The Freelance Guru: confidence

Dear Guru,

How can I get more self confident

Juliane

Dear Pilgrim.

I feel your pain. We've all faced hard times; when our get up and go gets up and goes; when we feel worthless and pointless and it seems no-one loves us, when we feel completely alone, stuck on my pole, isolated & misunderstood, no-one caring if I live or die; as if I might as well kill myself in the morning and....

Sorry. Excuse me a second. [....]

As I was saying, we've all had our self esteem fail us. My self confidence suffered terribly when I was a salesmen. You might find it hard to believe, given that I'm naturally suave and sophisticated, but selling is not my forte, and my failure to hit targets drove me into depression, to the point where it was a relief to come home to wife at the end of every day! My sales did improve briefly near the end of my employment but only because I cried so much people brought my policies out of pity.

Finally, I saw the light and spent several minutes researching how to improve my self-confidence, sourcing the whole of the World Wide Web to find the best techniques, and thus became the amazing person I am now. And here, for the first time, I will share these tips with you.

10 ways to increase your Self Confidence

Use the NLP Swish to change your negative self-images with confident ones. This amazing technique can also bring about inner calm, personal successes and World peace.

Surround yourself with ugly people.

Make the voices in your head sound like someone you hate. That way you'll feel really good telling them to 'Shut the f*** up!'

Love yourself. But I'd suggest refraining from doing so in public.

Join a low self-esteem club. Surrounding yourself with people who continuously put themselves down will make you feel great in comparison.

Take small, slightly illegal, risks everyday. Nothing boosts your self-confidence like a spell in prison.

Exercise. This won't help your self confidence, I just think you could just stand to lose a few pounds.

Find a highly confident, successful, superior and generally amazing mentor to guide you to confidence. My prices start at $100 an hour.

Prevent negative thoughts by sticking your fingers in your ears and singing loudly. This will also keep people away from you as you'll look a bit Buddha.