Don’t worry if others don’t like you. Worry if you don’t appreciate yourself.
Confucius
Self-esteem is a quality that acts as an amplifier for every activity we carry out, in fact having greater self-confidence means living happier and with greater capacity for action.
Even if you have been following Individual Growth for a while and have read about different strategies for achieving your personal fulfillment, without self-confidence or self-esteem, you will not get very far.
What does it mean to have confidence in yourself?
Self-confidence is the value, judgment and security we have of our ability to perform actions and in general to live our lives freely.
It is therefore evident that a lack of self-confidence limits us and slows us down when we try to reach a goal, whatever it is.
Maybe sometimes you have had the feeling of wanting to have your say without succeeding, of wanting to do something intensely without finding the courage within you or of feeling limited.
This is probably a matter of self-confidence.
Let’s look at the important aspects of self-esteem first and then 20 ways to increase self-confidence .
If you want something more in-depth take a look at my True Self-Esteem course .
What you need to know to have confidence in yourself
I’ve talked a lot about self-esteem (follow the link to read the article), but in this paragraph you will discover something more.
Suffering from a lack of self-confidence is a major cause of our suffering, especially people with low confidence in their abilities:
- They tend to have a passive attitude
- They suffer from a sense of general inferiority
- They have little tendency to take small calculated risks
- They have various and varied limiting beliefs
- They have a renouncing attitude
- They suffer from poor resilience
- They have a deep sense of never knowing enough
- They are passive or aggressive and have a hard time being assertive
Fortunately, self-esteem can be increased by working day by day with some precautions: let’s see 20 exercises to increase self-confidence .
20 effective ways to gain self-confidence
- Recalibrate your inner voice. Repeating yourself over and over again that you are tired, that you will never make it, that you are not fit to do a certain thing or other such phrases , creates a mental representation in you making it somehow real. Try to reconsider and change that little voice by thinking more positively. Thinking positive does not mean being unduly optimistic, but being aware that you have the power to change your thinking and what you think about yourself.
- Daydreams steal your self-esteem. Stop daydreaming now, but first identify the source of these visions.
What do you think about recurrently? To be a famous movie super hero like Ironman or Superman ? Or imagine you’re a video game character or a princess waiting for prince charming? You probably take refuge in these dreams because in real life you don’t have the stimuli that these fantasies obviously offer you.
Daydreaming of these kinds of scenarios is not a strategy that has a good effect in the real world, nor is it for self-confidence. Forget alternate realities and focus on what you can change in the real world. I’m not telling you that dreaming hurts, I’m telling you to eliminate, or rather replace, those absolutely unrealizable and imaginative fantasies linked to unreality. Imagine all the time you unwittingly spend fantasizing and traveling with your head and try to think about what you could create in the real world if you took advantage of this time. Instead of thinking about imagining things that make your imagination fly, use this time to think about what you actually want to achieve. I’m saying live your dream instead of imagining it. - Clean your inner mirror. Often what we believe others think of us is actually what we think of ourselves.
Sometimes we feel judged by others solely because we are the first to judge ourselves and we relive it through other people , just like in a mirror. Clean your inner mirror of what you think are the judgments made by others: many of our actions are limited by what we think and not by what others think. - Compare yourself correctly. Try to avoid confrontation with people who have already arrived: if you want to have a yardstick, compare yourself with them but how they were when they started your same path. What you see in others is the result of many years of work, taking a arrived person as a model is counterproductive . In the gym, for example, do not make comparisons with individuals who are already fit, knowing them you will understand that they had to make many sacrifices and maybe when they had the same experience behind them they were even further behind you.
- Use the pro’s technique. Sometimes the fear of failure does not make us proceed for fear of making a bad impression in front of others. Try not to be obsessed with mistakes but rather try to understand if you really did something wrong, because often you are not. Have you ever noticed how actors, dancers and singers keep going even when they’re wrong in theater performances? Maybe they make a big mistake, which can happen, but they proceed as quietly as if nothing had happened and most of the time the audience doesn’t notice anything.
- What you consider true is realized. We have already seen how self-fulfilling prophecy works : many of the things we believe to be true, eventually in one way or another, can become reality. Self-confidence mainly depends on the thought we have within ourselves: use self-fulfilling prophecies in your favor.
- Perfectionism gets it under your nose. Do not pursue perfection, take a first step, analyze how it goes, what is wrong, what to correct and proceed in this way, slowly, to build confidence in yourself a little at a time. It is normal to fail and to be afraid, trying to become perfect is senseless because we cannot change our DNA. However, we can act, for example, on our charm, heal ourselves aesthetically and feel good about ourselves, the mind will automatically follow us giving us well-being.
- Accept yourself as you are, but with this trick. Accepting ourselves does not mean surrendering to our own discomfort or suffering, but to take note of how we are in order to accept the challenge of change. Don’t accept yourself as you are, but as you would be at your best; i.e. don’t settle for an inferior version of yourself, but accept the best version you can reach.
