The hidden psychological barrier I am talking about is fear. The primary attribute in you that is stopping you from communicating confidently is fear. Like kryptonite to superman as fear is to communicate confidently. Fear is the acid that eats away confidence. Fear is the one tonne bolder that holds back a person from being confident. Fear is the Achilles of self-confidence.



You will build more confidence once you remove the "kryptonite, acid, or one tonne bolder" that is fear. To become confident you need to have little or ultimately no fear. To remove your fears the first step is to look at your fears and understand their "birth" to see what created them.

Let's look at what fear is first then we can analyze their creation. Fear is defined as an unlikable emotion towards a perceived real or fake threat. Read that out loud again. It is a perceived real or fake threat.

Perceptual Process

Perception has three stages. It starts in the first stage, then second, and lastly the third stage. Your perception can only take place in this subsequent order.

You are firstly exposed to the information. When in a conversation, exposure is being next to the person whom you can hear. Exposure is just a matter of coming within range of the stimulus.

Secondly is attention. It occurs when a stimulus activates one or more of our human senses. In our conversational example, you have attention to the person when you think about what is said. If the person begins to bore you or you are afraid of what the person is thinking of you, you are not thinking about the exposure and so the perceptual process would stop at this stage as you are not paying attention.

The third stage of perception is interpretation. It is the process of adding meaning to the stimulus through your thinking or feelings. The thinking often analyses the stimulus against past experiences. Using the conversational example, if the other person recently abused you, you will interpret what he is saying differently to someone who is a great friend to the other person. You can see how interpretation and experiences can affect your confidence in situations. You are better equipped in becoming more confident by identifying what experiences and thinking is affecting your interpretation of the situation. It is analyzing the situation as to why you are not confident.

Also, if you are feeling unhappy or other "negative" emotions when interpreting the situation with your feelings, you are more likely to experience negative actions such as poor confidence. It is the interpretation stage of the perceptual process which is the major focus in overcoming fear and building confidence. Once you have developed a basic understanding of the perceptual process you are more able to build unstoppable confidence by learning specific skills.