Great Self Confidence

...to live the life you want

Great self confidence from praise

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A chapter in the excellent Happiness Toolkit is devoted to praising yourself. The author Jennifer Summers states:-

Most people have no qualms about putting themselves down when they’ve not done something as well as they’d hoped or wanted. People put themselves down for all sorts of reasons, examples can include: being late, messing up the baking of a cake, scratching the car, quite often even injuring themselves can provoke a reaction, “I’m so clumsy.”

The opposite reactions can be experienced when you praise yourself, and tell yourself you did well. This shouldn’t be reserved just for big events – like running a marathon!

Recognize that most of what you do each day is positive

To do this Jennifer suggests listing 10 positive things you did today, and describe how this makes you feel? This ensures you focus on the mundane, as well as the special. The Happiness Toolkit includes a worksheet to help with this exercise, although any form of diary or notebook would suffice. Give it a try.

An Inspirational Thought

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I subscribe to a fairly eclectic mix of newsletters, or ezines. One recent addition is called Kickstart Today and this is a quote from a recent edition:-

An Inspirational Thought

There is a little voice in our heads that acts as a
valve: whenever we start to get too enthusiastic,
motivated or inspired, the little voice tries to close
down the flow.

That voice is called doubt.

Even the most positive among us have this annoying
little creature living inside our skulls.

We can live with doubt – and forever limit our actions
(and hugely restrict our potential). Or, we can learn
to ignore the voice. It shouts pretty loud though.

Even better, we can overwhelm it.

Daily affirmations are one such tool we can easily use
to drown out the voice of doubt. Every time we repeat
to ourselves that we are successful, smart, proactive,
healthy, wealthy or … (fill in your own blank), the
voice of doubt becomes weaker.

When your affirmations shout and your voice of doubt
whispers, your success in whatever you desire will be
assured.

Thanks to Martin Avis (who also has a good blog!) for letting me quote his newsletter. I will return to affirmations and a technique to capture them tomorrow. Getting in the habit of using positive statements about ourselves is a key factor in obtaining great self confidence.

3 Vital Self Confidence Tricks

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I have found a great post titled 3 Vital Self Confidence Tricks. The author, Dean Hunt, focuses on building self confidence when suffering from anxiety – such as in a social situation. His third “trick” in particular I like as it’s something that’s easy to do, but easy to overlook. Speak to yourself as you would speak to a friend.

If we make a mistake our self talk can be quite damning, “you are such a stupid fool”. But would we be so hard on a friend? This technique transposes even better when lacking confidence in our ability to do something. If you were a friend of a person giving a presentation or speech what would you be saying to them? You wouldn’t be saying “you’re going to mess up”, “you’re going to forget what to say”, “you’ll lose your job after this”. So why say those things to yourself?! As Dean says – speak to yourself as you would to others.

Confidence – who puts you down?

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Does anyone keep putting you down? I will return to the issue of dealing with the negative messages we all get whilst growing up, but this is about the here and now. Unfortunately there are many people out there in relationships with, working with, or friends with people who consistently make negative remarks about them and undermine their self confidence.

Over the years I’ve come across many people in this situation. Often they simply absorb the criticisms they receive and believe what they’re hearing – ending up with ongoing low self confidence. Especially when close to the person, it doesn’t occur to challenge what is being said. The person doing the criticism may themselves be unaware how damaging their behavior is, or that they are actually doing it.

Be aware of who you spend your time with and what they say to you. If friends put you down – do you need to review this friendship? Within work, school or family situations, learning to challenge critical remarks or put downs isn’t easy if you’re confidence is already low. But it can be done and I’ll come back to learning assertiveness skills. In the short term, being aware that what is being said is just someone’s opinion, and choosing not to take it as fact is a big step forward to great self confidence.

Confidence building exercise – portfolio

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To build self confidence, a good starting point is an inventory of what we have done well. Unfortunately we are very good at recalling our failures, situations where things didn’t go so well. This is partly because of the emotional attachment that helps make things going badly stand out, whereas doing something well (but not getting praise from others or ourselves) may not register much emotionally. Also, when your confidence is low, its easy to dismiss successful events as insignificant.

For now start building a portfolio of achievements. This can be work or school related, personal life, pursuing a hobby – anything you like. And you can go back as far as you can remember.

If possible start a ring binder or folder to keep this list and future exercises in. Apart from anything else it reinforces the fact that you are important, the achievements you are listing are worth recording on more than a scrap of paper. Its also useful to include visual reminders, such as photographs, if you have them.

This is something you can do over time and also ask people close to you to give suggestions – so long as you choose people who will be positive! Have a mix of statements – My greatest achievement is…. I am very good at…. I played a great game of…. on…. I can cook …….. better than anyone I have a wonderful (family member)…..

Such a “portfolio” is a great way of giving our confidence a boost – either as a first aid measure when needed or to gradually build a firmer foundation for our self confidence.