What is self confidence? build self confidence with this ten-day action plan.

Step zero to build self confidence:

Everyone wants to have self confidence but why a few of people have it? It’s because most people don’t want to pay the price of being successful. Most people like to build self confidence, but they don’t even bother to finish this article!
We decided to tell you how to improve your self confidence with this ten-day action plan but first we need a primary lesson which it’s called step zero!
Step zero is to know the fact that building self confidence needs practice, persistence and it takes some effort. And we have to remember this famous quote:

“Today I will do what others won’t, so tomorrow I can accomplish what others can’t”

Believe that if you don’t want to experience the hardship of practicing and effort, you will suffer the lack of self confidence for the rest of your life.
So we appreciate if you don’t just read this article, but you have to spend some time on its practices and complete them in the best way you can.

what does it really mean?

All of us usually use the word, self confidence in our lives somehow. For example, we say:
John has self confidence and Jeremy doesn’t have self confidence!
But when we ask ourselves “what does self confidence really mean?”, We can’t find a proper answer. It seems that self confidence is a subject that everyone understands but can’t successfully explain.

One of the things others ask us about self confidence is its lacking in public speaking and the fear of it. But it’s self confidence in daily life that no one has indeed involved in and sadly when we search in google about it, there are hundreds of useless articles that make me embarrass…

There are many definitions that usually people misplace them. I think at first we have to understand the differences between them and then we can illustrate the real meaning.

Learn how to build self confidence by knowing its real definition.

Different kinds of self confidence:

One of my friends said there are many kinds of self confidence but only one of them is the real one and the others are something else entirely.
Nathaniel Branden talked about all these concepts in his book “six pillars of self esteem.”

Build self confidence and know its difference with self esteem

We will explain all of them in separate articles, but now we only introduce them and then discuss self confidence.
– Self confidence
– Self esteem (when we feel we are valuable)
– Self efficacy (when we think we are good at something and we have its skill. It’s very much alike to self confidence and some people use it instead of self confidence)

Definitions of self confidence:

The literal meaning: being sure in our mind that we can do a task with a desirable quality or having enough skill and belief about the ability to do something.

It means we have to have two specialty:
1- Enough skills to do a job
2- Having a proper viewpoint about that ability or skill

For example, if you think you can say “no” to others and you have the ability to do so, you have the first condition of being self confident but if you have the skill and you don’t believe in it, your viewpoint is weak and it lowers your self confidence so you won’t be able to say “no” to someone at that moment.
It mostly happens for ladies because most of them can say “no” but because of the circumstances and the atmosphere, they don’t believe that they are capable of doing it.

Another point is that self confidence in every task, either exists or not, depends on the task’s type so we either can have self confidence in any task or not.
For example, I might be self confident to go skiing but I might not have self confidence in saying “no” to others.

I have to say this is not the only definition and most of the psychologists believe that self confidence has another meaning: having a valuable feeling about ourselves and our skills. This one is mostly the same as self esteem.
Since there are many descriptions for self confidence, we decided to speak about our standard so that you don’t get confused with all these concepts. We want you to have a better prospect on self confidence.

First positive definition of self confidence:

One way to build self confidence is to believe in yourself.

You will have self confidence when you have enough skills to do something, then you need to have a positive point of view for it. We believe that self confidence is precisely based on the job. You may be self confident in painting but we don’t have enough self confidence in public speaking.

In this definition, at least some factors lead us to success and being self confident. Including:
1- Enough knowledge to do the task
2- Enough skill
3- Enough experience
4- Others reactions about the job
5- The quality of others in doing that task
6- And…

Considering our definition, there are subjects that people argue about  in self confidence and it’s lacking:
– Communication skills
– Shyness and reticence
– take back what rightfully belongs to us
– tools and talking about our skills
– having an effective communication
– public speaking.
– And….

Self confidence can be defined in any field. For example, if you are an expert football player, you may have enough self confidence in your practice but when you have an important match in a big city, you can lose your belief and think that you can’t handle it in front of more audience.

One other example that occurred to me right now is typing with all your fingers! I am typing this article with high speed (about 80 words in 1 minute) with my ten fingers without any mistake while I’m in a plane! But the minute I feel someone is sneaking into my laptop (just like now!!!), I lose my concentration and my self confidence at the same time and I usually make at least one mistake in typing. (the moment he saw me writing this sentence, he turned around!!!)

Why self confidence is important?

