What is Self-Confidence?
Self Confidence is being secure in yourself and your abilities. Most people lack self-confidence, they don’t think they are good enough, they think everyone is better than them, which can hinder your performance at work and in life. So how does one become more self-confident? You have to master the ability to trust yourself, know that you can experience any emotion (including failure) without being harmed, and it’s your overall opinion of yourself. Let’s take a look at each part to better understand how we can be more self-confident no matter what others think and do.
- Ability to Trust Yourself: This comes down to knowing you will do what you have said you will do. You will follow through on your plan. You will take care of yourself. You will do the responsible and useful thing for yourself, even when you don’t feel like it. Let’s not confuse this saying you will do something and then hoping you follow through. That just leaves room for self-doubt. The ability to trust yourself starts from consistent follow through on your word to yourself. No one is born with self-confidence; you earn it from yourself by keeping your word and doing what you say at the highest level.
- Knowing That You Can Experience Any Emotion: The worst that can ever happen is an emotion. Truly, emotions are what make life bad when it’s bad. Most of us spend too much time in self- doubt because we don’t know that we can handle hard that comes our way. There’s no emotion that will permanently harm us if we feel it all the way through and process it. When we are willing to experience any emotion and we know it’s the worst that can happen, we will be flooded with self-confidence. The ability to feel is like our safety net for anything we want to do. It tasks the risk out of everything and gives us a “bring it on” attitude.
- Your Opinion of Yourself: How you think of yourself will either pump you up or deplete your self- confidence. Confidence is a feeling, and so that makes self-confidence a feeling about self. All our feelings are going to come from our thinking, so the way we think about ourselves will determine whether we feel confident. If you are self-confident then you will feel good, and capable, and worthy. You will feel like you can do practically anything. Now, notice that it doesn’t have to be proven or true – self-confidence is a feeling that creates a result, and that result doesn’t have to be completed perfectly to create the feeling.
Why Most of Us Don’t Have It:
Most of us aren’t self -confident. Why would this be? We don’t trust ourselves. We don’t understand how to manage our minds, so we feel out of control with our feelings and actions. This leaves us to let ourselves down consistently. This undermines our ability to trust and stay in integrity. We’re afraid of feeling our emotions. We don’t want to feel any negativity, so we hide. This leaves us scared to do anything that has the risk of failure.
We are always questioning our ability because we have to do it perfectly or we will feel negative emotion. Our opinion of ourselves is very low. We don’t spend a lot of time thinking highly of ourselves. Our brains are programmed to see what’s wrong, so that’s what it’s always looking for. It finds negative thoughts that create negative emotions. This is the opposite of self confidence
Self Confidence is a State of Being:
Thoughts create feelings. Beliefs create states of being. Beliefs are just thoughts we think over and over. Thinking thoughts that create confidence and then believing them is a skill. Most of our beliefs are recycled. We don’t even realize how much self-doubt and anxiety our beliefs produce because we’ve always thought this way. This familiar and efficient thinking is almost comfortable in its predictability.
How do we increase self-confidence?
Increased self-confidence comes from changing your thoughts about yourself. You can increase it by considering the possibility of what you can create in the future. The more certain you are of a possibility, the more confidence you will have moving toward it.
Actions Increase Capability and Capability Increases Confidence:
Progress increases self- confidence. Massive action helps increase it. Do the stuff you are scared to do. Repeat. Make decisions. Honor your decisions. Define opinions. Give up needing others’ approval. Self- confidence comes from needing your own approval. Learn by doing. If you don’t know something, learn by taking action to find out how. Don’t compare yourself 192 to others. Don’t be offended, ever. Let people judge you. Let them be wrong about you. Don’t live in fear of the haters.
In the end, we all die. Our lives are over before we know it. We will have controlled very little. None of it will mean much. We might as well lay it out.
Think Big and Big Things Will Happen!