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Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) for confidence
CBT for confidence - we believe confidence is something you can learn, build & develop. If lack of confidence is affecting your everyday life, we can help.
Confidence therapy explained
Confidence is something that we all learn during our childhood. There are certain events that may hinder the natural growth of our confidence such as being bullied or growing up in a strict, expectant family. This is not always the case however as sudden changes in our life can affect our confidence even during adulthood. Low levels of confidence can cause a variety of symptoms from negative thinking or irrational thoughts of failure to avoiding activities and experiences. If lack of confidence is affecting your everyday life, then we can help.
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What is confidence?
Confidence is a person’s belief that a chosen course of action is the right choice and that they can rightly perform that action. Confidence, or self-confidence, is often seen as a personality trait; it is often perceived as something you might be born with. At Pinnacle, we believe confidence is something you can learn, build and develop.
Those with high levels of confidence believe they can achieve what they set out to do, and that their lives will go as they plan. Self-confident people generally trust in their own abilities and judgement. Low confidence can affect you in many ways; you may struggle with assertiveness, communicating with others, or social anxiety. This, in turn, can affect your relationships, career, and your emotional and mental health.
“We all have our default ways of dealing with situations. Most of us aren’t even aware of what they are. And some of the time they work. But like a tradesmen who turns up to every job with the same couple of tools, there will be situations where those tools just aren’t the right ones. CBT is particularly helpful in building low levels of confidence. It helps make you aware and gives you a versatile practical set of life skills to become more agile and resilient for whatever life throws at you.”
Richard Reid - CEO, Therapist & Coaching Psychologist
“We all have our default ways of dealing with situations. Most of us aren’t even aware of what they are. And some of the time they work. But like a tradesmen who turns up to every job with the same couple of tools, there will be situations where those tools just aren’t the right ones. CBT is particularly helpful in building low levels of confidence. It helps make you aware and gives you a versatile practical set of life skills to become more agile and resilient for whatever life throws at you.”
Richard Reid - CEO, Therapist & Coaching Psychologist
Using CBT for self confidence
We believe that therapy is an effective way to build confidence. The use of therapy helps to target both the symptoms and the cause(s) behind a lack of confidence.
In order to treat confidence issues, it is important to discuss your past. We understand that ‘one size doesn’t fit all’ and that each of our clients is different and has their own set of unique needs and circumstances. We use a combination of therapies to build confidence, one of the primary treatments is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).
What is CBT
CBT is about looking at the relationship between your thoughts and feelings, and how they make you ‘default’ to certain behaviours. It’s seen as a different kind of ‘talking therapy’ that aims to solve a person’s current problems. In effect it helps you become your own therapist, where you use the skills you have learned.
By using CBT, we can help make you aware of what your own defaults are: sometimes they help us, sometimes they don’t – CBT helps you recognise those different responses for what they are.
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How does CBT help build confidence
CBT has good results when applied to someone who lacks confidence. Using cognitive therapy, your therapist can help you to tackle negative thought patterns you may direct at yourself or that you perceive from the world around you. It is usually these negative thoughts that trigger low levels of confidence.
After you have recognised these negative thoughts and when they occur, you can work to replace them with something more rational and positive which will allow you to build and develop your confidence in a calm and controlled manner.
CBT is a way to rewire the software of your brain, rehearsing troubling situations in your mind in order to create alternative ways of thinking when that situation arises again. In effect, you’re creating new mental circuitry by challenging and changing old responses that feel hardwired in, but aren’t.
With CBT, the therapist acknowledges that there may be behaviours that you cannot control through rational thought. Rather, these harmful coping strategies are as a result of prior conditioning from the environment and other internal or external stimuli.
By taking (what can feel like) insurmountable tasks and teaching you how to apply a pragmatic and objective viewpoint to these issues, CBT gradually changes the way you look at everyday challenges.
A confidence therapy case study
Carly was intelligent, successful and attractive but had a debilitating lack of self-confidence. These feelings prompted her to feel anxious in social situations and to actively avoid opportunities for career progression. Carly was very adept at using words and imagery so we used metaphors to represent how she felt about her situation. We identified the image of a huge grey ball to signify the lack of confidence that was crushing her. I encouraged her to find a way of altering it and she found a way to have it ‘dry out’ and disappear.
The change was then tested. She was asked to visualise being in a group and immediately said she felt “scared”. This feeling was used to lead to her second metaphor, being surrounded by spikes suspended in the air. They were there to hold her back and stop her getting into trouble. This was probably the actual cause of her problems, an originally helpful behaviour response that had gone out of control. Instead of keeping her out of trouble, it was now stopping her doing anything at all. To transform the spikes she was asked to look really closely at them, and when she did so she was surprised to find that each one she looked at just popped out of existence. She cleared all the spikes this way. When she was mentally led into the group situation this time she was totally confident that she could join in and even lead the group naturally and easily.
I then asked Carly to imagine a friend asking her to start a company, another thing she said could not imagine doing. She immediately came up with a third metaphor. She was inside a cage with black steel bars and she was calling out to people walking by, but they were unable to see her. Later she was able to transform the cage so that the walls disappeared but she found that she still was holding on to a few bars, even though she was now outside the cage. She found that she did not want to let go. This indicated that the symbol represented some sort of resource for her, and she did want to lose it.
Valuable resources are always kept, so it was suggested she transform the bars into something useful that she could carry around with her. It turned into a silver ball in her hand. But as soon as she felt it in her hand part of her wanted to throw it away. So she transformed it again and it turned into something she could keep in her pocket. As soon as it was in the pocket it merged with her body and ceased to exist. She then said that she was walking along with all the other people and they were not paying any attention to her.
She was again tested against all her scenarios and all her fears had totally cleared. As she was tested against each of the things she said she could not do, a wide smile appeared on her face and she realised that it was all over. She was free of it.
What happens in a CBT for self confidence therapy session?
Your therapist will guide you through your past to events that may have been locked in your subconscious. Together we can tackle the root cause and start on confidence building. It will help you to challenge any negative thinking that contributes to feelings of low confidence, helping you to grow in a more positive and assertive manner, proving your inner self wrong by accomplishing something that you didn’t think you could.
Confidence building can be done with just your therapist, though it may be recommended that you attend a confidence course where you can talk to others who suffer from low confidence for support. This helps to give people with low confidence a sense of achievement within a group.
How do we structure our sessions?
Our therapy sessions are tailored to suit your needs. Our sessions usually last from 30 minutes to an hour; our courses usually consist of around 6 to 12 sessions.
We may also recommend attending a confidence course where you can talk to others who suffer from low confidence for support.
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Take the first step toward a better you!
If you’re still unsure whether you need us or not then simply send us any questions you may have via the enquiry form on the right.