Confidence

• Give a slight pause before responding to anything or anyone. This will allow you to be a fraction of a second more rational and to make more rational statements. The idea is that if you do this often and consistently, you'll become more thoughtful and more composed, and the pausing and confidence will come automatically.

• Look for ways to make yourself slightly uncomfortable. for example if you were the kind of person who finds it awkward to say hi to people on the street, start there. If you already do this, then start greeting them in an accent. This will feel uncomfortable at first but as time goes on it will feel less and less uncomfortable. Up the ante as you feel more and more comfortable doing increasingly crazier things.

Increases in knowledge are offset by even greater increases in confidence

• often, a gain in confidence is more than is justified by the increase in knowledge. we have to fight that instinct

One of the easiest ways to get a confidence boost is to help someone out with something. Helping someone out makes you feel overall competent about your abilities, and makes you feel good about having helped someone.

don't worry so much about how to start off saying what you want to say. Just start speaking, and the confidence that you say things in, the thoughtfulness that you put into it. That is what is going to determine the feel and interpretation of your message. When you worry so much about what you're going to say and how you're going to say it, then you lose that connection to the moment, and that comes out in the way you were talking. Just go in and say something and think about it as you're speaking give them your attention and your focus, and the words will just come naturally.

Sitting/standing asymmetrically projects a sense of relaxation and confidence

Imagine showing somebody David Bowie's Blackstar and asking their opinion. Their response, is that they think this is bad music. In response, you say "but is it the music that's bad or is it the fact that makes you feel uneasy". This is better than just saying "aww u think it sucks?" In a way this kind of defending the way you feel about something, justifying its existence

• insight: you should never need to defend the way you feel about something. You should never justify the way you feel to someone else. Instead, you can make points for why the way they don't see it may have failed to consider all perspectives (as in with our example)

Having confidence in yourself leads to less jealousy and less insecurity. Consider your feelings of jealousy towards intelligent people. Do you feel threatened because you’re not fully confident of your own intelligence, and don’t think that you’ll be able to match up in every regard to other people. However, if you were more confident in your abilities and your capabilities as a person, then you wouldn’t feel threatened by the intelligence of someone else.