How to Create More Confidence,

Introduction

 

Confidence is self-trust in your skills, choices, and values. It comes from within yourself and feels like an inner knowing of your strengths and weaknesses while still thinking positively about yourself. Often we enter into the world with an abundance of self-confidence. Consider the young child who feels confident taking risks like jumping off the swings or dances without a care in front of a crowd.  While many people often have a strong sense of confidence as a child, life often throws curve balls that can diminish confidence. Low self-confidence can feel like being unable to handle other people’s criticisms or difficulty trusting yourself and others. The great thing is, every moment is a chance to build evidence toward your self-confidence. To make up for what was lost, you can rebuild confidence over time through small and large moments that ladder up toward more self-trust.  Notably, although they look similar on the surface, being shy or introverted does not equate to a lack of self-confidence. Shyness and being an introvert is a personality trait where some people are naturally timid around others. 

 

WHY IS CONFIDENCE IMPORTANT?

Times where you feel like giving up. Helps you make instant connections and build relationships that will ensure you succeed in life.  Help you attract a partner you can build a healthy relationship with. Help you effectively handle conflict and seek out new opportunities ­that will foster your personal growth.

 

What causes low confidence?

Caregivers that are overly critical or reprimanding

Caregivers that limit a child’s exploration

Feeling rejected by peers

Difficulties transitioning into a constructed idea of “adulthood”

Media representations and data from the world about what’s “ideal” in a person

 

THE PRINCIPLES OF HOW TO BE CONFIDENT (4)

 

If you want to learn how to build confidence, you must be willing to change your state. Your state is essentially your mood at any given time of day. Your mood is influenced by how you feel about yourself at that point in time. The good news is you can change your state at any time – no matter what’s going on around you – as long as you know how to do it. Here are the main principles of building confidence and certainty that anyone can use to their advantage – and some real-life examples to help you apply them in any area of your life.

 

BODY LANGUAGE

Physiology is key when learning how to be confident. Mastering the body language of confidence can put you on the path to success. Think about someone you know whom you consider extremely confident. When you first met them, you probably knew they were confident before they even started speaking. You knew they were self-assured because of the way they carried themselves and moved. They made eye contact, shook your hand firmly and stood up straight. Now do a quick inventory of your body. What’s your posture like? How are you breathing? We all get in negative states, which can lead to slouching, shallow breathing or hanging your head. You have the power to change how you’re feeling by controlling the way your body moves and the way you present yourself.

 

POSITIVITY

Thinking positive can manifest itself in several ways. First, change your focus – because “Where focus goes, energy flows”. Instead of getting hung up on all the ways something could go wrong, focus on all the ways it could go right. What you focus on becomes your reality – and that includes what you focus on within your own mind. Replace negative words with positive ones and start seeing the bright side of situations. By changing your focus, internally and externally, you’re changing your state. And by changing your state, you’ll change your life.

 

EMOTIONAL CONTROL

Humans have the unique and incredible capacity to experience a wide range of emotions. But if you let your emotions dictate your experience of life without pinpointing why you feel a particular way, your emotions control you. The truth is that you control the way you feel, including whether or not you feel confident. Confidence is not something people are born with – it’s something you must create. Building confidence creates the feeling of certainty that you can accomplish what you set out to do. Confidence is like any other emotion. It is something you feel, and you can train yourself to access it in an instant.

 

A GROWTH MINDSET

What do you think being confident entails? You may have some idea that confidence only stems from prior success – that you can only know how to be confident in yourself after you’ve become wildly successful. This sort of core belief severely limits you. Confidence doesn’t come from your outward achievements – it comes from within. Being confident means that if you do fail, you can pick yourself back up and try again instead of throwing in the towel. Once you start taking actionable steps toward your goal of being confident, your beliefs will gradually start to solidify. It’s time to adopt a growth mindset and start believing that you can learn how to build confidence. “Whatever you hold in your mind on a consistent basis is exactly what you will experience in your life.”

 

HOW TO BE CONFIDENT?

What do those principles have in common? They are all about becoming the master of your emotions. You must change your perspective and your mindset, and choose to be confident. And part of achieving this is believing – building certainty – that you are confident. That can sometimes be easier said than done, but there are specific actions you can take to apply these principles and become confident.

 

• Figure out where your lack of confidence stems from.

Finding the root cause for low self-confidence can provide a map of how to build up more positive self-confidence. A good place to start is through self-reflection and journaling. Try this exercise to help you get to the possible root cause of your low self-confidence: For one week, record any low self-confidence thoughts or sayings that keep showing up for you. For each thought or saying, ask yourself “Who or what told you that?” Decide if you want to allow that voice to have authority over your thoughts in this stage of your life. Journal out your reactions and create a plan of action to move forward.

 

• Understand what self-confidence feels like for you.

Take some time to figure out what confidence feels like in your body. A good question to ask is “How will you know that you’ve reached a satisfactory level of self-confidence?” Perhaps you will start speaking up more at work. You might finally wear that outfit you’ve always wanted to. You may even introduce yourself to your crush. This will be different from person to person, so it doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else. This is your personal measurement of confidence. 

