Great Self Confidence

...to live the life you want

What great self confidence can do for you

by

My 19 year old daughter is about to return home after over 3 months working in children’s homes in India. She spent similar time in Ghana late last year. When I was her age there is no way I could have embarked on such adventures.

Throughout my teens and early twenties I was quite shy and lacked self confidence. Leaving home was a very gradual process and looking back I had some lucky breaks that propelled me forward and helped me change.

The bottom line with any form of self improvement is that you have to change from how you are now. Sometimes, like with me, circumstances and people around you help facilitate change without much conscious effort. Other times, it’s down to you to decide that you want to change and take the steps necessary to move forward.

I’m really happy that whatever we got right as parents helped give my daughter sufficient self confidence to undertake this gap year and travel and work abroad.

3 Vital Self Confidence Tricks

by

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?

by

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

by

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.

Take the confidence check

by

How confident are you? I’ve come across this simple, ten question, quiz that gives a confidence rating between 5 (rock bottom) and 50 (total confidence). Give it a go today. I’m going to start adding some exercises and other tools over the next few weeks, so you can see what improvements you’ve made. Click on CONFIDENCE CHECK.