Doubt is one of the biggest obstacles preventing people I see from success. It’s a close cousin of fear, and it’s why I focus on conquering it first before anything else. Other traits that may bring you closer to success will simply be obstructed as well if you doubt success is even possible for you. You will be sabotaging your own efforts, shitting all over yourself, leading to a tremendous waste of energy, time, and other resources. So I suggest starting any improvement or transformational journey by developing a sense of adequacy and self-confidence.
Self-confidence can feel so far out of reach, perplexing. Many people don’t even know where to start, or they don’t know that it’s possible to increase our self-confidence. They continue on with their lives, thinking it’s something some people just have already.
I tell you now it can be cultivated and that you are capable of improving in this area. Here are a few ideas to get started on this process. Try them all, see what works. You may find that some of these work in some situations but not others, so don’t be too quick to dismiss one if it doesn’t work immediately.
Set Smaller Goals
One easy hack to boost your confidence is to break goals up into smaller, bite-sized pieces. Trying to tackle too much at once makes it easier to get daunted and quit, or it may take too long to hit a milestone. By breaking your goals up, not only will it make it far easier to achieve the overall goal, it will supply you will small successes, which will naturally make you feel better. These successes will happen more frequently as well, so you’ll have less “down time” to focus on the long haul, which may only discourage you. Eat the elephant one bite at a time.
Curb Expectation
Expectation is the mother of all disappointment. Disappointment can provide a blow to the confidence, especially if it’s in relation to your perceived value, a skill, etc. We have trained ourselves to be ashamed of making mistakes. We try so hard to be perfect and we fall short. We must rid ourselves of the expectation to be perfect. Accept that you will make mistakes. Temper your expectations of a particular outcome and approach each result when it happens. If it’s a setback, reframe it as an opportunity to improve and don’t waste a single moment judging yourself harshly. Keep moving forward.
Give Yourself Slack
In addition to curbing your expectations, you must learn to stop judging yourself negatively. Give yourself room to make mistakes, to stumble, to have less than ideal days. If you judge yourself negatively, you are essentially lowering your own confidence. The things I mentioned above happen to everyone, so ignore anyone who may use your mistakes or setbacks as a way to make themselves feel better.
Affirm Yourself
Use positive affirmations to train your brain to think differently. Often we think negatively out of habit, so we must rewire our thinking. How we think becomes reality. Use phrases like I am a great public speaker, or I complete the projects I start. Think of the ways in which you doubt yourself and rephrase them into positive sayings. Repeat them often.
Visualize Confidence
Visualization is a powerful tool. It’s used by successful people of all types. A great example is with world-class athletes. To do this, visualize yourself in your most confident state. Imagine how it feels. Picture yourself as you would like to be, how you present yourself, how to you act. The more you can visualize yourself in the ideal state, the better. Practice acting more in line with the visualized version of yourself and over time you will slowly become that person.
Face Fear
Everyone fears something. One way of overcoming fear is to acclimate yourself to the thing you fear. Think of it in the same terms as going to the gym. Start by facing your fears slowly. Go just outside your comfort zone. Just like lifting weights, we don’t lift what we can’t handle. We choose a weight that’s just tough enough to provide a challenge. Then when we get stronger, we increase the weight. Conquer your fears in the same way. Don’t retreat to your comfort zone. Expand it.
Stop Comparing
Resist the urge to compare yourself to other people. For one, we often only see the highlights from other people’s lives, especially on social media. We don’t see the struggles, the hardships, the nasty bits. Because of this it may seem as though everyone else has it better than we do. This is not the case. Everyone has their own issues. They have their own mountains to climb, so focus on your own goals. Somewhere, someone is looking at your life and wishing they had what you had.
Rethink Failure
Successful people don’t view failure as failure. They don’t let it bring them down because where others see setbacks they see opportunity. Every setback is an opportunity to learn something, to do it better next time. To improve. In doing this, you reframe failure as something that brings you closer to your goals instead of taking you farther from them. In doing so, you will only ever experience failure if you quit. Don’t quit. Improve. Learn.
