Here’s how you can increase your confidence without ever having to say a word.

Stand taller, shoulders back.

That’s right, people who stand tall actually increase their self-confidence and it has been verified through research to be true.

People who do not have sufficient confidence have a more slouching posture or even a cowering stance.

People who seek more confidence actually accomplish it by how they walk into a room, enter a meeting or when meeting people they do not know.

Before I speak to an audience I stand up as straight as I can and stick my chest out.  Often, this physical manifestation of confidence is more effective than all the subliminal messages I might try to send myself.

All of us are capable of adjusting our posture and stance which means that we can find a simple way to be more comfortable with who we are.

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Before you give another person a compliment, rely on a proven method for making it stick like glue.

First, sincerity trumps giving praise to manipulate someone else.

Second, a compliment is just mere flattery if it is not backed up by evidence.

You exceeded my expectations on this project because (and here comes the evidence) you’ve captured the spirit of what we’ve been trying to do in this company. 

You are so kind — it means so much to me that while I was in the hospital, you texted every day to check in on me.

Everyone likes a compliment that is backed up by evidence that conveys that you really mean it, but for a compliment that absolutely no one can resist, give the compliment to a spouse or a friend or another associate.

Bad news travels fast, but good news travels even faster.

I knew of a radio station where the boss paid bonus checks to his best workers by sending a letter to their spouses along with the check.

Your wife is again a super achiever this month leading everyone in local sales. 

Giving a compliment can be better than receiving it once you realize how people will become drawn to you for your sincerity and appreciation.

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Harvard Business Review published an article titled “How To Fake It When You’re Not Feeling Confident”.

This is a common theme of late at companies, from motivational speakers and even psychologists who counsel troubled foster children.

Should you “trick yourself out of the state of self-doubt”?

But it isn’t necessary to fake anything.

Remembering an I.O.U. for anything that you succeed at for use when more confidence is called for will be more effective.

Every success you have – big or tiny – add to a list on your smartphone which, as you know, is always with you.

Scroll through that list at least once a day – preferably more. 

Some examples:  I spoke up at a meeting without being asked to; I broke the ice and started a conversation with someone I didn’t really know;  I made it through a tough day without saying the word “can’t”;  I got a raise (you’ll be surprised how quickly we forget raises and promotions which are testimonials to our success shortly after we get them;  I was bullied today and I pushed back.

If you start looking for little successes, you’ll change the way you think.

Imagine hundreds of these accomplishments starting with most recent first on a scrollable list.

Then bolding the ones that you are particularly proud of.

No more is needed than to organize a way to easily view all the things that we tend to forget about that can become powerful I.O.U.s for future success.

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It’s not an iPhone or money or some other nicety.

It’s the thought of their favorite gift that can transform your relationship with your spouse, partner and/or family members.

Think of the way most people come in contact with loved ones after being away for some hours, the day, or for work.

Right back to business as usual and often with the burden of haunting problems on your shoulder.

Now imagine your first contact with them as if you are going to hand them something they really, really want.

Say, a new digital device or whatever.

When we have a gift in our hands, we almost can’t hide the anticipated joy in giving it.

Except, don’t bring that gift.

Walk in as if you have it with you – happy, bright-eyed, anxious to please.

Believe it or not most people would rather have you 100% in the moment and not thinking about work, how tired you are or what else you have to do that day.

You are the gift they wanted all along.

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Even the most self-assured person has lapses of self-doubt.

And many others have more self-doubt than confidence.

For that occasional bout of self-doubt, insert work ethic for ability.

When we get a pang of self-doubt it has very little to do with our ability and everything to do with fear of failure.

Replace that fear with a vow to outwork everyone to assure your success.

Replacing fear thoughts with promises to outwork all replaces negative thinking with positive thinking.

Doubt kills more dreams than failure.

“Make sure your worst enemy is not living between your own ears”

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Everyone wants it all, but few attain it.

Whatever ALL really is.

So handling a career and family at the same time can be challenging.

Balance is important but employers often have a way of bending those boundaries and families have ways of increasing the time you are needed.

• Smartphones are beautiful things at work but toxic when children and spouses need you in person.  Phones off.  No exceptions.

• The time you spend 100% present with family members and children is more valuable than the gross number of hours.  Lean in.

• Children need boundaries and many career-oriented men and women blur the lines out of guilt or convenience.

• Eat dinner together – always.  Phones off – yours.

• Prepare and clean up dinner together.

