How To Boost Confidence

Check back here regularly, as we will add books as we read and review them.

How to make friends and influence people

It may be old, but that doesn’t mean the techniques in this book are not effective. In fact, they’re timeless. Some of them are incredibly simple – smile more,  use people’s names. Others, such as building up people’s reputations, are more difficult to implement. But they all work.

For me, one of the most effective pieces of advise was never to criticise or complain. That can be rather difficult when you have children (talking from experience here!) but as the book explains, there are more effective ways to achieve what you want.

This may not be a direct confidence book, but as you learn to befriend and influence (and it is influence, not manipulate) your confidence will rapidly build.

The 7 principles of highly effective people

I must admit, I was expecting a business book when I bought this. What I got, however, was a blueprint to building up your character to deal with the whole life situations, from a happy marriage and bringing up kids to how to be a better business person.

You slowly work through different principles, achieving (hopefully) first a greater independence, confidence and control over oneself, before achieving the second goal of interdependence. Throughout it, you learn to develop a ‘core’ based on principles – sounds corny, but the book is deep, insightful and inspiring.

This book is rather harder going than the previous one, but in many ways fits it perfectly, giving deeper underlying principles to complement the techniques used and suggested in How to make friends and influence people.