Actually, just before we start it is important to know that there is also a Map of Confidence (and a Map of Love and a Map of Wealth and….). In fact, screw the whole Map of Fear idea altogether. You can work it out for yourself if you think there is any point after reading what follows.

Your Map of Confidence is a region within your mind where you have mapped out all of the people, situations and contexts that are associated with a feeling you call ‘confidence’.

There are three things to remember.

• It isn’t real
• It keeps changing
• You are in control of what you put onto or remove from your map
• You can choose where you go
• You can have more than three things to remember

So how is your Map of Confidence useful to you?

Imagine that on your map there is a whole series of countries within which you feel varying degrees of confidence. Some you can be completely relaxed in, others you need to be quite wary in.

Let us say you want to feel confident about meeting someone new. It could be someone who you want to employ or be employed by. It could be someone you want to make babies with (please do not say ‘both’ because then you will have to book a lot of therapy sessions with me and I charge extra for idiots).

No matter, just pick a meeting with someone with whom it would be useful to feel confident.

Now which country on your Map of Confidence, taking account of what you know about this person, do you think would be the best place to meet them in?  Like should you take them to that country where you are wearing a micro skirt or your favourite Tom Jones lace-fronted shirt un-seamed from the chaps to the navel? Or is this a business suit and manicure job? For more on Relationships watch the video.

The trick is to find the country not where you feel the most confident, period, but where you will feel the most confident with them. This might require more than deciding what to wear. If it is a job interview you might want to do some research beforehand. If it is a date you might want to do some research beforehand. If it is anything to do with anything and you want to feel confident… you get the idea.

Of course this all presupposes you have already bought into the belief that confidence is a useful way of measuring the appropriateness of your choices and preparations, as opposed to a thing you either have or do not have. Believe it or not, some people haven’t. Some people think their confidence (or usually their lack of confidence) is a permanent feature of their own landscape. Like a lamp-post that any stray dog can arbitrarily pee on. They have become parochial. They are stuck not just in one country on their map, but in a very bad country.

Get up! Move! There are no airport taxes and no terrorists within your Map of Confidence (apart from the ones you introduced yourself and the ones you can eliminate now).

Oh. One other thing. This is Confidence World Head Quarters here. Not because I am supremely confident. I am the one who ran away from an Institute of Directors meeting when I discovered I had sewn the buttons on the inside rather than the outside of my shirt remember!

No, it’s just that we have some very good tour guides here so I have linked this post to a map so that you can find us when you book your FREE initial consultation here.