Confidence comes from deep inner feelings of well-being, acceptance of your body and mind, your inner self-esteem and belief in your abilities, skills and experience. Confidence is an attribute that most people would like to possess and you will be pleased to hear that it is a learned and developed habit. It’s such a great thing to be confident and I do think everyone admires a self-confident person. We may even envy them a little as those self-confident people seem really at ease with themselves, others and their work. They hold a calm strong air about them, invite trust and inspire confidence in others. These are attractive characteristics that not only inspire others but feels great to have ourselves. It’s not always easy to be confident in yourself, particularly if you are naturally self-critical, an internal thinker, a worrier or if other people put you down. But there are steps that you can take to develop, increase and maintain your self-confidence.
Self-confidence is that deep inner feeling inside that you truly understanding that you trust your judgment and abilities. It is also about being able to love and value yourself, believe in your self-worth. Accepting that none of us is perfect and that regardless of any imperfections or of what others may believe about you we can still love and value who we are. We can also gain a sense of self-efficacy when we see ourselves and other people that remind us of ourselves, mastering skills and achieving goals. This can encourage us to believe that, if we learn and work hard in a particular area, we will succeed. These are often the first ways that can help us start that process of believing in ourselves and this type of confidence can lead us to accept difficult challenges. This can also give us more belief in how we cope with things helping us to keep going in the face of setbacks. Having self-esteem is a more general sense that we can cope with what’s going on in our lives, and that we have a right to be happy.
Self-esteem comes in part from the feeling that the people around us approve of us, but this is only the start for us to build our confidence, as we can’t spend all our time looking for approval from others. We may or may not be able to control this though, as it can be us trying to reassure ourselves and this wont help in the long term its needs to be just that stepping stone of understanding what it’s like to be confident. Also if we experience a lot of criticism or rejection from other people, our self-esteem can easily suffer unless we support it in other ways. It’s a bit like watching too much of the News, after watching too much of it, we can sometimes feel our moods start to lower, we can start to worry and have thoughts of foreboding.
Self-confidence is vital in almost every aspect of our lives, yet many people do struggle to find it. This can become a vicious cycle, people who lack self-confidence are less likely to achieve the success they need, which could give them more confidence. This is because if we don’t follow our instinct and our inner self believe we can end up just following the confident people instead. This can be good at times, if we know this person not only is true and confident but that they are helping us develop our confidence. Confident people inspire confidence in others: their audience, their co-workers, their bosses, their customers, and their friends. For people who want to impact others, it is key that people can gain their confidence, it is a key way for them to succeed. This aspect of learning from the confident people around us is a great way to start to build your confidence.
The best thing to do is to look at one area of your life that you’re looking to gain confidence in and find someone that you can aspire to. If you want to gain confidence in meeting new people, for example, think of one of your friends or family who is great at meeting new people. It’s good to watch how this person deals with meeting new people, how they are feeling, how they carry themselves and the way they communicate with new people.
This is a great way to help you understand how to develop new skills yourself around confidently meeting new people. Over time this will help you develop these new-found attributes of confidence. Once we have found a way to develop our confidence in one area of our lives and have developed a good habit of this, then it’s time to then transpose this into other areas of your life.
Like with any new habit we are creating, it takes times to develop, so don’t just think one or two tries will be enough to become confident in something. Just like anything we learn, it takes time, dedication and practice. It’s good to set a weekly target of things that we can challenge ourselves with, in the areas we are looking to build confidence in. With those challenges, we can then set targets for what we want to achieve. It’s good to be realistic and we must start with the easiest things first as this allows our confidence to start to build step by step. After we have achieved our goals we can then move onto the next challenges until we have achieved full confidence in all those areas we have been challenging in our lives.
Don’t put off starting, now is the time to change and the quicker we start the sooner we are feeling these great feelings of confidence. This can then start spreading through the other areas of your life and before you know it you can one of those people you have envied for their confidence.
Have a great day, Sara x
HYPNOSARA 