Everyone knows how important this is and it seems a cliche question. If you do not have enough self confidence, two things will happen:

One, you never start doing something and you avoid it.
Two, you do it but in a wrong way or with lousy quality and it will lower your self confidence even more and make this defective circle:

Lack of self confidence -> not doing anything -> being unskillful

In fact, if you start doing something with less self confidence, it’s impossible to do it in a right way, so you do it with bad quality (because either you don’t have enough skill or you don’t believe in it) and this leads to a negative point of view in your mind and after that your self confidence lowers day by day.

Somewhere somehow we have to stop this circle from ruining our lives so I suggest you to:

• Determine a purpose:

Purpose is food to self confidence. With no doubt, having a goal is one of the best ways to build self confidence. Purpose is like fuel to our movement and progress. No fuel, no actions.
If you don’t have a purpose, I suggest you search about setting purposes in Google.

• build self confidence with this 10-day active plan

It’s time to act! It’s time to explain the cohesive and 10-day plan for improving this essential skill.
I suggest ten ways. You can use each one in one day.

1- Learn enough skills

first and the basic thing you have to do is having enough skill.
Imagine you’re supposed to have a presentation. If you don’t know how to speak, what to say or how to behave, there is no doubt that you won’t be able to have self confidence to do it because you can’t have a proper perspective on it and your mind is struggling so you can’t get the job done properly.

Another example is saying no. imagine one of your friends asks a favor. He wants to borrow some money from you or he wants you to take his place at work for several hours or do something very small but illegal!
If we want to be confident enough to say no to someone’s request, we have to have two skills: one, know the skill to say no. two, know how to say it.

Second thing we have to do is having a proper image of our abilities. We have to believe that we can do it correctly.
Action: decide right now that you have to be skillful in doing something new. We can take a course or read a book about it.

2- Do something difficult

One of the things that build self confidence is doing something hard. For example, if we manage to be successful in a public speaking in front of 20 people, it’s easier for us to say no!
So you have to seek for something that is hard and try to get it done!

For instance, I had a friend who was afraid of water. He didn’t even get near to a rill with half meter depth and he never tried to walk along a small river!
I asked him to come with me to a pool. We started from shallow parts (of course we were wandering around children and we were completely embarrassed!) and then after I taught him the ability to stay above water (now he had enough skill but he still didn’t believe it), I asked him to come to the deeper parts.

After a 3-hour practice, that it was annoying for me I might add, I succeeded. He came to the deeper part of the pool and he believed that he could easily be there!

With this simple solution (it wasn’t really easy) he could have enough self confidence to be near water and at the end I warned him to be ready because I might throw him into water any second.
After 20 minutes when his mind was completely else where , I suddenly threw him into water. He drank some water but after struggling and trying so hard he could gain enough power to change his perspective. Now he’s not afraid of water like before and has his minimum self confidence.
He could make next tasks easy for himself by doing something really hard.
Action: decide what difficulty you want to overcome? And can you handle it?
You have to be sure that you can do it because if you fail, it results in even less self confidence than you have now.
I suggested to do something that we are ashamed of in my teacher training class. For example, one of classmates begged for money and I did something that I was ashamed to do: recording a video in public in the middle of an airport.

3- Do something new

Build self confidence by doing something new like playing basketball.

Sometimes, we can build self confidence by doing something new.
New experiences usually give us some energy and if we dare to test new actions, we can improve our self confidence too.
For example, we can sign up for a new hobby (Bungee jumping/swimming) or a new educational class (Pilates/personality), also we can participate in tours that travel to places we never have been.

4- Imitation and dissimulation

The truth is there is no difference between actually having self confidence or pretending to have it! People usually do not understand the difference. What is important is our imitation must be correct because if we imitate something, we become it after sometime. One of the best imitations is imitation in communication skills. For example, we have to have a loud voice and self confidant people speak with loud voice too. We don’t need to sound loud or audible, we just have to act like it and best thing to do that is practice: reading with loud voice and the pen practice.

5- Talk positive about yourself

You have to inculcate positive things and say positive things about yourself. We have to analyze our thoughts to see if we are thinking positive or negative.
Even if we are pretending, we have to think that we can handle this and we can do it. Above all, we have to avoid negative conversations.

6- Improving others

One of the most effective factors on our self confidence is the ones around us. In fact, they effect our imagery. If our friends and relatives tell us we can’t do something and they do not believe in us (weather we want it or not), our imagery and self confidence will be altered. So it depends on us how to reduce this affect.
Think about five people around you. do they make our self confidence to improve? Or they’re causing its reduction?
If you think it’s the second one, I suggest you get closer to the ones with positive energy! You don’t have to throw away your parents! Mostly when we talk about people around us, we go straight to think about our parents and our spouse! Certainly I don’t mean that. I say we can add positive people in our lives so that the negative effect can’t prevail over us.