• Become a better listener.  This occurs when you can hear what someone else says and say it back to them.

When I got divorced I saw a child counselor who gave me the best advice in our first session together.

She said, “Your job is not to put on a show for your children, just make them part of your life even if it is mundane and boring”.

Redefine having it all from being able to be fully actualized in your work and in your family and personal life to being happy with a life that you consciously work to keep in balance.

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On the first day as program director of a Philadelphia radio station, I faced this crisis.

The person whose job was to prepare and type the commercial logs required by the FCC under the station’s license was fired at the end of the day – not by me, but by the general manager without asking me (a bad radio management practice that unfortunately continues to this day).

She was fuming.

I was taken aback and very apologetic.  I told her the weekend logs looked perfect to me but she was so hurt and so shocked that she ripped them up.  Keep in mind that they were not computerized at the time which means they had to be retyped.

That left me with the huge task of having to retype these legal documents for the rest of the night Friday and all-day Saturday and Sunday which meant that I spent my first weekend as the station’s program director doing a sales job all weekend long.

On Monday, I dragged my tired body into the station ready to beg this person to come back if the station would only let me rehire her and of course they wouldn’t.

The hard work tired me but didn’t kill me.

What did bother me was that no one – not the manager or anyone at the station thanked me for spending the weekend cleaning up this mess.

Being appreciated means being acknowledged.

I vowed to remember that in the years to come by doing what my employers forgot to do – I thanked myself – and it felt so good.

Never let your job well done go unappreciated by the most important person in your life – YOU!

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Back then I never gave a second’s thought to what made the best friend I ever had, Jimmy Weinraub, such a good friend.

Now that he is gone much too early, I have figured it out.

It was like we both had a clock inside of us and knew when to reach out to each other.

Too much time never went by no matter where we were – we were always connected.

And we didn’t just text or email – he would never have liked that – we spent face time together.

One of us always knew when we needed to contact the other.

It was automatic. You could set your Apple Watch by it.

We didn’t just huff and puff about how busy we were and how work and family was so stressful, we always made time to eat together and look each other in the eye.

Jimmy always – and I mean always – followed up with a note of gratitude for as long as we knew each other to thank me for my time and enclose something inspirational or motivational (we were both Dale Carnegie instructors so that was like crack to us).

Our friendship was not just another entry in Outlook or iCal, it was celebrated in spirit and in person on a very regular basis.

I may never know another friend like this in my life, but it has taught me this much.

The litmus test for a good friendship is not how long you spend planning to be together but how many moments you actually spend together.

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The Washington Post did an interesting piece on how baby boomers are losing their battle against ageism.

But Millennials roughly 18-34 years old are also fighting ageism from the other direction.  They were born into an economy that left many of them unemployed or under-employed.

Today Millennials are still facing age discrimination in that they find it hard to get full-time jobs with benefits.  So ageism either has nothing to do with age or something to do with age for everyone.

The best gauges for hiring are …

1. Does this person have the passion and skills for the job.
2. Do they get along with others easily.
3. Can they motivate others to bring out their best.
4. Do they have impeccable integrity.

Therefore, in planning to seek or change employment, concentrating on these four things makes you more attractive.

Emphasize your passion for the job and the skills that you possess to be successful.

Show confirmable results of how you get along well with others.

Likewise show specific examples corroborated by others that you are a motivator of people.

And let your integrity show through with meaningful examples in the words of others not you.

It is harder to discriminate against anyone offering a proposition as impressive as this.

“Ageism works in both directions” – Alanis Morissette

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Failure feels worse than almost anything a human can experience.  I hate it.  You hate it.  No one wants it.

But if you study successful people, they almost always have a path through failure before they arrive at success.

In other words, we don’t have to like it, but failure is an important component.

It tells us how badly we want something to go back again and again to confront it.

Failure introduces us to ourselves and our friends and makes us stronger.

If we try once or twice and give up, then maybe we don’t want what we’re pursuing.  But if we never give up then we are almost willing a positive outcome.

Failure teaches us patience because no successful person ever got what they wanted without some cuts and scrapes first.

Stop becoming discouraged and begin being encouraged by studying the successful people you admire who had to fail their way to success.

“Failure is a rehearsal for success”

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My best friend in high school stole the girl I liked and eventually went on to marry her.

I owe him thanks because I couldn’t have had my children or married my wife.

Once in college, another friend and I in communications school planned to pitch a two-person radio show to a small suburban radio station.

The call was made from a phone booth (what’s that?).

