How to Increase Confidence – get your life back
Find out how to increase confidence so you can achieve a goal you’ve set, reduce stress, and improve your state of happiness.
“Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.”
Benjamin Spock, author of ‘Baby and Child Care’, 1977
If you want to increase confidence you need to know that it has as much to do with attitude as ability.
I’ve known many people who, while they lacked ability in a certain area, absolutely ‘oozed’ confidence! I’m not talking about bragging about how good they are at tennis, or singing, or public speaking – when really they’re not. I’m talking about feeling okay about not being skilled in those areas and doing it anyway!
Some things are just not important enough to worry about – but we do just the same and create unnecessary stress for ourselves. Whether you fall over trying to ice-skate, make a hash of cooking, fail at DIY or just fear that you may not be good at using a computer if you tried it, so you don’t – does it really matter?
Of course there are some things that are important! Being good at your job is one of them; creating good relationships is another. In these instances you need to find some strategies to help you.
What building self-confidence boils down to is getting rid of that voice inside your head that tells you that you’ll fail if you try, that you’re no good at this sort of thing, that you’ll make a fool of yourself – or whatever the particular message is that rocks your confidence.
Those messages don’t necessarily tell the truth:
- They may have been told to you, in the past, by other people who had their own agenda. Sometimes people will say things to put you down so they feel better about themselves!
- They may have been your interpretation of what someone said. Often what we hear is not what is meant, so if I say “You’re not very good at sports”, you may hear that as a criticism or someone saying “You’re a failure!”
- They may be based on a specific experience you had which caused you to write that message in your head yourself. Let’s say you tried making a bookcase once but it didn’t look very good when you finished it. Therefore, in your mind you believe you’re no good at carpentry and will never try again. But you could have acknowledged that this wasn’t too bad for your first attempt and that you’d probably improve with experience.
Your attitude is the thing that will carry you to success, or defeat you before you even begin.
If you don’t believe you can do it – chances are very high that you won’t. And if you believe all the negative messages from the past, you may as well build a brick wall between you and your goals. (And don’t forget, you fail 100% of the opportunities you don’t even go for!)
But if you believe you can do it, if you can visualise yourself in your mind doing it, chances are very strong that you will succeed!
There’s a saying: “Change the way you look at things and the things you look at will change.” (The half full – half empty glass is an example of this!)
But you don’t have to do this on your own. and confidence coaching will help you to find alternative ways of viewing things. Then the coach will help you to identify your negative beliefs and knock down those brick walls that stand between you and your goals. To increase confidence will undoubtedly help you to achieve what you want from life.