7- The image of you that people have in their mind.

I think best way to explain this method is an example.
In public speaking course most participants notice something important in first session and it makes them be more self confidant. It’s the fact that the things made us less self confidant are the things that audience is not able to see or understand! For example, most people are worried about their heartbeat or shaking hands. The fact is that audience can’t even see the lecturer’s face let alone noticing his trembling hand! Or they do not even notice what we are wearing.
So this is very essential to know how people perceive us.

8- A correct visual imagery

Visual imagery is one of the best methods to build self confidence

One of the most valuable methods is a correct way of visual imagery.
We are lucky that our mind can’t tell the difference between reality and imagination. So if we can make a good visual imagery, our mind believes it is real and that improves our self confidence.
Now decide in which task you want to build self confidence and picture it for yourself.

9- Making small decisions

We have to make small and successful decisions. For instance, if we decide to wake up 10 minutes earlier from tomorrow and we really do it, it makes us feel better about ourselves. One other small decision is to spend 10-20 minutes on reading in our daily plan.

10- Change your viewpoint

Last method is to change your point of view. Sometimes what we have in mind or our expectations do not correspond and it lowers our self confidence.
For example, there are some changes and improvements here:

• Do others have to support us?

Negative! Who said everyone should support us? If it would happen, it was good but the bad news is not everyone supports us when we decide to grow and change.
If we go back through history, we see all great men started their new path without any support and even sometimes others disagreed with them.

• Do we have to win?

No, sometimes we will fail. This is one of our mistakes. I am almost certain that every success has a failure.

• Does everyone have to think like us?

We have to build self confidence no matter how many people argue with us because no one think like us.

Look at this picture! It’s one of the comments from a member of this website!
“I don’t even say hi. You don’t deserve it. You have no self-conscious. you take people’s money and fill your pockets. I wish you bad luck and unsuccessful life.”
If I expected everyone to agree with me, I had to shut down this site a long time ago. But the reality is that I accepted others opinions about me. The world is spinning with these disagreements and contradictory comments, so I have to admit that no one has to agree with me or think like me.
Above all, I don’t have to prove everything to everyone. I have to walk on the right path.
There is a beauty in this sentence:
“if we want to have a better life, sometimes we have to let them think they are right! We don’t need to argue with them.”

Childhood role in self confidence:

If we seek into Psychology of the past (like Freud), we can find plenty of reason for not having self confidence in adulthood. I think changing others opinion about these three factors will have a significant role to build self confidence:
1- Parents didn’t give us the right to choose in our childhood.
2- People around us mocked our skills.
3- Teachers ignored our skills.

But the fact is that when we feel we have the right path in front of us, there is no reason to think about the past. You have to decide to build self confidence and you have to do it, without looking back and ask about whose fault it is.

Suggestions:

• Don’t get excited! The minute you start, the whole world is against you!

Do not imagine that after reading this article the whole world changes and you will be someone else!
Usually, the world is against someone who decides to change and obstacles show up so that only those who deserve it and prepare to pay the price can change! For example, the minute you decide to go on a diet, delicious food starting shining and winking in the fridge or you will be invited to parties and weddings. Or when you choose not to lie, not to talk behind someone’s back, all the circumstances lead you to do so!
Similarly, when you want to build self confidence, many things happen to prevent that, but you have to be persistent and continue to show that you are stronger than any obstacle.
“I don’t stop when I’m tired. I stop when it’s finished.”

• Have a mentor

Have a mentor who guides you when you want to build self confidence

It’s better if you have someone to guide you. A teacher, a couch or a friend who knows the path and comes for help whenever you need it.

• Overconfidence

It’s about time to talk about overconfidence! It happens when we don’t have enough skill but we have a strong feeling for it and we believe in it. For example, I am not very good at skiing but I think I can jump on a massive hedge. The result is I will fall.

• Have faith in the source of energy in the universe.

It’s useful if you know there is an energy surrounding you and watching over you.

Conclusion:

Having self confidence takes effort, and you have to practice, you have to know without practicing and failing, you can’t get what you want.
Jim Rohn’s quote about discipline and pain is: “We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons!”
Now, do you prefer the pain of practicing this 10-day action plan or the pain of not having self confidence for the rest of your life?