He did the talking because two of us couldn’t be talking into a pay phone to the program director who was hiring.

When he pitched our idea, the PD said, “I don’t have any need for a two-man show but I need a weekend jock”.

And yes, my friend took it right on the spot.

For himself.

I got continued unemployment.

A few weeks later, I got a job in Philadelphia radio, a major market on a major station.  I had no choice but to keep dialing for dollars.

In the end, again, I got the better end of the deal.

Sometimes things work out better when we don’t get our way.

That sounds horrible to say but it’s true.

We often don’t know what we really want or what is best for us.

So I have learned that when I feel a knife in my back, I tend to the wound and go on to an adventure I never saw coming.

 “Being betrayed is one of the most valuable lessons life can teach” – Shania Twain

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People born after 9/11 have lived every day of their lives with the insecurities of terrorism.

And each year, the outrages get worse as it seems hatred has replaced love and once again we’re fighting over religion as humans have done since the beginning of time.

A local doctor and his wife took their children to London for what sounded like a nice vacation.  She was worried about terrorism but pushed her worries aside.

Unfortunately, innocent victims were killed in the street during her stay.

Penn Station in New York is more than just a rundown train terminal.  It is a fortress for military personnel with automatic weapons at the ready.

We live in a world of insecurity, fear and uncertainty by understanding that fear is the desired outcome for terrorists.

And remembering the helpers – the people who respond first and show their humanity to others – is a way for us to focus on love and not hate.

“If you and I are having a single thought of violence or hatred against anyone in the world at this moment, we are contributing to the wounding of the world” – Deepak Chopra

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Our level of confidence usually comes down to that little voice in our head that gives us permission to succeed or sets us up to fail.

A baseball player doesn’t take the field and listen to an inner voice that says “Don’t hit the ball to me, I might drop it or commit an error”.

And their inner voice doesn’t even say “I will not make an error”.

It’s better yet.

“Hit the ball to me – I can handle it”.

This is how to change that little voice in your head that somehow says “I can speak one on one but not to groups”.

Kick that voice out.

“I can speak to anyone from my heart, as myself, as long as I have earned the right to speak on the topic”.

Or for folks who say, “They will never hire me with all those qualified people applying”.

Adjust your inner voice to say, “They ought to hire me – I’m an excellent candidate, I work hard and I will make a difference”.

For those of us looking for the perfect mate in our lives, why not choke off that unhelpful voice that says “I can’t find that person” and replace it with:

“Someone is waiting to meet and get to know me as the person I am so I will just keep being that person”.

Tweetable reminder: Banish that inner voice that says “I can’t” with the one that says “I can handle it”.

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A friend of mine, Jim Carnegie, passed away this past week.

Jimmy was a complex man with whom I had a complicated relationship but I was horrified to see an ex-employee of his rip into a dead man the way she did on the RadioInk website.

I’m not taking away from any shortcomings they may have had in their relationship with the deceased but I got the feeling that she had the need to air her dirty laundry more than the mourners, friends and family needed to hear it.

In our digital social media world, we have all been victims of personal attacks but when it is aimed at the dead before the body gets cold, you can see we have problem.

The best defense for personal attacks is not necessarily what is intuitive to us which is to hit back.

One of my media publication readers ripped me in an e-mail last week to which I agreed with him and left a phone message for him to personally hear him out.

I’m still waiting for a return call.

Personal attacks are bullying.

Here are some defenses.

• Just because someone has hurt you the most does not mean that they are correct.  They may have issues of their own like the two examples I cited above.  Don’t make their issues your issues.

• Reach out to the attacker and most likely they will run which will help you accept that they are just being mean and you are being open minded.

• 9% of personal attacks do not happen live in person between two people.  It doesn’t take much courage to attack another person behind their backs so what they say is not worth considering.

• And this is my favorite – when anyone points fingers at me, I am reminded they are also pointing several fingers back at themselves.  If you have to deal with such people, consider what their issues may be before beating yourself up.

“How people treat you is their karma.  How you react is yours” – Wayne Dyer

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I never rehearse a presentation more than 3 times.

And I do it 3 times only to prove to myself that each time will be different and the fourth – the actual presentation – will be different yet which is just fine.

The best prep for a presentation is to build your confidence not over prep the material.

• You have earned the right to be doing the presentation which is why you are doing it.
• Your goal is to give your audience a “gift” – something special that they will remember.

• Doing a perfect presentation is not as important as doing an authentic presentation.