 

• Align with yourself.

If you find yourself frequently using the word “should,” (for example, I should be married by 30, I should have a house by next year, or I should have my life together by now), take a step back and reflect. Where is this “should” coming from? Many of the “shoulds” in life stem from cultural or familial expectations. With all of these statements, it’s helpful to always ask yourself: Is this what I truly want for myself? You have the power to reclaim your life at any point. The more that you make decisions aligned with your true self and your desires, the more confident you will become in your decision-making.

 

• Start small.

Most of us don’t like experiencing a ton of change at once. A very important key for self-improvement work is starting small. One way to build self-confidence is to make small promises to yourself and then follow through. And the key word is small. Do things that are a stretch but also realistic for you. So perhaps if you’re not a morning person, not committing to waking up at 6 a.m. every day to do a morning routine but instead trying out an evening routine.

 

• Adopt a growth mindset.

A growth mindset encourages you to explore beyond your current skills and knowledge, keeping the possibility of improvement open. Instead of using phrases like “I’m not confident,” just add “yet” to it, which transforms the old belief into “I’m not confident yet.” This adds the qualifier that you are in the process of gaining skills to become confident.

 

• Know you will fail, and that’s OK.

We live in a failure-averse culture where people mostly just talk about their accomplishments. Rarely do you ever get to hear about people’s accounts of failure. Understanding that failure happens and is a part of the process of living will help you to live more fully. For a lot of us, we were usually taught that self-confidence comes from achievements. However, this means that when we achieve, we feel great about our abilities, but when we fail, our self-confidence takes a hit. Self-confidence comes from our own thoughts about our abilities rather than external achievements. So that regardless of whether we succeed or fail, we have the power to retain our self-confidence.

 

• Stand up to your inner critic.

Sometimes you might hesitate to trust yourself because you’ve received critical feedback from authority figures earlier in life, like parents, teachers, or community leaders, and you have adopted their criticisms as your own beliefs. But there comes a point when this feedback no longer serves your current life. Standing up to those old criticisms can unlock a new level of confidence. Confidence can also be built by rewriting the narratives in our heads about our worthiness. This involves identifying self-limiting beliefs and reframing them. Often the voice in our head that tells us we are not good enough is not our authentic voice but an aggregate of all the voices of those who have criticized us in the past. When we talk back to the inner critic enough, the confident inner-child that we lost touch with can reemerge.

 

• Understand that emotions and feelings are temporary.

Emotions are tunnels. You have to go all the way through the darkness to get to the light at the end. Emotions go through a cycle of beginning, middle, and end. Although emotions can feel really intense in the moment, they are only temporary. At the very basic level, emotions are physiological responses to stimuli in your environment. If your Wi-Fi goes out right before your work presentation, you may experience an acute pang of stress. If you receive a surprise package from your sister, you may be overcome by heartfelt joy. If you get a text from your ex, you may feel a sharp streak of hot sadness. Whatever the stimuli and paired emotion, they’re all data points to inform your next action step. In terms of confidence, any emotion like anxiety, stress, or fear that is holding you back from taking action is only temporary. Once it subsides, you can make your next move. As the saying goes, “Feel the fear and do it anyway.”

 

• Focus on what you can control.

A lot of times, we base our self-confidence on things we actually have no control over—what other people think, the outcome of a project, others’ reactions, etc. To build self-confidence, we need to release our attachment to the things we can’t control and start basing our self-confidence on what we do have control over. Take, for example, when you’re working on a presentation. You might invest a lot of energy into other people’s opinions, the outcome of your project, or your peers’ reactions to your work. To build self-confidence against things you don’t have control over, focus on the things you can control—for example, how prepared you are, your passion for the presentation topic, and how much work you’ve put into it. Remind yourself of these things consistently and repeatedly until they become your new beliefs. Grounding yourself in things you can control, even just one aspect of your goal, will provide you with more stability to move forward. And remember: Building confidence builds more confidence. By starting in the places you have control over, you can ensure that you build confidence from a place of inner strength.

 

• Build a like-minded community around you.

Research suggests that our views of ourselves are usually inaccurate. Whether you underestimate or overestimate your abilities, you can’t create a more accurate level of self-confidence in isolation. You need to interact with your environment, hobbies, and other people to build confidence. Curating an intentional environment to develop your budding confidence is crucial. Share your experience with a few close friends who are on the same self-development journey. 

 

• Take a break from social media.

People who have lower self-esteem tend to gravitate toward building a “false self” on social media, which can lead to an inaccurate sense of self and self-worth. So consider taking a break from social media to reconnect with the person you truly are, free from comparisons and trying to impress others. 

 

• Cultivate compassion.

Cultivating a sense of self-compassion can help you to sympathize with yourself when you experience difficulties in life. This can help you turn away from negative, demeaning self-talk and toward more loving, nurturing ways to talk to ourselves. Compassion is key in cultivating self-confidence. Holding on to past ‘mistakes’ or ‘failures’ really affects how confident we are. If we can be kind to ourselves and allow ourselves to let go of these moments, then we allow ourselves to trust ourselves.