Confidence of personality or humanity

I clicked onto the article, "Help For Public-Speaking" (thank you blogger and confidence coach Nancy Tierney for sharing it) and I was quickly riled up by what it said, "Here's the bad news. You cannot change your traits. They are part of your personality. If you are a person with high-trait anxiety, there's no simple way to become a low-trait-anxiety person."

This is just not true.  To me, it reflects a superficial way of understanding what personality, behavior and physical experiences are.

If we change what we believe about ourselves, about who we are and what we are capable of, there is a way to love the human experience of interacting - inside of groups and in front of groups.

This is no small thing, however, altering our sense of what it means to be human and be in relationship with other humans in social situations.

Here's why I think the philosophy that the article suggests of + visualize + practice + change your focus is not deep enough: What good does visualizing do if you still believe you have something to hide in front of others?  What is the point of shifting focus if you feel ashamed and inferior to others?

When the real beauty of the social experience lies beneath the level of language or thinking in the brain, deeper than the level of 'personality' but in our being, our body, our humanity, our spirit, our heart.  Something that the cognitive brain (that is busy visualizing and practicing) does not get.

Confidence cannot be taught just through information knowledge - tips and tricks.  It must infuse your biological being and touch your identity.  It must become part of, in the words of neurologist Antonio Damasio, the 'word-less story' of your physical existence.