Take two people; they are the same age from similar backgrounds with the same experience and qualifications. In fact the only difference is one has loads of confidence and the other lacks self-belief. Who’s going to be the most successful?

I agree.

Over the past 15 years or so I’ve presented to over half a million people around the world. During presentations I often ask the question, ‘Is there anyone here who can honestly tell me they have all the confidence they need in every area of their lives right now?’ In this time out of 500,000 people I’ve only had three people who’ve put their hands up.^*

Turning worry into confidence

Unfortunately this doesn’t mean you get better at it – it means you master the worrying part. Worriers have an uncanny ability to imagine the unimaginable. My mum is brilliant at it. If I call her and I’m travelling she worries about the fact I’m away from home. If I call her from home she’ll worry that if I’m not travelling we can’t have much work on!

People worry for many reasons, but have you noticed that they are always negative things? People don’t worry that they may win a contract or find true love. No, they worry that they may lose the contract or grow old lonely.

Some people claim a bit of worry is good for them. It helps them to prepare. OK, but prepare for what? The worst?

Worry is simply a product of your imagination. This is brilliant news because the better you are at using your imagination to worry, the better your imagination can be used to eliminate worry from your life. Here’s how.

Confidence cake – the recipe for self-belief

I’m going to teach you a simple technique which is like the recipe to a perfect cake: get the ingredients right, follow the method and you’ll get great results every time.

What we are going to do is use Flip It to turn worry into confidence by cleverly using the same mental muscle that creates the worry in the first place – your amazing imagination.

I want you to test out this idea right now – even if you don’t need to. Then practise some more – again whether you do or you don’t need to. And then a little more. Then, the next time you feel worry coming your way, you will be able to use the technique immediately as you will have created a habit.

Here’s what to do. Start by thinking of a time in your past when you were worried about something but you actually needn’t have worried at all as the situation turned out really well and you ended up feeling incredibly confident.

Here are some examples of situations you may have experienced to get your mind turning.

• A date that turned from stress to success.
• A new job interview that moved from concern to contract.
• A theatre performance that transformed from stage fright to leading light.

Imagine yourself in the situation when you were worried. Do your best to get into the feeling but don’t stay there too long! Now cast your mind back to the point where you felt incredibly confident. Again, do what you can to capture the feeling and live it as closely as you can.

Now evaluate the differences between the worried you and the confident you. Make a note of the variation in:

• breathing;
• physiology;
• focus;
• language;
• image colour and size;
• reaction of people around you.

You may find it easier to do the next bit with your eyes closed.

Take the feelings and actions of confidence you have just experienced and make them bigger and bolder in your imagination. Now supercharge them until you can feel yourself glowing with confidence.

You have a unique recipe for confidence. And now that you know it, practise this confidence recipe as often as you can. Give this way of feeling a name: Super Me, Confidence Man, Wonder Woman, you get the idea. This can feel a little false and weird at first. That’s OK, so did riding a bike and tying your shoe laces, but you don’t even think about that now. And, in just the same way, the more you practise the confidence recipe the more powerful it will become until it is like second nature to you.

So, the next time you feel yourself starting to worry, immediately Flip It and start to use your new confidence recipe. Change your breathing, hold your body in a different way, say the words you use when you feel super confident. Now hold this for as long as you need to, which may be several minutes or even hours. You have to really go for it, believe it will work and stick with it.

Using cloudy nostalgia

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be (sorry, I couldn’t resist). Seriously, have you noticed how two eye-witness reports of the same event can appear completely different? And how often people change their memory of events to the outcome they would like? This is because memory is just your interpretation of what really happened.

This is one of those strange phenomena that can be manipulated to your advantage by using Flip It (and a bit of imagination) to take unhelpful memories and recreate them into a positive past.

I use the word ‘unhelpful’ carefully here as it may be that some negative parts of your past may need to remain. I’ll let you be the judge of that.

