“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” (Albert Einstein)
Let’s talk about confidence and how it influences your abilities and success story. Brad Sugars, Chairman and Founder of ActionCOACH, defines confidence as the feeling that makes you say, “I can succeed, and I deserve to succeed.”
Simply put, you must choose to believe in yourself and understand your abilities. Sometimes, you need to gain more skills or achieve something to build confidence, and that’s part of the process of learning how to have a google level of self-respect and confidence.
Before we go into the 20 tips for becoming more confident, let’s see what kills self-esteem for most people.
What Kills off Self-Esteem
Everybody has bad days, and feeling down now and again doesn’t mean you’re not a confident person. However, if you often don’t feel confident, and your levels of self-esteem are generally low, take the time to ask yourself the following questions?
Are you around the right people?
It’s hard to build confidence when you’re around people who slow you down. Look around to see who’s helping and encouraging you to be confident. Take some time to identify those who are constantly breaking you down and stop hanging out with them as much.
Do you always apologise?
Constantly accepting the load /blame from others around you will kill off your confidence. Say you’re sorry when you make a mistake, but don’t make it a habit to blame yourself for everything wrong in the world.
Do you overthink everything?
Thinking about possible solutions to your problems is good. Overthinking to the point, you create problems that didn’t exist in the first place degrade your self-confidence. Get rid of generalisations like “I always do this” or “this happens to me every time that only build negative scenarios. Make a list of the things you tend to say about yourself and change your language.
Do you often compare yourself to others?
Thinking of yourself as better or worse than other people is a dangerous game. If you feel the need to put someone down to feel better, you put yourself down, too. Don’t compare, and don’t feel the need to make other people feel small. Confident people build confident people.
20 Tips to Build Self-Esteem
Now that you know what kills off confidence and self-esteem, you must learn to flip these thoughts and build confidence. You don’t have to master them all at once. Improving your abilities 1% at a time will help you get better at this over time.
- Find ways to help people (mentor, give to charity, donate your time). The more you build others up, the easier it is to build your confidence.
- Take care of yourself. Build a habit to exercise as a way to build self-esteem.
- Make a list of the positive things you’ve done lately.
- Go somewhere different. Visiting new places and meeting new people can help you leave negative scenarios and people behind.
- Practice forgiveness of others and yourself.
- Give compliments. It helps you learn to accept compliments in return. Get used to saying “thank you” when someone pays you a compliment.
- Practice self-compassion and compassion with others. Learn to not be harder on yourself than everyone else around.
- Teach other people something or learn something new. The more you teach and the more you know, the better you feel about yourself.
- Pay attention to how you dress and put yourself out there. Putting on your fancy clothes makes you feel confident. In this case, “fake it til you make it” can work to your benefit.
- Clean the place up. When you feel down, getting things looking organised in your office or home can significantly impact your mood.
- Find people doing extraordinary things and congratulate them. This habit helps build you and them.
- Stand tall. How you stand with your chest out is a part of feeling confident; learn to make eye contact and smile. These simple things practised daily build confidence in the long run.
- Listen more to other people to build confidence in yourself.
- Shine the light on others. By giving other people credit and kudos, you help them build confidence, and you increase your self-esteem at the same time.
- Enter competitions. Pick somewhere you have an excellent chance to prove your value.
- Use entertainment to build a better version of yourself. Things like music, movies, or even youTube videos can help you be more confident.
- Put yourself into someone else’s shoes. When you feel less confident about a life situation, ask yourself what would someone do – someone who is satisfied. This simple thought puts you in a different frame of thinking.
- Understand it’s okay to be wrong. Confident people admit their mistakes because they know their value and understand that one mistake doesn’t represent them.
- Slow down and take a break to reduce the pressure you put on yourself. Moreover, try not to overcommit or overpromise.
- Be willing to make mistakes. Think of the things you could achieve, visualise them, and take action. How you perceive yourself is essential for building confidence.
What’s Next?
Pick five or six of the strategies listed above and practice them every day. Even if you’re a confident person, find ways always to get better and be even more confident.
Note that confidence isn’t ego or arrogance — confident people don’t need to brag about what they’re doing to feel good about themselves.
