Do you feel confident enough to come out shining from normal and weird situations? How well do you feel about your level of confidence? Do you consider yourself “confident”?

There are moments in life, no matter what age you are, that you experience some awkward events and situations where your confidence is tested. Sometimes we smoothly escape the state, like a bird flying away, while at other times we stand there and counter it face-to-face.

Some consider confidence to be a trait one is born with, but most people feel it is something one develops or gains over time. In most cases, the latter is

true because people learn from their experiences and work to overcome their shortcoming, and this is what you can also do. Below are some helpful tips mentioned which can be surprisingly supported as a pivot to your confidence in any situation.

The algorithm of your body language

Eye contact: When communicating with people/audience, follow the three-second rule of eye contact.

While speaking to a group of people, you have to make an eye contact for three seconds with each member of the group and then shift the gaze to a different member in a random order. This will make each member of the audience feel included in your conversation. Hence this reflects your confidence. Boom!

Palms: Show palms and gesticulate movements while you speak. Hiding palms or setting them in a static position in front of the audience sends a hidden/subconscious signal to the audience that you are hiding something from them, and this makes you less trustworthy. Reveal your palms and don’t grip the podium or seat.

TIP: If you encounter a situation where you doubt whether a person is lying or speaking the truth, you can check if the person is using their hands and gestures while speaking. If yes, then they are less likely to lie. That’s a human psyche that when a person lies, their lie grabs all their inner attention and they don’t make much body movements and don’t gesticulate either.

Expressions: Commit to what you’re saying and go full-on! Most people become stiff and limit their body movements and facial expressions because they fear that they would be judged by the audience. They fear that they’ll be criticised for their facial expressions or body gestures and movements.

Limited expressions result in discomfort for people around you. Being committed fully to your body movements, gestures to facial expressions, you can win the audience, or at least the game of confidence.

Charlie Houpert quotes in a particularly artistic manner: “By embracing awkward situations fully, you show more confidence than every person in the room.”

Enjoy jokes, even if those are about you!

Have there been times when you were part of a group, it could be your friend group, and somehow the conversation turned towards you and people started laughing at you, about you? What did you do there to control the situation? Did you feel awkward, irritated or angry?

These are all normal reactions to situations like these. Our reaction to such weird situations determines our confidence in ourselves. You could do one of these:

a. Laugh with the group instead of resisting the joke, or giving a harsh reaction.

b. Double down on the joke. It means to continue to do something in an even more determined way than before. Amplify the joke and simply spread the laughter. This action will result in you taking control back of the conversation. People might have laughed at you, but you just transformed the moment by amplifying the joke. Sometimes self-deprecation makes people like you because it is considered as an element of being down-to-earth.

NOTE: Learn to discriminate between bullying and joking. Joking about someone and joking with someone has a thin clear line in between. Always respect the line and the person, of course.

c. If you are not able to amplify the joke, then a simple less awkward escape from the situation could be initiating a question to the person who initiated the joke. This way the conversation will move from the joke to your question. It is like you’re back on the steering wheel!

Be the first one to tell your own embarrassing stories.

a. While telling your story, select words that portray your emotions.

Choose high-impacting words which involve and expresses your sentiments in your story. People can get bored listening to long stories, so acting out, or even gesturing few elements of your story, or incorporating words that represent emotions will make people want to hear your story. This is how your story can get attention.

b. Embody, act out the characters in your story and go fully committed to it, as discussed above too. Half-committed act-out elements and scenes create awkwardness. So, if you decide to act out, go full-in with your body language, accent or voice type.

Reality vs perception

a. Let go of managing people’s opinion about you. A study says that 99% of awkward situation one encounters in life are made worse because people fight to be perceived in a certain way. A simple way out could be when you feel self-conscious ask yourself, “What perception am I fighting for right now?” The way people perceive you doesn’t say a lot about you, but about themselves.

b. There are two sides to it as the heading suggests “Reality vs Perception”. One is the reality and the other is the perception of that reality. Perception is always in other people’s minds; it isn’t real or reality.

Let’s take the example of sportsmen. People might simply assume the life of sportsmen is of easy and luxury. For most people, all such sportsmen do is walk in and play at fields and make money out of it.

This is a perception in people’s head. What reality they are ignoring is the number of tireless hours they have to practice, the sacrifices they have to make because of their game schedules, following strict diets because of their calculated intake of calories and what not. A sportsman’s reality has so many elements and hurdles, but only they know about their reality, other people have the freedom to perceive them as they want or how they are as humans.

As someone once said, “You can only control your reality, not the perception of your reality in other people’s heads. So be concern about only what you can control, not what is out of your control.”

Perfectionism is just a fake perception that people have consumed. It is recognising and embracing the not-so-perfect and real facts about yourself that liberate your confidence. No matter how you are, like yourself anyway.

Only you control your reality and nothing is as beautiful as self-confidence which has nothing to do with perfectionism.

Happy journey!

Note: This article is inspired by the teachings of Charlie Houpert.

Published in Dawn, Young World, June 26th, 2021