All people want to have self confidence. Who doesn’t?
Whenever we meet people, we wonder if they are self confident or not, and we immediately judge them. Do you have enough confidence at work or in your relationships?
I bet most people don’t know the correct definition of it.
What is self confidence?
There are three different names which you may confuse them. Let’s see what they are:
– Self confidence
– Self esteem (when you value yourself)
– Self efficacy (when you think you are good at something and you have the skills to do it. (Most people use it instead of confidence)
The definition
You are confident when you have enough skills to do a task, and you have a proper point of view about your skill.
For example, if you have the skill to be a public speaker and you think positively about it, you have passed the first step of being self confident. But if you have the skills and don’t believe in it, your perspective is weak, and you can’t show up in a public speaking properly.
When you have self confidence, you become more successful in life.
The point is that you can’t say I am self confident or not. You can be self confident in each task: swimming, sky diving, learning other languages, playing a musical instrument, etc. You might be self confident to sing, but you might not be confident to find the right words and sentences to be a public speaker. There is different.
Other factors affect self confidence, for instance:
– Knowledge to do the task
– Skill
– Experience
– Others’ reaction
– The quality of other people in doing the task
For example, you might be self confident as a football player, but when you are in an important match, and there are eyes looking and waiting for you to shoot, the experts are on the chairs, and they all will react to your right or wrong choices, you feel you don’t believe in yourself anymore!
Which one is more important, self esteem or self confidence?
The answer is self esteem because self esteem means you know how valuable you are generally, but self confidence can exist in each task.
In other words, someone can have self esteem but be self confident in singing and not in playing the piano.
Overconfident
Be careful that overconfidence makes you pride. Have enough self confidence.
Being overconfident can harm your decisions and behaviors. It is overconfident, but there is no such thing as over self esteem. The more you feel valuable, the better but when you think you are too good at doing something, you try to be a show-off in a wrong way, and you may even hurt your colleagues’ and friends’ feelings by rubbing it to their noses.
Is it hard to improve self confidence?
It’s easy because you can be self confident in each task so with a little bit of practice we can be good at something and then we can believe in it with a positive perspective. Self esteem, on the other hand, is complicated and hard to boost.
The similarities between self confidence and self esteem
There are similarities between self confidence and self esteem such as:
- Lack of both or having both depend on people around us
- They both can be improved or decreased
- And finally, they both affect each other.
Why is it important to be self confident?
Not being confident enough results in two consequences:
1- You never start doing something new
2- And if you do, you will be in a wrong path of doing it with lousy quality.
So you will always stalk in a loop:
Lack of self confidence ↔ Not doing anything ↔ being unskillful
You become unskillful and with no purpose when you don’t have self confidence.
Anyways, if you don’t try new stuff or try it the wrong way (because you don’t have the skill or you don’t believe in it), it results in the negative viewpoint of yourself and your capacities.
Change the flow of this circle:
1- Define your purpose: when you have a goal, you will be motivated to improve self confidence.
2- a 10-day active plan which we explain as the last part.
First, let’s talk about the two things you need to avoid if you want to be self confident:
a- Do not criticize others
Talking about others’ weaknesses might give you power and confidence, but it lowers your self esteem. It is so wrong to count people’s faults, and it affects your confidence plan.
When you criticize others, and it’s due to learning from them, we can call criticizing a way to improve your confidence but it becomes a mistake if it happens because you feel strong by pointing out to others’ weaknesses.
b- Do not humiliate others
It may give you satisfaction at first, but then it will harm your self esteem and self confidence.
Another way of humiliation is to think that others are like sheep, not worth talking to or being with. Here, you will believe how valuable you are while others can’t understand or feel something. This wrong method usually is used in presentations and public speaking. It’s much easier to present when you imagine your audience is sheep because you don’t care how they feel or think about your performance which is wrong. You have to try your best to make the audience excited, entertained and valuable.
You can’t have self confidence by wearing fancy and expensive clothes.
Some other people try to impress others by wealth, fancy clothes, a constructive surgery, expensive cars and jewelry. These factors help you feel self confident for a while but the feeling fades away because external factors can never be replaces by a nice behavior.
Knowing too much results in overconfidence so it’s not a good way to learn and know everything due to building self confidence. You can speak, perform and talk perfectly by knowing enough and using special methods to show how confident you are.
(To know more, read “2 simple things to avoid to boost self confidence?“)
Self confidence in public speaking
It is vital to be self confident in public speaking. But most people are not. I believe the only reason to that is imagining the wrong thing. When you believe you will goof up in your presentation or you can’t handle everything pretty good, Karma helps them to happen in reality!
