Be confident no matter what comes your way by looking inward and updating your beliefs about yourself.
Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you are right. ~ Henry Ford
The way you treat yourself sets the standards for others. ~ Sonya Friedman
Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look how we perform, is truly important to other people. ~ Andre Bubus
What is confidence?
Confidence is the ability that a person has to proceed with a task, or life in general without being held back by self-doubts or thoughts of failure, and while having the self-belief that he or she can succeed. To be confident you must focus on your strengths.
Stop the negative thoughts!
Focus on the other person not on yourself
What is the worst that could happen?
Ask yourself, “What’s the worst that could happen?” Too often, we place excess importance on potential problems. We all have a certain amount of
energy so let’s apply it to creating extraordinary relationships, advancing our careers and meeting our goals INSTEAD of wasting that energy worrying.
In order to be confident :Take action on what you do have control over and minimize risks for what you don’t. Then invest your energy wisely.
Visualise a confident you
In doing something for the first time, imagine that you have already done it in the past. Close your eyes, then vividly imagine you succeeding
wildly at what you are really going to do for the first time.
The mind does NOT know the difference between something VIVIDLY imagined and something real. Make it vivid by involving all 5 senses.
Find a role model to emulate
Find someone who is already confident in that area and copy them. Model as many of their behaviors, attitudes, values, and beliefs for the
context you want to be confident in as you can. How can you do this?
Talk with them if you have access to them. If you don’t have access to them, get as much exposure to them as you can. This could be talking to people who know the person and/or buying their products if they have some.
Act as-if
Use the “as-if” frame. I literally love this frame of mind. If you were confident, how would you be acting? How would you be moving? How
would you be speaking? What would you be thinking? To be confident your body language must mirror your thinking and beliefs.
What would you tell yourself inside? By asking yourself these questions, you are literally forced to answer them by going into a confident state.
You will then be acting “as-if” you are confident. Now just forget you are acting long enough and pretty soon you’ll develop it into a habit.
Maintain perspective
Go into the future and ask if what you’re faced with is such a big deal. This might be a bit morbid and yet this works tremendously well.
Imagine yourself on your deathbed looking back over your life. You are surrounded by your friends and family.
You’re reviewing your life. Is what you’re faced with now even going to pop up? That’s highly unlikely.
Keeping things in proper perspective really diminishes fear.
Ask for what you want – be brave
Remember that you lose out on 100% of the opportunities that you never go for. To get what you want, ask for it. I fully believe that if I ask
enough people for whatever I want, I can get it. This is not necessarily true and yet it’s a useful belief.
As you think about your goals and what you are striving for, how effective would it be for you to believe that all the people out there want to help you if you only ask? Whether that is true or not in the “real world” does not matter.
If you find that belief empowering, I invite you to adopt it as your own. Be confident that you are capable – nurture your self-belief always
Use humour to reduce the impact of your self doubt
Disarm the nagging, negative internal voice. That negative internal voice can keep anyone stopped. To disarm the internal voice, imagine a
volume control and lower the volume. Or how about changing the internal voice to Mickey Mouse?
Do you think you could take Mickey Mouse seriously if he were criticizing you? Change the voice to a clown voice. The point is to disarm the voice by altering the way it nags at you. If I hear my own voice nagging me, it stops me. If I hear a clown voice, I laugh and continue onward.
Confidence is a state of mind. You have to work at it by dismissing the thoughts that work against you. Don’t look externally for confidence – the best way to be confident is to build an inner strength to call upon. You take this kind of confidence with you wherever you go and it isn’t reliant on approval from others. That’s true confidence.
Mandy X
Photo by Adam Winger on Unsplash
Author: Mandy Kloppers
Mandy is a qualified therapist who treats depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, trauma, and many other types of mental health issues. She provides online therapy around the world for those needing support and also provides relationship counselling.
