How can we successfully build our self-confidence and live life feeling strong, confident and self-assured?
We all have self-confidence issues at some point in time. Even the most confident people have their insecurities and the people who appear extremely self-confident aren’t perfect.
Even though we dream of being perfect and we see other people who appear self-confident and all together, we have to realize that no one can be perfect. We are all human and we all make mistakes. The things we want to happen in our lives don’t necessarily happen the way we want them to, no matter how carefully we plan our futures.
Success Comes From Self-Confidence
The most confident person doesn’t become that way by sheer luck. Success don’t just happen. Successful people must know hardship and suffering. They must know defeat, struggle and loss before they truly understand the depth of their worth.
The things we want to achieve will pass us by when we don’t work towards achieving them. It takes effort and self-confidence to make things happen.
Everyone is built for recognition, for achievement, for fame. The capacity to be confident of oneself does not happen by chance, it lies within all of us. Like with all other things in life, we are just as capable as the person sitting next to us. The only difference is our belief in ourselves and that we can accomplish anything we set our minds to.
Signs of Low Self-Confidence
There is no single factor that leads to a lack of confidence. Most often, it is the accumulation of negative experiences from our past, which we fail to deal with when they happen. It is also the result of our failure to recognize who we truly are and what hinders to our own growth.
We define ourselves, we confine ourselves
Low self-confidence is defeating. It can define us and cause us to beat ourselves up emotionally. We limit our abilities and this keep us from growing and moving forward from our mistakes, failures and defeats.
It confines us to our comfort zone where everything is safe from potential humiliation and further mistakes. We are then stuck in that comfort zone believing that we shouldn’t move away from it. We believe that if we leave our comfort zone we will be left hurt and disappointed. Once we are stuck in that zone, it is very hard to move forward in life. This keeps us from achieving our dreams, reaching our goals and living a rich full life. Even when we tell ourselves that no matter how harsh and messed up things get, we shouldn’t surrender to the inner critic that thrives inside us. The inner critic fills us with self-doubt and a profound lack of confidence.
Believing The Naysayers
We might have people around us who are more than happy to point out our mistakes and faults rather than praising our talents. These could be anyone from teachers during our formative years, parents, friends, co-workers.
They may not even realize what they’re doing or how big an impact they are having on our self-confidence. They may not even say anything to our face, but often their actions speak louder than words, making us feel inadequate and worthless.
Perhaps you live under cold critical eyes of someone who doesn’t see the good in anything. Maybe you are related to an over achiever and live in the shadow of their accomplishments. Perhaps those around you make you feel like you can’t do anything right. These are all triggers that can make you feel inferior and inadequate which only adds to your lack of confidence.
With poor rule models and lack of support, many grow up feeling as if they are incapable of doing certain things, growing or achieving anything of value. What we do have to believe is that each of us has our own inner strength and power to take control of our lives. We just have to have the confidence to do it. Once you recognize the underlying causes of your lack of confidence, you can begin the process of overcoming the impact it has on your life. The best place to start is by evaluating the triggers that smash your confidence and make you feel inadequate. A good place to start is by keeping a journal.
7 Ways To Build Self-Confidence
A lack of self-confidence can stem from many things, even as early as our childhood. Your childhood may be impacted by the people around us and it determines how we grow up as well is what we achieve. At a very young age, we already know the difference between being humiliated or encouraged. We already understand when good or bad things happen to us.
If from young we are lost to react positively to negative situations, this may impact us later on. Whether it’s due to the lack of proper guidance, support or role models, it’s likely that the succeeding phases of our lives will become dependent with how we developed later.
1. Learn From Life Experiences
With age comes maturity and maturity comes from the experiences we go through. Experience is one of the greatest teachers we have. Failure to learn from the experiences we encounter keeps us trapped in a recurring loop. We will only break this cycle of self-defeat when we are able to see where we’ve gone wrong and correct our course.
Many of us find ourselves limited by our experiences. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t learn or grow from those experiences and change our perception of ourselves. We are all gifted with certain talents, skills and beauty within along with the power to use or disregard them. Once we recognize our potential, we will find that life has much more to offer than mediocrity.