Some speakers are nervous about the tic one of their facial muscles has. You truly need to know that the audience won’t see you eyelid tic for being stressful from that distance in the hall. So there is nothing to worry about.
What is the one factor that lowers self-confidence in public speaking? |
I am not saying to have no stress because being nervous to talk in front of people is normal but you can ease it by thinking positively, instead of freaking yourself out with wrong beliefs and negative thoughts.
Mark Twain says:
There are two types of speakers: Those who get nervous and those who are liars.
The signs of lack of self confidence
I wrote this part of the article from Barbara De Angelis book: Self Confidence.
– You force others to pity you
– You push others to encourage and inspire you. It’s like they must settle your life for you.
– You act the way, so no one hates you because you are cautious and never a threat to them.
– You are not afraid of failures because you never try something new.
– You have an excuse for all your misbehavior.
– You absorb others’ attention, kindness, and pity because you have to do everything for them, so they make you feel better.
When others know how low your self confidence is, there is no need to accept the consequences of your actions. It’s true that you will lose your personality and you will be humiliated deep down but you are also free to do anything you want without being worry what others might think of you!
| To know more about these signs, read “6 simple hidden advantages of lack of self confidence“. |
10 action ways to build self confidence
To improve your self confidence, bring a checklist and start working on these methods.
Now that you have learned almost everything about being confidence in life, it’s best we go for the 10 ways to build and boost self confidence.
1- Learn skills
The basic factor to be self confident enough is to learn skills. Has it ever happen to you when you were at school the moment that you saw you hadn’t done your homework and you didn’t study? Of course, it has happened!
The moment you realize you have a test today, you become nervous because you start thinking about the subject and you remember nothing because you haven’t studied, therefore you have no knowledge about it.
The same goes for self confidence. When you haven’t learned enough skills about the subject you are presenting, you become nervous. This is the moment you start telling yourself you are not self confident enough. It is not true! If you had done your homework, you’d be standing on the stage speaking like a professional with less stress!
So gather all the information you can. Read books, explore all websites and read all articles about your subject. You even have to be ready for the audience’s questions. And this is not only for presentation. When you want to go swimming, you need to know about all kinds of swimming ways, the height of the water and how much deep you can go and for how long you can breathe underwater.
2- Do something harder
Start doing something hard and challenging to gain more self confidence
We all know that when we do something harder, hard becomes easier!
If you speak in front of 20 people, it will be easier to present your idea in front of your managers and bosses who are 5 in general.
The plan is to find something hard to do. See what is one task that frightens you and you believe it’s hard. Then analyze it, see if you can handle it. When you go for it and you succeed in it, other stuff becomes easier and easier.
For example, my friends and relatives used to tell me I am not capable of doing something hard. When I strongly went for taking my driver’s license, I knew it’s hard for me but I did it and all my relatives and friends started looking at me differently. More importantly, I could look at myself differently because then was the moment I realized I can do hard things with a little bit of effort.
Now whenever I want to decide to do something, then moment I say I am not self confident enough to do it, I remember learning to drive and the driver voice in my head tells me you can do anything because you have done something harder!
3- Start doing something new
When you do something new, your brain believes that you can go for anything you want. Then when you want to do something hard, your brain tells you that you have self confidence to do it because you’ve done something new before.
4- Pretend to have self confidence
When you pretend to have self confidence, your mind truly believes it.
The truth is that people can’t tell the difference if you truly are self confident or you are pretending to be.
So when you pretend, you feel much better and your brain believes it too!
Once, I had a presentation, I had to speak for over 500 people. I was nervous as to will every speaker in my position. Suddenly it occurred to me that I can pretend and see what happens. The worst thought of it was to mess things up. But the fact is that I felt great because my mind believed how self confident I am and I could present the way that satisfied me!
5- Think positively about yourself
It’s about your brain believing in you! When you speak and think positively about yourself, you truly believe you can do anything and it gives you self confidence!
6- People around us
If your family or friends don’t believe in you or support you, you lose self confidence too. There are 5 people around you who have an immense effect on your life. So think who they are!
Are they helpful for your success? Or do they believe in you?
I know! You can’t change people if they don’t help you with you your success. But there is a better solution: try to be around people who are supportive, the ones who believe in you and make you self confident enough to be successful.
People around you make you feel you have self confidence or not.
7- How people think about you?