- Enhance and create valuable experiences. Often the lack of self-confidence is given by the lack of extraordinary experiences that have led to adequate psychological growth. Have you ever noticed that there are people of the same age but that some have a strong personality, great self-esteem and ability to carry out projects while others seem to have arrested their growth and their life experience many years ago? Probably the first category of people has a relevant and stimulating experience from which they have drawn a great experience that is now part of their strength. Experiences shape us and make us grow, so the idea is to enhance your valuable experiences and create new noteworthy experiences: in this regard, read the article on 5 things to do before dying.
- Start with simple goals. One of the most effective ways to increase self-confidence is to set small goals that are very simple and easy to fulfill. For example, cleaning up your PC, desk or going to a certain place that makes you feel slightly uncomfortable, then moving on to more important goals and gradually building your self-esteem. In short, it’s time to get out of the comfort zone.
- Sometimes doing nothing is the right thing. Sometimes it can happen to repeat over and over that we have to make a commitment or that we have to honor a promise made to someone else. However, if you have a strong tendency to procrastinate with a more than valid reason, rather than making a commitment and then not honoring it, choose not to make promises you cannot keep so as to avoid further lowering your self-esteem. Evaluate every promise you make to others and especially to yourself.
- Your point of view matters. I have already talked about this aspect in the article dedicated to the history of the horse. People often tell us that we cannot do a certain thing because they themselves have not succeeded or because they do not want others to succeed where they have failed. Remember that your point of view always matters, objectively evaluate the circumstances that influence your choices and do not be overly influenced.
- The physical aspect has to do with self-confidence. Let’s start with a little reflection: you could spend a century in your body, so it makes more sense to take care of it properly. Not to mention that a well-groomed appearance transmits positive signals to your brain; to further explore this aspect, read the article on self-esteem that I indicated earlier.
- Let go of excessive demands and expectations. It can happen, when we launch into a new business, to leave with widely exaggerated expectations and often out of reality. Perhaps you have happened to go to the gym and quit after a month with no apparent results, resulting in lowered self-confidence. This happens because we start our activities with surreal pretensions while instead it is better to start without particular expectations.
- Develop a project-related skill. Have you ever experienced the feeling of wanting to do? Have you ever found yourself being struck by an idea, a thought or a project or a sport? Do you remember how you felt? It was almost an obsession so it took up space in your head, yet thanks to this project you probably momentarily stopped building castles in the air and procrastinating. Maybe you thought about it all the time at all hours of the day and night. So find a project that can move great energies within you.
- A quick exercise to boost self-confidence. Try to list only 3 of your physical and character qualities that distinguish you, of which you are proud and which are always valid in any situation. For example that you like your hair or that you can always be on time. Once done, write a couple of lines about why you like them to solidify these positive qualities that are independent of the situation you are in. This exercise repeated a few times is very useful for strengthening self-confidence.
- Pay attention to your internal dialogue. As we saw in point # 1 our inner voice is king when it comes to self-esteem. Another effective remedy for low self-esteem is to erase excessive self-criticism and be slightly more malleable, in short, be kind to yourself. But be careful to cancel only the senseless and disempowering self-criticisms, without constructive self-criticism we stop growing and improving.
- Resolve the contradictions within you. Loving yourself is not easy for everyone, we often go into contradiction within ourselves because we think one thing but do another. Is what you think you have to do really your will or is it a decision made by a puppeteer above you? Unravel the cards in your life and ask yourself if the goals you are pursuing are in line with who you are, if they no longer are or if they never were.
- Know the locus of control of self-confidence. The locus of control, in fact, is a belief (sometimes correct, sometimes not) deeply rooted within us that can be of two types: internal or external. Those who have an internallocus of control think they have the total capacity to control events, linking successes and failures to the expression of their abilities. Those who possess the external locus of control , on the other hand, have the belief that almost every event is dominated by external factors: fate, chance or luck. To increase self-confidence you need to know, reflect and become aware of these two possibilities: too often we have a tendency to yield to an external locus of control, when perhaps we have the full capacity to control what happens to us to turn it in our favor.
- Beware of self-esteem thieves. There are people who often, even without realizing it, rob us of our self-esteem by repeating demotivating phrases or convincing us of faults that we do not have. Identify these people and carefully reevaluate their judgments, do not allow them to rob you of your self-confidence and try to become more emotionally independent. To learn more, I suggest you read the article dedicated to energy vampires.
- Bonus +1 – Start your journey. If you really want to find self-confidence step by step, take a look at Self-Esteem Vera, my course to increase self-esteem in 60 days.
How to find self-confidence
Self- confidence must be considered as a skill to be cultivated, or as a real path of personal growth .
To be sure of oneself means to sink one’s self-esteem on solid and real foundations, not on weird “quantum transformative” techniques.
We also dispel the myth that having adequate self-confidence leads people to become inflated balloons , in this case we are talking about bullies, I’m sure you are perfectly able to recognize the difference.
As we have seen, nurturing self-confidence means seeking a delicate balance of self-esteem between who we are and what we perceive to be.
