Almost everyone spends their time on learning new indicators, staring intently at the market and maybe reviewing their performances. Ironically, we do all of this to increase our confidence but we rarely set out to work directly on confidence. Why don't we itemize the factors that make us feel more or less confident? Why don't we plan strategies and tactics that will increase our feelings of confidence?

Is it because we don't know how to work with our feelings as an "object' - as a "thing"? I think that is it ... no one ever directly taught a class on confidence building (well I have and will again on September 16th but.. you know... it wasn't on the list in high school, college or graduate school).

Does that mean it CANNOT be learned and developed on purpose? I don't think so (clearly - or why would I be teaching these classes?).

(Some Stanford research teaches us more about what it literally is in the brain - kind of like a probability - in which "there is always a graded degree of belief" even in a binary yes/no question. (Kiani, 2008).

So... if you had to pick the next three things that you could do to increase your confidence... what would they be? Do you even know what influences it? August is a really good month to think about these things.. to get ready for the rest of the year.

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