What lessens our self confidence in public speaking is what the audience notice less! For example, some speakers are worried about their trembling hands while the audience can’t notice these small things in a huge hall.
The same goes for self confidence in any other situation. You may not be self confident enough to accept an offer or do a task because of what others may think about you. As a result, it can lead to your failure.
It’s best not to think about what others may think about you. Good or bad, people are always going to judge you and criticize you. The most important thing is your decision and where it leads you.
8- Visual imagery
The human mind can’t tell the difference between reality and imagination. So if you believe something, your mind believes it too. If you believe you are self confident, your mind intends to send some positive thoughts to you and tell you how self confident you are.
9- Small decisions
Small decisions and acting on them make you more self confident. Imagine you decide to go hiking once a week and then you don’t go when it’s the time! You feel useless and with no purpose then you regret being irresponsible.
No, imagine planning to read a book for 10 minutes a day. If you set your alarm and do it, you feel responsible and useful. Then you believe in yourself and know you can do anything if you want.
10- Change your point of view
Sometimes, bad things happen and change your thoughts. You need to wipe away these negative thoughts. One bad thing doesn’t mean it will always go bad! You can change things, improve behaviors and your point of view.
Try to draw and imagine new things and change your viewpoint to have self confidence.
Here you see some of these improvements and changes:
– Do we have to have others’ support?
Absolutely not! Imagine no one supports you but your correct decision leads to a better life and success.
Some people may support you but not everyone agrees with what you do. Consider what we see in Riverdale. Archie Andrews loves to play his guitar and his father wants him to be an instructor like himself. His dad didn’t support him but he still continued his good work until his father came to his senses and agreed with him.
– Is winning everything?
Nope! You don’t have to expect to win in all your steps. Sometimes you lose, sometimes you fall. You have to use your strength and stand again. It truly depends on how much you want that thing to work!
– No one thinks like you!
I wanted to be a speaker. Most people support me but some don’t. I have seen negative comments on my website, Instagram account, etc.
Not all people think like you. Not all people agree what you do is useful and helpful to yourself or others. Then do you have to quit? It is totally up to you. you have to see how right you think your dream is. Is it really your one true dream?
If it is, then don’t stop fighting for it, no matter if others agree or disagree with you.
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What is self confidence? build self confidence with this ten-day action plan |
What childhood has to do with self confidence?
If you dig into Freud‘s and other psychologists’ research about human childhood, you see that it makes sense not to have self confidence in adulthood. You can’t be self confident enough when you are an adult if:
– Parents didn’t let you choose between things
– You were being mocked as a child
– Your teachers ignored how clever and skillful you are
Now, remember that when you are sure you are walking on the right path, there is no need to think about your past and what you have lost. Think about what you will gain.
A few useful tips
you may make some mistakes during your success while you are trying to build self confidence. we enlisted them here so you can prevent them from happening.
• Do not get too excited!
Unfortunately, it’s how the world works. The moment you start doing something big, the whole world turns against you so don’t be too excited.
There are going to be hard choices, hard works, effort, and dilemmas!
Now you may say: “Oh, how can I get past these? Let’s drop it!”
You should know that if you love your choice and dream, you don’t let go but you find a way! My suggestion is hiring a mentor!
• Hire a mentor
Hire a mentor, just like a parent to their child, they will help you build your self confidence
A coach will help you through tough decision-making, dilemmas and guide you back to the right path if you ever confront an aberration.
• Overconfidence
Ego and pride drag you into pit holes so try not to fall for them. Overconfidence is a part of them. When you think you are so good to do whatever you want without putting an effort into it, you become proud and it will be your downfall!
How to maintain self confidence?
Some people learn how to build self confidence but they can’t maintain it. it means they are self confident enough to do something but after a while, they lose their motivation. Here, we want to say how to maintain the motivation to have self confidence.
1- Have a purpose
You always need to have a purpose. it doesn’t matter if it’s a big one or a small one. when you do, even if you finish your first task, you still have a purpose to go forward.
2- Value the task
You can maintain self confidence in front of your audience if you value them.
Imagine a speaker who doesn’t appreciate his audience and doesn’t know their value. Here, he doesn’t care enough to practice and learn more stuff to share with them so he practices for a while and he thinks “Ok, I am self confident enough”. But he loses his confidence when it’s time to present because he doesn’t have enough passion and value for the job to continue what’s right for him.
A practice to maintain self confidence
One way to practice it is to choose someone confident around you. notice what they do. try to imitate that and see how it works.
