HOW TO BUILD CONFIDENCE: 5 STEPS TO GAIN CONFIDENCE

The reality now is that life can be pretty competitive and without a dose of confidence it is impossible to achieve the things we desire. With a lack of confidence, it`s hard to put yourself out there and you feel limited to do things you want such as putting up a business, starting a relationship with someone, creating a Youtube channel, the list goes on.

You can have a multi-millionaire business idea but without confidence, it won`t get you anything as confidence makes you a doer to take actions and transform your ideas into reality. This article is dedicated to helping you build a healthy dose of confidence.

You might have experienced this where our teachers and cultures chastise us for doing creative things and instead teach us to do “proper work”. Our family telling us to take an Engineering course or Information technology, become a doctor or a lawyer instead of taking Performance arts.

Our friends encouraging us not to pursue someone we like because we are not worthy of it. Such things have a dampening effect on our confidence.

But the good news is, we can never lose our confidence. Some things may crush your confidence but they can be developed over time. All you need to do is nurture it and reading this article is the first step of unleashing that confidence that is already within you.

Let`s define confidence

What is confidence? I know for sure that we all want it. Some people lack confidence, some people have too much of it. Psychology Today defines confidence as belief in oneself, the conviction that one has the ability to meet life’s challenges and to succeed—and the willingness to act accordingly.

You can acquire and develop this ability to go through challenges and thrive in this competitive world. It is a belief that you can set to yourself and if you can believe in it, you can own it.

Similar to this, Claire Shipman and Katty Kay, authors of The Confidence Code say that confidence is the bridge between thoughts and actions. This means that if you have enough belief in your own abilities, then you can be a doer. You can be active and make efforts to chase your dreams.

ALSO READ: How to stay motivated and inspired

How can confidence help you achieve success in all areas of your life?

Confidence is essential. Don A Moore emphasized it in his book, Perfectly Confident. I knew this really well before starting my mission of inspiring others using this platform. Without confidence, I cannot inspire and empower fellow women.

So, this was something I had to work on really hard because I used to operate in the eyes of fear, and it includes negative emotions such as lack of confidence, self-doubts, anxiety, or fear of judgment.

I had to boost my confidence through reading books, practicing self-love, and affirmations. This topic is close to my heart and I am so glad to share ways to build confidence.

Building confidence results in good opportunities in our business, career, or relationships. When you have that perfect confidence in you, you can open the doors of opportunities and seize them.

Confidence may not be the sole answer to success, but it helps you to start the work you need to succeed. It can give you the push you need to work on your goals. When you have the right level of confidence, you can increase your credibility, improve your decision-making ability and understand your limitations.

Are you ready to build confidence? Here are 5 ways you can try.

1. Failing makes you more confident

This is the key message in Mark Manson’s article on How to be more confident. He said the only way to be confident in yourself is to be comfortable with what you lack. The truth is confidence has more to do with our failures than our achievements.

Your failures build more confidence rather than your accomplishments. I just had to agree when he said people who are confident in their business are confident because they are comfortable with failure.

People who are confident with their social lives are confident because they acknowledge rejection.

Build your confidence through failures. Learn from your mistakes, improve yourself from negative experiences and make better decisions from bad ones. Failure is part of success. You can never meet someone who has not experienced failures.

Use your failures, big or small to build that confidence and keep that confidence no matter what happens in life.

2. Optimism helps in building confidence

Optimism is the attitude of always looking at the bright side and thinking that everything will be okay. It may be different from confidence which is the belief in your abilities as defined earlier, optimism has a role in boosting confidence. It helps us to leap and try things which improves confidence as well.

In my English classes, most of my Japanese students prefer to just sit and keep quiet in class, not expressing their opinions because they are uncertain. There are afraid of making mistakes.

Similar to this, lack of confidence makes us scared to even try in life. It makes us uncertain whether our efforts will be successful, most of all uncertainty makes us afraid to leap and try. But what if optimism plays a role?

When you firmly believe that everything will be okay, it helps to ease that uncertainty. Even if events turn the opposite way, there is always a bright side to every situation.

ALSO READ: HOW TO OVERCOME SELF-DOUBT

3. Thrive to know yourself

When I moved to Japan, I cultivated the habit of visiting cafes. I would go to cafes every weekend to study Japanese. But aside from studying, I had another agenda. I would sit by the window, enjoy my coffee while observing people who pass by.

Often, it led me to imagine what kind of life they have. Do you enjoy observing people too? I guess most of us do but when you’re trying to boost confidence, the only person you should be observing is yourself. Focus on yourself and have a piece of deep knowledge of yourself.

“He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.” This quote commonly attributed to Lao Tzu offers one way to build confidence. The first thing you have to know is yourself.

Know your limits, your skill set, strengths, and weakness, what are you good at, and what you enjoy doing. This way you can step out of yourself and plan out how you can contribute to this world. Confidence comes from within when you know yourself.

4. Practice gratitude

There is a Vietnamese proverb that says, “When eating fruit, remember the one who planted the tree.” This is the perfect definition of gratitude and it is a source of positive things such as happiness, contentment, self-love, and of course confidence.

Confidence starts with us. It starts with loving ourselves, changing our perspectives, and practicing gratitude.

Appreciate all the good things about you and it will boost your self-confidence. The quality of being thankful and appreciative of things makes us read to show and return kindness. And we can never go wrong with kindness. If we can just take a minute to appreciate all the good stuff in this life, we can feel more confident.

4. Understand that others are struggling too

When we look at the journey of great athletes, most celebrated writers,s and artists, there is something they have in common. They practice their craft frequently and consistently. You can’t really say you are a good writer if you don’t actually write.

One key message from Moore’s book is that underconfidence is most common when people know their own limits but not other people’s.

Thousands of books offer their advice on how to build confidence. The advice of not comparing your behind-the-scenes to other people’s highlights permeates every book. This is essential to know in building your confidence because it causes all sorts of issues such as a false sense of competence.

In my own experience, comparing my new website to well-established and top-rated ones crushed my confidence. I see other people’s sites and get disappointed because I felt like I can never reach the success they have.

But I had to do something to not fall for the trap. Acknowledging that these people probably spent hours of hard work every day to achieve success in their blogs helped me a lot.

Do not compare your hard work with other people’s finished products.

 Sometimes we only see the successes of others and don’t take into account the unseen time of their struggles and hard work. After seeing what fellow bloggers go through their journey, I gained not only confidence but patience to work on my own path to success. And slowly I see results for my own blog.

It gave me that push to start reaching out to collaborations and projects. I got to work on sponsored content and my site secured the 12^th spot on Top 100 Women’s Lifestyle blogs by Feedspot.

ALSO READ: How to invest in yourself successfully

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OVER TO YOU

Confidence is more important than we think. It is essential in overcoming struggles and achieving success in all aspects of our lives. Building confidence might be easier said than done but if we practice these tips daily, it is very possible to gain the perfect confidence we want for our lives. Remember that we can also teach ourselves to be more confident if we wish to do so.

There are tons of resources online that we can turn to. Next time you want to do things, think less and act more. Be a doer. Don’t overthink the situation, instead, make a decision to take action. If you fail, learn from it. Your failure will build you more confidence. Stay inspired and motivated.