Boost Your Image
It’s a proven fact that we can boost our confidence quickly by changing our looks. Get a haircut, buy some new clothes. When we feel good about ourselves and how we look, it amps up our moods, which effects our performance. Having a poor mood will infect every other thing you do, so take this out of the equation. A better mood leads to better performance, which leads to more little successes which leads to greater confidence.
Fake It
Fake it till you make it. Sometimes the best way forward is to pretend you have the confidence to do a thing. What this does is it may give you just enough of a jolt that you actually go and do something you might not have otherwise done. Reward yourself for going outside your comfort zone. The more you do this, the more you are facing your fears and acclimating yourself to them, which means you will be learning more, getting better, and getting closer to those little successes that lead to bigger ones.
Exude It
Similar to boosting your image, making changes to your posture and your body language has profound effects on your mood. If you stand taller, start looking people in the eye, speak slower and louder and with more authority (even if you’re scared), you will start to feel more confident. It may even help you to emulate someone’s mannerisms if you view them as having high confidence. Picture (visualize!) a confident demeanor and practice exuding it!
Clean and Organize
Another mood booster is to get rid of clutter. Clean your house, wash your car, do some yard work. It will also serve to reduce anxiety from knowing that these things are lurking (procrastination), which means you won’t be wasting energy trying to avoid responsibilities. You will spend more energy toward more important things if you don’t have to worry about the dishes piling up. The organization may also help improve your productivity, which will be another small success you can be happy about.
Mind Yourself
Another thing in line with positive affirmations is to be mindful of your inner critic. Kill negative self-talk by practicing self-awareness. Catch yourself when you’re being critical of yourself. Don’t judge yourself for the negative self-talk. Just become aware of it. Then practice reframing it into positive self-talk.
Get Hypnotized
Hypnotism may be another option you can use to boost your confidence. Many people have gone this route to great success, so don’t be afraid to try it.
Help Others
It’s a proven fact that helping others gives us a sense of purpose and helps us feel fulfilled. It puts you in a better mood (which effects all the other areas of your life). The world is full of negativity, and it can weigh us down if we don’t counteract it. Lift your spirits. Helping others will also reinforce the feeling that you have value to someone.
Practice
Spent time deliberately practicing things you want to be good at. By improving your competence, you will propel yourself closer to experiencing more small successes, which can give you a greater sense of accomplishment. Feeling competent in what you’re doing will also help eliminate doubts about your abilities.
Be Prepared
Eliminate performance anxiety by preparing yourself for an upcoming event. For example, if you fear public speaking, you may have anxiety over it, which will cause you to get nervous and you may end up performing terribly, which will be a blow to your confidence. You can overcome this by preparing for the event. Practice, rehearse, study for that test. The more prepared you are, the more confident you will be going into it. This will improve your performance in the event and will make it more likely that you will experience success, and thus, your confidence will soar.
Respect Yourself
We don’t like it when others treat us poorly, yet we treat ourselves poorly all the time. We tend to treat things we value with high regard. Think of a new car. You would probably wash it, and take care of it. You should learn to view yourself as important, because you are! Take care of yourself, and treat yourself well.
Remember Successes
Another way to help curb negative self-talk is to remember our past successes. We often tend to dwell on our failures, or how we didn’t meet our own expectations. When we do this, we often get stuck in the mire of our own thoughts, so focus instead on all the things you’ve done that made you feel a sense of accomplishment. Picture how you felt in those moments and you will find that you can revisit those emotions again and again. The inverse applies, so avoid dwelling on the negative from your past.
Validate Yourself
We often look to others for validation, which means we can sometimes set ourselves up for disappointment when we don’t get it. Learn to stop relying on others to make you feel good about yourself and start providing your own validation. You can do this by using all the techniques above. Take responsibility for your own happiness and sense of self-worth. Practice doing this, that way you can still feel “worthy” even when others try to bring you down.
-Janden
Leave me a comment if you’ve struggled with this.
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