Daniel was a reasonably happy 40-year-old, but he found it difficult to connect with his father. As his father was getting on a bit, Daniel wanted to fix this and decided to use ‘cloudy nostalgia’ to do it. It turns out that Daniel’s father wasn’t around for him much when he was a child. At least that was how he remembered it.

Daniel thought it was time to create a better memory. He started by visiting his mum and asking her to recount some of her favourite memories of him as a child with his dad. Much to his surprise, she had lots. Fun fights, fishing trips, the day he got locked in a loo and his dad had to climb over the door to free him and many more.

Then Daniel did the same exercise with his dad.

Next, Daniel took 15 minutes to visit his memory, with a healthy dose of imagination packed in his pocket. He went back as far as he could remember and played out moments where he and his dad had had great times together. He then started to weave in some extra times along with those that had been shared by his mum and dad. Every time he came to a point that he had associated with his father not being around, he created a new memory and played it over and over in his imagination.

The more he did this, the more his memory and imagination merged and the more happy childhood memories of time he had spent with his dad were created.

‘At first I felt like a fake,’ says Daniel, recalling how his new memories were created, ‘but after a short while I found it easier to mix and merge memory with imagination. The weird thing was how much more positive I felt towards my dad. He hadn’t changed – or had any need to – but I had.’

Act ‘as if’

You may think that using imagination and memory like this is a little far-fetched. I know I needed to be convinced when I first started to explore methods for increasing confidence and self-belief.

Simon Woodroffe, one of Britain’s most successful entrepreneurs, who founded YO! Sushi and YOtel, once told me that even he worries that one day he’ll be ‘found out’. When I asked how he overcame this, he said he acted ‘as if’.

When he was negotiating the deal for his first YO! Sushi restaurant he didn’t really have a clue what he should be saying or doing, so he simply acted ‘as if’ he did know. Simon says, ‘I would get into the mindset of a person who was an expert and I’d ask myself, “How would they do this?” then I’d act that part as best I could.’

Here’s a secret for you. Most of us have huge self-doubt, so we look for people who have certainty so we can believe in them. Could that person with certainty be you?

How would a confident person act? What would you do if you were absolutely certain? What would be different if you eliminated doubt? One way to do this is to create different characters (using the confidence recipe) who can be at your fingertips when you need them. So as well as Super Me you might also have Meeting Maestro or Hot Date Girl.

Your act ‘as if’ characters can have multiple personalities too.

Practising acting ‘as if’ when you don’t need to is vital; practice does after all make perfect, so when you do need to pull off an Oscar-winning performance you’ll be ready.

Next ball

Richard Nugent is the co-author with Steve Brown of Football: Raise your mental game (A&C Black, 2008). He coaches top footballers and sportspeople, as well as company leaders. We were discussing why some footballers just seem to lose their confidence during a match and he told me an amazing story about one of his clients.

His client was a Liverpool player who could be described as being one of the brightest young players in the country. But he had a dilemma. If he made a poor pass early in the game he could guarantee that he would make at least another five poor passes in the rest of the match.

The mental challenge was that he would hold on to the memory of his last poor pass. This meant that not only was he playing each new pass but he was also replaying the poor one he had made previously.

Richard explained, ‘That means you are now trying to make two good passes at the same time and because the brain doesn’t differentiate well between what’s real and what’s strongly imagined, no matter how good at football you are, playing two passes at the same time is difficult!’

You can imagine how this would create anxiety. Each time he would make another poor pass it would build on the mental challenge, becoming three, four and so on and replaying over and over.

This young footballer would build up a layer of poor passes and with each one would become more and more certain that he would play another poor pass. And with that certainty his passes indeed became poorer.

To fix the problem, Richard taught his client to focus on using a trigger phrase, which was ‘next ball’. He would repeat this phrase over and over to himself while playing, and in doing so eliminate the memory of a poor pass.

So if you’re a professional footballer reading this you know what to do if you’re making poor passes. But the chances are you’re not a professional footballer. Your equivalent of a poor pass could be: rejection, a missed opportunity, a failed audition, the way someone reacts to you, messing up what you were going to say.