2. Take Full Responsibility of Your Life
Improving self-confidence is just a matter of becoming more mature and learning from our mistakes. Everyone has the ability to improve his or her own self-confidence regardless of how we were in the past. What matters is now, the present. If you take stock of yourself and believe that you have the capacity to be anything and everything you want to be, you can move towards achieving your dreams and becoming more self-confident.
3. Turn Things Around Positively
Remember that you can do anything you set your mind to. Write down times when you’re feeling less than confident and what caused you to feel that way. What about writing down things that you could do differently that will help make you feel better and more confident about yourself?
It’s important not to be too hard on yourself when thing don’t go as well as expected. Don’t deprive yourself from enjoying life. Take stock of yourself and refrain from making excuses as to why you can reach your goals. Instead change your mindset and think of all of the positive things in your life and how you achieved them.
By identifying these triggers and combating them with positive reinforcement, you can begin to move forward and become the self-confident person inside you.
4. Change Our Perception
The difference between being afraid to try and being confident in your abilities comes with our understanding and acceptance of the experiences we go through in life. Some people are just better at recognizing their abilities and achieving their goals than others are.
Like being rich, we think that self-confidence is something that everyone has. Except that we are the ones lacking in self-confidence. We must believe that we have the power within us to achieve anything. Inequality just comes with our notions of what we already have and fail to recognize it in a positive way.
5. Get Out of Our Comfort Zone
Simple things like reflecting on our achievements can help improve our level of confidence.
We can build our self-confidence by doing activities that are out of our comfort zone. What are your fears? What are you not confident of? How about starting out with conquering our fears, like doing public speaking, or engaging in small talk with complete strangers. If this is too much out of the comfort zone, how about first writing about conquering fear in your journal?
Once you take the steps to conquer this fear, you will discover that your confidence will increase and even more is possible. This holds true for any fear you may have. Once you make up your mind not to let it beat you a world of possibilities will open.
By recognizing that life hold endless possibilities, you just have to be open to them. You can then take control of your life and be a strong and confident person capable of accomplishing anything.
6. Eliminate the Inner Critic
It is strange how many of us fail to listen to that tiny voice inside ourselves. There is no biological or scientific explanation to this voice, but we all hear them. An innate murmuring voice telling us we aren’t good enough, we’re worthless, we can’t do anything right, does this sound familiar?
For some the voice is the all-commanding mentor and for some, this little voice has become their inner critic, or worse a guiding force in their lives. If we would all remember, this tiny voice has been with us throughout our lives, guiding us to make the proper decisions.
But during the course of life, when we have become too jaded and have forgotten the beliefs we once had, this voice becomes silent that we no can no longer remember how good it feels to listen to its guidance. It was intended to help us but our negative thoughts turn that little voice into an inner critic.
Banish the Inner Critic
This inner critic is the nagging voice that tells you how deficient you are, how ugly you are, how weak and useless you are and how people dislike you for who and what you are. It will convince you to believe in all these lies until your self-confidence is sapped and your sense of self becomes devoid.
You may try not to listen to this inner critic initially. Yet once you believe in its miserable denials of who you are, you are sure to have it win you over. You will then be convinced of the validity of its claims and so, you will resort to succumb to mediocre and somber life.
This inner critic lives in all of us as much as the inner voice of goodness does. Theirs is a battle to conquer your being. To deliver you back from the course of goodness and happiness or to the other end.
This inner critic will provide proof of how stupid it would be take chances with faith. It will create proofs of how unable and incapacitated you are against shining. It will make you believe in time that you truly are worthless and insignificant. It will store memories of such failures to be recovered when you falter with “unbelief”. This inner critic will eat you up until it overpowers your sense of self. You will eventually be ruled with fear anxiety and a lack of self-confidence.
7. Believe In Yourself, Build Your Self-Confidence
Of course, you are worth everything. You are endowed with talents, skills and personality that make you important to those around you and for the world. When the voice of inner critic tells you, you can’t do something or you’re not good enough it’s important to face it with everything you have and prove it wrong.
Keep in mind that we don’t always have to be good at everything, so don’t be afraid to try new things. While your inner critic may have the noble intention of keeping you from failing, it can also keep you from succeeding.
I hope this article paves the way for you to build up your self-confidence. Get on the journey of discovery yourself and that is among the most wonderful venture you will take in life.