Sitting at our desks this APEC week in Sydney it’s starting to feel more like we are back in downtown Baghdad.  Helicopters buzzing above like angry mosquito’s on steroids, snipers on rooftops and gaggles of police ambling past our window with SS-like ‘don’t f@&k with me’ looks on their faces.

With so much testosterone on the streets it got me thinking what would it be like to be so powerful you could bring a big city to a standstill just by turning up for a cup of tea and a chin wag with some of your mates from overseas.

Power has always been the ultimate aphrodisiac but sadly not all of us can possess the kind that brings a city to a stand still every time we walk out the door. However the good news is power has a little brother almost as powerful, just as sexy and a lot more subtle and his name is ‘Charm’. Charm and their sexy cousin: self esteem are within the reach of even us mortals and although they may not generally be ‘city stopping’ they are most certainly number swapping, panty dropping and relationship rocking.

Prez Clinton was a smoking success at mastering both power and charm, and if you leaf through the history books there are many glowing examples of the hypnotic effect of a little bit of old fashioned internal trumpet blowing. All but bad cigar jokes aside, what is it about a person exuding self confidence that gets the juices flowing even when that person themselves may have little else to offer in the way of looks, money or intelligence. And more importantly, ‘how can I get me sum o dat’!!! Without, of course, the throngs of loonies that want you dead and the weight of the civilised free world on your shoulders.

Well anyone who like me has spent more than a few hundred hours reading up on self help books trying to get to the bottom of the secrets of how to get richer, happier, healthier, sexier, or more successful will know there is no shortage of advice on the subject. Building self esteem, winning friends and influencing people and getting who or what you want from life seems to be the meat and veg of every self respecting motivation guru, but does any of it work? 

I remember when I started researching this topic 20 years ago I would dash to the book shop every couple of weeks to buy the latest tome by the latest expert. Devouring it enthusiastically, only stopping to look in the mirror briefly to check if I had reached enlightenment. Of course I was never quite sure what enlightenment was supposed to look like but I thought it was reasonable to assume that halo’s or’ other worldly’ glows would probably ensue. To my huge disappointment years later, not only had I not glowed, levitated, visualised a million dollars into reality or said enough affirmations regarding Angelina Jolie to have her arrive on my doorstep naked with flowers, I actually felt worse about myself.

With the weight of all the ‘must do’s’, ‘should do’s’ and ‘need to’s’ I hadn’t been able to put into practice, or hadn’t been able to find the time to do, it made me feel more like a failure than ever.

So with Anthony Robbins and George Bush in Australia over the next month I thought it would be a good time to look at what the average person can realistically do to build that extra bit of confidence, strength and self esteem. Here are the best 3 time poor, bullshit free steps to finding the world leader or confidant relationship Diva in all of us;

Love thy self:- Ok so you don’t have to spend long languid afternoons in bed with a mirror and a copy of your baby photos. But as clichéd as it is the old saying ‘how can you expect someone else to love what you don’t love yourself’ is oh so true.

“But I don’t love myself!” I hear you say. “I hate my thighs and my nose and I’m useless” and blah blah blah. So how do you overcome feelings like this? Well that’s step two, the old Hollywood mantra ‘Act as if’.

Act as if: – An interesting scientific fact is that the brain is actually not very good at telling the difference between what’s real and what’s not. That’s why we get scared at a horror movies, revolted at gory ones and cry at sad or romantic ones even though we know 100% that none of what’s on the screen is actually happening.

Our brains are wired with something called mirror neurons and they make what we see or think a mental reality in our heads. In other words the exact same neurons fire and imprint on your brain when you imagine something, as when it actually happens. Your brain doesn’t know the difference. So when you consider we have up to 30,000 internal conversations a day. No I don’t mean the ones when your dog turns into Satan and tells you to buy a hand gun. I mean the usual hum drum, drone of the average persons internal chitter chatter, you have to ask yourself how many of your conversations are giving you a hard time?

Imagine if you were on a plane for 24 hours and the person next to you kept telling you what a useless prick you were or how bad you looked?? You would smack them in the face somewhere over the Pacific right?. So start de programming the years of bullying and self fladulation you have paid out on yourself by ‘acting as if’. In other words begin to pay attention to your thought process and instead of accepting it, start ‘imagining’ what it would feel like if you felt good about yourself. You don’t even have to believe it at first. Just pretend – remember your brain doesn’t know the difference. It’s all about re programming one neuron at a time.

Failure is your friend. This is the biggest kept secret of all. Any world leader, successful businessperson, great romancer or genuinely happy individual will tell you that your perceived failures, lets downs, split ups, rejections and upsets are the stepping stones to your successes, be that in romance or life in general. It’s the people who stay crushed under the rubble of failures in their lives that never get to see what’s on the other side. Remember the old story of Sir Thomas Edison failing 6000 times before he got the light bulb right. Ok so he was probably obsessive compulsive but you get the point!

So imagine if increasing your self-esteem and charm, attracting the people in your life you could fall in love with and feeling a whole lot better about yourself didn’t take becoming ruler of the free world or a captain of industry. It was just about taking 3 simple steps. None of which you can fail at!

How do you think your love life would work out then?