• Before you can ask your group or listeners to accept you as a credible presenter, you must see yourself as a credible presenter.

“People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint” – Steve Jobs

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Within the next few weeks I will make my annual pilgrimage to the Jersey shore for all the obvious reasons and one not so obvious.

That’s when I become a free agent every year and I use the beach time to think about what I want to do in the year ahead.

My career.  My personal life.  My yet unfulfilled dreams.

Sports figures are lucky.  They get to negotiate and renegotiate not only their salaries but where they want to play and how long.  But so many of us just keep going until something happens that makes us have to deal with it.

Like getting fired.  Or burned out.  Or discouraged.

Here’s my mission:

• Do I want to keep doing what I do for a living next year (and for me next year starts in September) or am I ready to make a change?  Add a challenge.  Drop something that is not rewarding.  I had a close call with death this year due to a familial aneurysm I didn’t know I had.  You can believe I am seeing things very differently now that I dodged that bullet so I can hardly wait to see what I decide.

• What am I worth?  Most of us accept what our employers decide we are worth and when they are taking bonuses while cutting our salaries, does that mean we are actually worth less?  In sports, arbitrators use similar situations, skills, accomplishments to determine a player’s worth.  That works for us, too.  How do we perform compared to others?  Not how does a company compensate us.

• What new skill sets do I need if in fact I want to begin to change how I work or spend my time?  Often we just hit up Monster and apply but acquiring new skills are critical to career growth and satisfaction.

• Remember, you are signing a one-year contract with yourself.  You may decide to do what you do for one more year but that’s it which tells you that you have 12 months to acquire the skills necessary to go on.

I love becoming a free agent.

I don’t know what I will decide to do because I’m going to think it through.

But one thing I am NOT going to do is miss the opportunity to become a free agent in a world with so much opportunity.

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•  I’ve done it before and I can do it again.
• Do the things you fear to do and the fear will go away from you.
• Never fear making a mistake because mistakes are always a rehearsal for future success.
• Talk to yourself in a way that you would talk to someone you really love.
• Self-confidence comes from what you think of you; not what others think of you.

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Ric Elias had a front row seat the day Captain Chesley B “Sully” Sullenberger glided his flight down on the Hudson River barely missing the George Washington Bridge in January, 2009.

Every passenger survived their close call with death for which Sullenberger’s cool, calm skills have been rightly acclaimed.

But Elias put into words a wake up call that I want to share with you.

How his close call with death changed his life.

1. Don’t postpone anything in life. Elias said, “I learned that it all changes in an instant … We have this bucket list, we have these things we want to do in life, and I thought about all the people I wanted to reach out to that I didn’t, all the fences I wanted to mend, all the experiences I wanted to have and I never did.”
2. Don’t waste time on things that don’t matter.  Elias said he hasn’t had a fight with his wife in years. Don’t be right. Be happy.
3. Find the most important thing in life.  Being a parent. A friend. Work can rob us of our ability to be friends and spend time on which becomes so important when we believe we are down to our last few seconds of life.

Does it take a near fatal plane crash to know what is really important or can we get to it by thinking about what our priorities would be if we had only a few seconds left and we got a second chance?

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This dangerous step up from regular cyber bullying involves humor and ganging up on someone in particular.  Dangerous because the humor part often masks the meanness of intent.

So as each year goes on adults and children both are being exposed to bullying from people who will not look them in the face to deliver their invectives.

Schools are investing a lot of time and effort into preventing bullying with minimal results.  Social media – a misnomer for sure – is the dangerous weapon.

Cyber bullying is not going away.

The best defense is a good offense from people who are comfortable being authentic.

To children, never let anyone else record on your hard drive (brain). 

To adults, bully’s go elsewhere when they see a person is truly comfortable in their own shoes.

And that’s where the answer is to be found.

No one is perfect.

No one is worthless.

And no one ever gets direct access to your brain without you first deciding whether you will let it in.

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Study confident people and you will see the one quality they all have is the ability to use past successes to access future success.

In other words, they remember the things that made them feel great, powerful, effective and happy and they use a technique to unleash what worked for them in the past once again.

Most people forget about their successes as impressive as some of them are and concentrate on the negative.

To get a boost of confidence, try this …

I’ve done it before and I can do it again.

If I don’t believe, why am I asking someone else to?

Confidence is a perishable item.

When things are going great, we tend to have a lot of it.

When things are challenging, we need a boost.

But the boost must come from within.

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