If you create a phrase such as ‘next ball’ for whatever it is that affects you, it makes it less likely you’ll make a mistake again. By focusing on the positive ‘next’ rather than reliving a negative ‘past’ you build your confidence quickly.

Still ordering number 37?

But what if you associate your past with safety? Then it becomes difficult to experience new things because your perception of anything new or different is associated with risk.

When I was a child it was a big treat to order a Chinese takeaway. I remember the ceremony. About once a month, usually a Friday, my mum or dad would announce that we were having Chinese. My brother and I would get quite excited and 30 minutes later Dad would arrive home with a plastic carrier bag containing: 1 Chicken Fried Rice (number 37), 1 Sweet and Sour Chicken (number 52) and a portion of chips.

I genuinely believed for the first 13 years of my life that the only food you could get from a Chinese takeaway was Chicken Fried Rice, Sweet and Sour Chicken and a portion of chips!

My parents ordered the same Chinese meal for 20 years. Why? It was safe, it tasted nice and they knew what they were getting.

Here’s how and why they changed their minds, and in doing so helped me discover the wonders of international cuisine.

After telephoning through the order, my dad arrived home with the bag. As usual, my mum had prepared the kitchen table with some kitchen towel rolled into serviettes and four glasses of pop had been poured. Sometimes we would listen to slightly oriental music to set the mood. All this but not a chopstick in sight!

My dad would ceremoniously place each of the containers in the centre of the table before removing the lids with a flourish. The same routine for 20 years. That was until this special night. I recall his exact words as he took off the lid of what he thought was Chicken Fried Rice and discovered it had been mixed up with a House Special Chow Mein (number 78): ‘Bloomin’ heck Liz, what’s that?’ (I didn’t hear my dad swear until I was 16.)

I remember looking at them peering into the tin foil container, and then my dad scooping out a single noodle with a fork. After a few minutes of study and discussion I said, ‘Look, I’ll have it.’ To which my mum replied, ‘But you don’t like noodles.’

How would she know? I’d never had them!

This is where my dad stepped up as the man of the house and said, ‘Don’t worry everyone, I’ll try it.’ And he promptly put half a forkful in his mouth as the other half slid down his chin. The whole room became silent as he took three chews before declaring, ‘It’s delicious!’ At that point, we decided that the best thing for all of us to do was to taste a little. It turned out that everyone loved it.

But that wasn’t what encouraged the Heppell family to deviate from numbers 37 and 52 and try multiple Chinese dishes. The real reason was far more complicated than that.

Although I now know that this strange new food was House Special Chow Mein (number 78), at the time it was known just as ‘the mistake’. On those special occasions that we had Chinese food, my dad would order our usual oriental fare but then he would attempt to describe ‘the mistake’ dish hoping to relive the glory of the House Special Chow Mein.

It took six attempts over several months but, in the end, he found it. Plus we found five other new dishes, which inevitably we loved.

Perhaps it’s time to Flip It and test out something new. Use it as a confidence-building exercise, whether it be food, a holiday, a route or a new way of doing something.

Failing a test, screwing up the interview or that awful first date

If you ever want either to have your confidence boosted or to have it knocked right out of you then sit a test. If you do well your confidence will soar and if you do badly your confidence will take a dive.

So what could I suggest to help prepare you for taking exams? Oh yes, EXAMS – Exaggerated an Xiety And Mental Stress.

And as if taking the exam wasn’t bad enough the next stage is worse – getting your results. Stop for a moment and ask yourself how the opening of an envelope can dictate how clever you are. Are you any more or less intelligent the moment after you read the result than the second before? So why do we give ourselves such a hard time when we fail a test?

Time to Flip It and get the best out of the situation.

I’m a big fan of learning; I’m not such a big fan of the current methods of testing our learning. Sometimes we are judging whether a person is good at something because they are good at taking exams in that subject. Does this mean they are better than someone who can apply the ideas in real life more effectively but isn’t as good at taking exams?

