Self-confidence is defined as a person’s ability to trust and believe in their personality traits, talents, skills, and perspective on life. It has a remarkable effect on everything in your life, from giving a speech to making a proposal. It also influences your mental health. When you have a solid sense of self-confidence during your life, you can be more hopeful, strong, glad and energetic. Furthermore, to be more successful in your social or professional life, and be healthy mentally, you should trust and believe in yourself at a healthy level.
By your own effort, you can start to feel more self-confident. Thinking more positively, living a more active lifestyle, and having a realistic perspective are beneficial. Here are 6 pieces of advice to boost your self-confidence.
Understand Your Unique Strengths
Some traits that make you unique are your talents, abilities, traits or skills. You have abilities, traits, talents or skills that not everyone has. You can spend time understanding your unique strengths. When you do things you are good at, your self-confidence and energy levels increase.
Asking people close to you what they think you are good at can be beneficial for understanding your unique strengths. At the same time, they can observe what makes you energetic, happy, and self-confident. Ask those people to answer these questions:
- What do you think I am uniquely good at?
- In what areas do I inspire you?
You can list answers. Then, you can ask yourself the questions below to determine your unique strengths.
- In which subjects do people ask my opinion and advice?
- In which areas have you achieved success in the past?
You can also list those answers. They help you to understand your unique talents, abilities, traits, or skills.
Use Your Past as a Self-Confidence Guide
Your past failures supply you lessons you can use to improve yourself. You can analyze right and wrong decisions, your feelings, and you can deduce how your self-confidence is affected by your failures.
Secondly, think of a time when you succeeded at something. During the process, what did you feel and think? Were you always sure of what you would achieve? Most probably, no. However, this success has contributed to being more self-confident. Lessons taken from past achievements can be used in the future to make better decisions.
Stop Comparing Yourself to Others
One of the surest ways to reduce your self-confidence is by comparing yourself to others. Focusing on features, skills and abilities that you do not have would cause to focus on only inadequacies. How can you feel self-confident this way? Why would you compare yourself to others based on attributes you do not have?
Thinking that others are better and superior would erode your confidence. Life is not a competition. Everyone tries to achieve their own aims through their own mental, social, and academic capacity.
Take Care of Your Body
Do you like yourself when you look at the mirror? If your answer is no, you may have difficulty feeling good about yourself and trusting in yourself. Developing a healthy sleep routine, having a balanced diet, being physically active and being confident in your appearance has a positive impact on your well being overall. First, having a healthy sleep routine helps you to live with energy. Having a balanced diet can help keep you at a healthy weight.
Being physically active is important for increasing energy. Finally, try switching up your style. Wear clothes that make you feel good about yourself, establish a self care routine, or play with a different hairstyle or color. Do things that give you confidence and give you that extra spring in your step. That extra boost in your confidence will make you shine!
Use Self-Affirmations
Your thoughts affect your feelings, and your thoughts and feelings affect your behaviors.
Thoughts that you have about yourself determine whether you are self-confident or not. To affect yourself in a positive way, you can use affirmations. When affirmations are repeated again and again, you begin to accept them as truths over time. Self-affirmations are sentences such as “I deserve” or “I can succeed”. When you repeat such sentences, you start to believe in yourself. That self confidence shapes your attitudes and behaviors.
Look for Social Support
In those times that you need to feel more self-confident, encouragement and realistic compliments from friends and family are beneficial. Phrases that motivate you and encourage you to look on the bright side will change your self-perception and perspective on life positively. The main thing is that those sentences must represent reality. This social support reduces your stress level and feelings of loneliness.
When you do not feel self-confident, you tend to analyze circumstances in a negative way. However, thanks to social support, you can start to evaluate conditions through a realistic perspective.
