When you’re confident you feel secure in yourself and your abilities. Not arrogant but quietly certain that you’re capable of handling what shows up in your life. Confidence is necessary for you to back yourself to move forward into the unknown to reach your goals and your dreams. Everyone agrees that confidence is important but far fewer people have solid advice on how to become more confident.
External events and outcomes can increase or decrease your confidence. You have no control over those externals except in the way you choose to respond. Stronger self-confidence creates better responses. So here they are, 11 ways of building self-confidence you can start implementing today.
1. Make your Relationship with the Most Important Person in Your Life the Best it can be
William Glasser said that everything is a relationship issue. What you probably forget is that the most important relationship you have is with yourself. When you relate to anyone, including yourself, you are either connecting or disconnecting.
2. Take the Best Care of your Body that you Can
When you value something you take care of it, right? Your body is the only vessel you have to experience life through. It’s a marvel of engineering but it can also cause you a lot of pain. Some of this pain is outside of your control but you do have a lot of control over the way your body looks and feels. The way your body looks and feels can add or detract from your confidence.
Instead of taking care of your body do you have a tendency to use your body for comfort? If you’re comforting yourself with food, alcohol or vegging out you’re not caring for your body you’re abusing your body.
You can keep doing this or you can look at the underlying causes of your stress and manage the symptoms better while you sort those causes out.
3. Meeting your Needs
You have five genetic needs: survival, power, love and belonging, fun, and freedom. Everyone has the same five needs to varying degrees. If you can meet those needs successfully you will be confident and happy.
Enter your email address on the sidebar so we can send you our Needs Profile and Satisfaction Questionnaire. You can then see how well you’re meeting your needs and how this could be dragging down your confidence.
4. Focus on what you can Control
There’s only ever one thing in life that can you control and that’s you in the present moment. Blaming yourself for your past choices, or allowing yourself to get down for long over things that are outside of your control is waste of time.
Practice being the best you can be in everything you do then let everything else go. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by what’s going on around you. Most of this will be outside of your control. Pull your attention in around what you’re doing and focus on it fully. Bring joy and enthusiasm to your tasks and appreciate your efforts.
5. Do what Brings You Joy
Joy is the greatest currency of the universe. Feeling joyful builds confidence. It feels great to feel great.
Doing the things that you love is usually the first thing you drop when you’re under pressure. When you do that you’re telling yourself that you aren’t as important to yourself as other people, and other things.
6. Accept what is Showing up
Accepting what is showing up in your life and learning how to deal with it successfully is an amazing way of building confidence. Unless you’re in imminent physical danger, the basis of most fear is the idea that you won’t be able to handle something that might happen. So each time that you do handle something successfully you’re building your confidence.
7. Glance in your Rear Vision Mirror Every Now and Then
You can’t get where you want to go by staring at your rear vision mirror. That’s why your rear vision mirror isn’t very big and your windscreen, by comparison, is huge. It does help your confidence however if you glance at where you’ve been and how far you’ve come, now and then.
8. Stop Comparing Yourself
Part of having a great relationship with yourself is to really value and appreciate who you are, your unique talents, and your journey. It’s very difficult to do that if you’re always comparing yourself to other people. So STOP IT!!
9. Check your Perception
Truth is the information you agree on until more information comes along. If the information that you’re giving yourself, via your thoughts and actions isn’t working for you go out and get some different perspectives. Ask people who you trust what they think. Gather information from reputable sources and if necessary change your perception or change your behaviours until you’re in alignment.
10. Check your Quality World Pictures
Your Quality world pictures are the ideas you have about the things that you need to be happy. Confidence is part of happiness because it takes confidence to be able to meet your needs. If you’re having trouble meeting your needs there are three things you can change: your thoughts and actions, your perceptions, or your quality world pictures. If your quality world pictures are unrealistic or unattainable your confidence will keep getting battered. You don’t have to completely wipe your dreams and aspirations but they might need tweaking.
11. Learn how to Manage Stress and Anxiety
Stress and anxiety are a vicious cocktail when it comes to wrecking self-confidence. When you’re highly stressed your lizard brain kicks in and your lizard brain only has a couple of options: fight or flight. It developed that way to save you from physical threats. Today’s issues require the more modern parts of your brain to help you strategise yourself out of your problems. You need to think clearly and you can’t do that with old lizard brain in charge.
As always thanks for visiting and I hope this post has helped you gain some clarity over confidence-building. If you don’t already receive regular communication from us sign up for the Needs Profile in the sidebar so we can keep in touch. You can also book an online counselling appointment with Jeff below.
To a more confident you 🙂
Deb