What can you do if you fail a test?

1. Destroy the result. If you have failed completely then get rid of the evidence. Burn it, shred it, anything, but don’t hold on to it.
2. Convince yourself you are the same person you were just a few moments before. But now you have something extra – experience.
3. If you are going to re-sit, do it as soon as you can. This is very important, particularly with driving tests.
4. Get feedback. If there is someone who can explain why you didn’t pass, ask them why you didn’t – and listen.
5. Ask yourself, ‘What have I learned?’
6. Use a confidence booster like the ones outlined earlier in this chapter.

Failing a test needn’t be a nightmare. By Flipping the experience you can turn a negative into a positive learning experience.

The same applies to getting over that disastrous first meeting with your new flame’s parents or not getting the job of your dreams.

The more confidence you have, the easier it is to get out of your comfort zone. The more you get out of your comfort zone, the more confidence you have. Waiting for one or the other to happen is not a strategy.

You have to Flip It and take action by working on building your confidence now and your confidence will build you.

Being happy for the heck of it

Most people wait for a reason to be happy then they choose to be cheerful. Flip It suggests you don’t need to feel happy first for happy things to happen. In fact you can create a happy state any time you choose.

But being happy for the heck of it needs some strategies. This section is designed to get you started.

Don’t overanalyse these questions, just answer a simple yes or no to the following.

• Can you be happy and sad in the same day?
• Can you be happy and sad in the same hour?
• Have there been times in your past when a similar situation has made you feel happy one time and sad the next?
• Have you noticed how some people appear to be happier than others?
• Have you noticed how some people appear to be happy all the time?
• Are there times when, even if you have a lot to be happy about, it’s easier to be a bit grumpy or a bit sad?
• In fact, can you choose to be grumpy?
• Isn’t grumpy a lovely word?
• And now the big one . . . If you can choose to be grumpy (or sad), can you also choose to be happy?

My guess is that you will have answered yes to most of the questions. These simple questions are just a way to get you thinking about the fact that you do have a choice. That choice becomes even more obvious when you have the right tools.

A simple way to Flip It from sad to happy

The easiest and fastest way to start is to put a big daft grin on your face and see what happens. Yes I know this can be a lot harder to do than it is to say (and it’s even easier to read) but it’s still worth the effort. There are two schools of thought for this type of ‘fake it until you make it’ thinking.

The first goes along the lines of when you take an action, even if you don’t believe it, you can trick your mind into thinking a different way and you’ll get different results.

The other is that all you are doing is applying a thin film over your deeper thought processes and even if it does make a difference you quickly revert back to where you were previously.

I think a combination of the two is a little more realistic, so here’s my ‘sad to happy in three steps’ guide. You’ll get some quick results – and they’ll last too.

• Step 1: Change your physiology. That means change your face from a smirk to a smile, put your shoulders back, activate your eyes, look up and take a couple of deep breaths.
• Step 2: Explore what’s right. This means you need to find five things that are right and good about this moment. I’m alive, I live in a nice house, I look good, people like me for who I am, I get to eat today! You know the sort of thing, but you need five as a minimum and it works a little better if you write them down.
• Step 3: Action stations. Take one or two actions towards creating a happier state – and by action I mean move it! When you are sedentary it’s easier to feel sad; when you are moving it’s easier to feel happy. If you need to call a friend then stand up and move to a different room to do it. If you need to sort out a mess then move swiftly to do it.

Simple? Too simple? Well don’t knock it until you’ve tested it – and it’s best to test it before you need it.

The next step

If you’re a cover-to-cover reader (as opposed to a dipper, like me!) you will have noticed you’re about 20 per cent of the way through Flip It. And now it’s time to move on from you, you, you and expand your thinking to incorporate . . .

* I don’t think they raised their hands because they did have all the confidence they needed in every area of their lives, it was that they didn’t fully understand the question!