Self-confidence is typically what makes people at ease with themselves and their situations. It is understanding yourself enough to trust your actions and abilities. It helps you value your judgment and rise above what others think of you. The world today has made believing in your abilities harder than it should be. However, with any luck and a healthy dose of determination, there are steps that you can take to maintain and boost your self-confidence.
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A Psychology dictionary online defines self-confidence as an assurance of trust in one’s abilities, qualities, and judgment. It can also be simply referred to as believing in oneself.
The level of self-confidence a person has helps to increase one’s self-evaluation and esteem. It has been found that high self-esteem is associated with better mental and physical health. It also boosts your social confidence and forms a defense against mental disorders. Naturally, when you are confident in your capabilities you are content and happier with your successes. Similarly, the more you feel better about your capabilities, the more motivated you are to act and achieve your goals. This, therefore, results in better performance and stronger devotions to tasks.
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Attributes Of A Self-Confident Person
Before we proceed, here are some attributes of a self-confident person. These attributes will help you succeed in life:
- A greater sense of self-respect.
- Greater satisfaction in life’s activities.
- Freedom from insecurity, fear, and anxiety.
- Steady energy and motivation to act.
- Being more willing to try new things and take risks.
- Doing what you believe to be right, even if mocked or criticized for it.
- Admitting and learning from your mistakes.
- Always radiating positivity.
In trying to appear more self-confident, practicing assertiveness helps to express your opinions and feelings. This ensures that others understand and respect you as well. Also, it helps to build the psychological mind-frame you need to develop self-confidence.
In addition to being assertive, knowing the right body language, building confident behaviors, and engaging in face-to-face communication can improve your brand and have a great impact on your self-confidence.
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How To Boost Your Self-Confidence
Stop The Comparison
The surest way to implode with self-pity is to constantly compare yourself or your achievements with others. Even as an entrepreneur, whether you compare physical looks or you compare income to your friend’s, comparisons are not healthy.
As a resolve, try paying attention to your thoughts so when you start to compare your wealth, skills, clientele, achievements, or personal attributes, it becomes easy to curtail. Always remind yourself that doing so, isn’t helpful and that life isn’t a competition.
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Practice Self-care
Looking good is good business; it’s hard to feel good about your “business” if you’re abusing your body. Skipping sleep, eating unhealthily, and ceasing to exercise will take a toll on your well-being and overall confidence eventually. In truth, studies have shown that physical activity boosts confidence. Taking absolute care of your body by regularly exercising and adapting good body postures improves body image and enhances self-confidence.
Additionally, commit to sitting up straight or jogging daily. You will always feel more motivated to see yourself in a positive light. Other grooming activities like shaving, wearing a good outfit, or applying a soothing cologne can also make a difference in improving your self-image and confidence.
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Be Self-Compassionate
Self-compassion generally means being kind to yourself when you make a mistake, fail, or go through a setback. When any of such situations happen, rather than beat yourself up about it, try speaking well to yourself as you would talk to a good friend. Also bearing in mind that nothing speaks confidence like approving of yourself. Remind yourself that no one is perfect and cut yourself some slack.
Remember that always seeking approval from outside yourself is an easy trap to fall into. It can make you lose track of yourself and your esteem. Encourage yourself, be your biggest cheerleader, and, if you fail, don’t lose hope in your abilities, rather reposition yourself for a better opportunity.
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Assess Past Successes
Take a personal analysis test and try to identify your weaknesses, strengths, and successes. Your self-confidence can tremendously improve when you can point to an accomplishment and reassure yourself. Review these accomplishments and use them to make positive affirmations about what you can do. Thankfully, these affirmations can be very effective in reviving your self-confidence if you tend to demoralize your confidence with negative self-talk.
Know Yourself And Guard Your Thoughts
This is typically avoiding negative thoughts and changing your acts one positive move at a time. Action and understanding yourself, as you may have guessed, is a strong key to developing self-confidence. Frequently think of the good things about yourself; the things you can do well, and start acting them to your favor without any limitations.
Since boosting your self-confidence is more psychological than physical, reminding yourself of who you are, sticking by your principles, and generally embracing positivity can help. But, if you do not have or know your guiding principles, you will always run into trouble with your confidence level.
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Thoroughly Prepare
It’s hard to boost your self-confidence if you don’t believe you would excel at something. Beat that belief by preparing yourself and increasing your competence as much as possible. For instance, think about submitting a proposal: if you do not research, you won’t be confident in your abilities to properly sell your idea to a prospective client.
On the other hand, if you do the research and are thoroughly prepared, you’ll be much more confident in your abilities. If you need to undergo training or take courses to help you improve, stay committed to constantly improving your craft and skills.
Besides, mindfully allowing yourself to visualize confidence and embracing the feelings of a comfortable presence will saturate your mindset with self-confidence.
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Set Focused Goals
In a bid to boost your self-confidence, setting and achieving goals is an important aspect. With this, you will tend to feel better about yourself once you fully complete the goal and even see yourself setting more goals. The more you achieve small goals, the better you will be at it, and the better you will feel about your confidence.
It is important to set goals that make the most of your strengths. And take advantage of opportunities to feel confident in yourself. Also, when considering what goals to set for yourself, it may be helpful to start with smaller objectives and then gradually work your way up to the big leagues.
Be Intentional About Change
Every decision you make in life must revolve around you making a determined and intentional effort to see it through. This also applies to you making conscious efforts to improve yourself and your self-confidence. You can start by trying to change small habits that reduce your confidence.
Likewise, you can also try to imbibe habits that can help you boost your self-confidence like waking up early, taking an evening walk, or reading something new every day. Be grateful for the little efforts you have made to boost your self-confidence, it can spur you to put in more effort.
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Learn From Mistakes
It takes a great deal of courage to allow yourself to be a learner, a novice, or someone willing enough to make mistakes just to learn from them. Boosting your confidence involves carrying out intended actions. But, how would you achieve them if you don’t try?
Trying entails that you break out of your comfort zone, begin something new, expand your limitations, trust that it’s okay not to be perfect, and having faith in the process. When you successfully try to complete something that is out of your confidence zone or limit, you are eventually building confidence in yourself.
Be Willing To Offer And Ask For Help.
In most cultures, a high value is placed on self-reliance and self-actualization. It is therefore unsurprising to see some entrepreneurs labor and toil with building their brands alone with the hope of passing on the lessons.
Sometimes, however, a necessary part of working towards our goals involves reaching out to others for help or even helping others. This usually gives an invaluable sense of belonging, thus resulting in a heightened feeling of self-confidence. Additionally, teamwork creates the most powerful results and even more meaningful purpose in our lives.
The bottom line is that self-confidence takes dedicated work to build and maintain. It is not something that we achieve once and then stops aiming to achieve for the rest of our lives. Entrepreneurs and humans at large are bound to experience moments that test their confidence and morale, but with constant devotion to become better we can always work on boosting healthy self-confidence.