You think a loser like you is ever going to be confident?!
Just kidding.
Self confidence is very achievable as long as you put in the effort. I'm am living proof of this.
When I was very young I was totally shy. When I met new people, I wouldn't talk at all, even if they asked me a question, I'd just look at the floor with my mouth firmly shut. I was very boisterous with people that I already knew, but as soon as I was around new people, I was a completely different person. When I got to my teens I was a little better, I could answer questions if I was asked. But I still didn't volunteer conversation.
By the time I was in my mid-teens, I was better but it was still affecting my interaction with girls. I realised I needed to do something, so I set about gaining some self confidence. It took me many years using different methods to train my mind to be confident around people. I tried many different things, some worked better than others and some were no help at all.
It wasn't easy, but now, nobody would believe I had ever been shy. I now have a problem with over confidence :-).
I can communicate very easily with people I've only just met, I can talk in front of large groups without a second thought and I can stick up for myself confidently and powerfully in situations of conflict. It really has changed my life and enabled me to become much more successful than would have otherwise been possible. It has made me much happier too, because not only am I not nervous all the time like I used to be, but I'm getting what I want out of life.
Sometimes I get accused of being big headed and arrogant, and having a big ego. I've gone from one extreme to the other. I often say that if you have it, it's called arrogance, if you don't, it's called self-esteem. Nobody ever has "high self esteem" or a "small ego". This is a possible downside that you should be prepared for. I don't think I've lost any friends because of this, in fact, I've probably gained friends because I have the ability to laugh at myself with them instead of being defensive and introverted. I think the benefits greatly outweigh the perceived negatives. And if you get it right, you'll be so confident you won't care anyway :-). But seriously, it is possible to improve your self confidence greatly, without becoming arrogant.
Self confidence isn't just about shyness either. Most people don't have the confidence in their own abilities to strive to achieve their dreams, so very few people actually do. They remember past failures and it makes them doubt their abilities. People are more comfortable doing what they've always done and what they already know how to do. They don't want to look silly trying something new and making mistakes. So how do you overcome this?
One method to try is hypnotherapy. This isn't like stage hypnosis, you won't end up eating onions like they're apples or anything silly like that. You can buy CDs that induce a very weak hypnotic trance and gently guide you in the direction you want to go. It's not magic though, so you are still going have to put in the effort and try other things at the same time. These hypnotic induction CDs are just helpers, not solutions in their own right. Paul McKenna's Supreme Self Confidence is a popular course and a lot of people have had some success with it. "Side A" gives some very good self confidence tricks that you can use to consciously improve your confidence and "side B" contains the hypnotic induction that will help you unconsciously.
See the Hypnosis section for more information on hypnosis and hypnotherapy, and some links to other hypnosis courses that can help with self confidence.
Anthony Robbins' motivational tapes and books can also be used very effectively to gain confidence in yourself. I used Anthony Robbins' Awaken the Giant Within which is a great course covering a variety of aspects including confidence. The main focus of the course is about changing the way you see things using his neuro-association principle. In order to change the way you think about something, you simply need to change the things you associate it with. For example, if you associate robbing a bank with going to prison, you probably won't do it, but if you associate robbing a bank with getting lots of money, you are probably more inclined to do it. In order to stop someone from robbing a bank, you need to make them associate it with going to prison (an extreme analogy I admit).
In order to get more confidence, you need to associate the things that make you less confident with something else that doesn't make you feel that way. This principle is helpful in many more areas of life and not just improving your confidence, such as losing weight, motivation, getting up earlier, or pretty much anything you want to improve in your life.
I think the biggest thing that stops people from being confident is past failures. When we were very young, we had all the confidence to try new things, then over time, after a few failures, we started to have second thoughts about trying new things. We realised that life wasn't as simple as we'd previously thought. The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is usually just that successful people realise that they will always make mistakes, they will always get things wrong and make bad decisions. So there's no point trying to avoid it. They realise that life isn't just going to fall into place every time, so they learn from their mistakes. They don't see their mistakes as failures, they seem them as learning opportunities. Most people don't try new things in case it goes wrong, successful people try things to see if they go wrong and then learn how to do them better.
There have been many studies into succesful people and every single one has resulted in this one critical finding. Successful people have had more "failures" than unsuccessful people, just because they have had more opportunities for things to go wrong. Unsuccessful people don't even try, whereas successful people try something out and learn from it. All the most successful millionaires and billionaires and all the successful sportsmen, all the successful people in the world choose to learn from their mistakes and move on, instead of learning not to even try.
