Confidence is about believing in yourself, feeling comfortable in your true self, and knowing your worth. People are more likely to believe you if you appear confident, and confidence also helps bring success, is deemed an attractive quality, and helps to connect well with others. Here are a few tips to live a confident life.
Practice Self-acceptance
One of the most important steps to increasing confidence is to become more accepting of yourself. Look at your strengths and achievements and put a plan in place to address your weaknesses. We need to practice self-acceptance, feeling alright about ourselves and others regardless of the existing conditions that we may be going through.
In this way, we may sometimes think it reasonable to be critical of our behavior and try to modify it but without being critical of ourselves. This attitude helps in maintaining a healthy level of self-confidence.
Focus on your Achievements
If you take out time to think you will realize that you have achieved a lot in life. It does not matter whether these achievements are large or small, as long as they are important to you. Think about these achievements and reflect on their meaning and significance to you.
Prepare a list and add all the things that you are proud of. The fact that you are focusing on positives will also help you increase your level of self-confidence.
Making Personal Changes
If, as a result of monitoring your self-esteem and confidence, you decide that you want to change, it is best to identify some specific goals. What are some things that you can change which will make you feel better about yourself? There are two kinds of change that you may wish for.
The first is changes in your life and how you live it. Ask yourself questions such as are you happy in your job? Is there something else that you’ll do? What about your relationships or social life? Having done all this, it is necessary to make sure that they are manageable and can be broken down into smaller steps.
For example, in order to be able to speak up in seminars, it may be easier to begin by expressing opinions more often with friends. Becoming comfortable with this can make it easier for you to speak in a seminar.
Seeking Positive Experience and People
We can give ourselves positive experiences as a way of increasing our self-confidence. Also, spending time with people who like us for who we are is helpful. Surround yourself with positive influences and avoid those who have a constant negative aura around them. Being around critical people can have a detrimental effect on how we feel about ourselves and our self-confidence.
Rewards and Support
Give yourself rewards as you practice building your self-esteem. It doesn’t really matter what the reward is as long as it is something that you really value.
Thus, on a concluding note, it is rightly said, self-confidence is just a small term for a lot of things. Emotional constraint, empathy, resilience all go into creating a personality that exudes self-confidence. A self-confident person would know how to say things that are honest without hurting the sentiments of others.
A self-confident person also knows how to be heard with complete dignity, when there is a difference of opinion. What all this really takes is practice, but the most important thing is your belief in your ability to do better.
Also published on Medium.