to your long-term mental health and social well-being.

Start where you can. Fix your own life before jumping to conclusions about how you can fix the complex issues within society.

Give Yourself Meaning

We can attribute any meaning we want to live and work towards any goal we dream of. Imagine in your mind, an image of yourself in ten years that you dream of becoming. What does it look like?

How can you work towards it? What were the most important things about yourself within that image? What responsibilities did you have within that vision? How can you become the person capable of living up to your dreams?

Give your own life meaning. It will drive you forward and allow you to gather a long-term perspective.

Gather Long-Term Perspective

You can do more in a day than you can do in five minutes. You can do more in a decade than you can do in a year.

Thinking long-term and giving yourself time to achieve your goals will free up thoughts of meaningless and emptiness, which is how we might feel if we have nihilistic thoughts and belief systems.

Think through your daily thoughts. What do they attribute to your attitude, and how does that affect your daily life? Do you want help changing your attitude and behaviours? Give me a call on 07825599340 for a free confidential chat.