We all love to be around people who ooze of confidence. Confident people shine like none others. Just look at someone really successful prepare for the task they need to do. You will have seen what real confidence looks like. You will be able to notice the determination and surety with which they move their body and practice their skill. There is no hint of doubt in their faces. It is all because of the confidence they have.
Self confidence has a direct impact on your performance. The more confident you feel, the better you perform. And better performance in turn makes you feel more confident. Everyone should be able to feel like this. Being confident makes you alluring and attractive. The good thing about confidence is, anyone can develop it. The most confident people in the world today, weren’t born with the confidence which they have. They developed it over time. You can as well!
What Is Self-Efficacy?
When you are trying to build self-confidence, the place you should start at is by assessing your self-efficacy levels. So what is self-efficacy? It means the level of confidence which you have while doing a specific task. One of the theories from a leading researcher about self-efficacy suggests that self-efficacy is the relationship between how well a person can carry out a certain task and what is his/her belief in his abilities while doing so.
Just to set it straight, confidence and self-efficacy are not the same things. While confidence is a general term applied to the strength of belief, self efficacy is the belief in one’s abilities tied to one particular task at a time. You will be able to notice the difference. Some people are really comfortable at doing somethings and seem really confident while doing those activities. But they may not be very comfortable in doing something else.
This is why understanding self-efficacy is really important. You need to understand your different levels of self-efficacy in context of different activities. It will give you an idea about how confident you are overall. It is basically like finding the average rate of your confidence. While there is no metric to do so, you can still get an idea/sense.
Building Self Confidence
What if I told you self-confidence is something that you can build overtime. You can be your own cheer leader and push yourself to new heights. You just have to do a few things. I am mentioning below 4 exercises that you need to do in order to build self-confidence:
- Remind yourself of your previous accomplishments
- Learn to envision deeply how your successful future would like like
- Reframe how you see your past mistakes – see them with a more positive light
- Set achievable goals and crush them
Push Yourself Up – Celebrate You
One key ingredient which self-confident people have and other’s don’t is they have the belief that whatever they set out to achieve, they will! They don’t doubt themselves and avoid talking negatively to their inner-self. You will never find them comparing their performance with other people and berating themselves. They have a belief that they are the best the way they already are and they don’t need to be like anyone else.
Celebrate everything that you do. You don’t need to be hard on yourself even when you fail doing something. Just get rid of that monkey sitting on your shoulder who is bringing you down whenever you are trying to attempt something new. This is going to increase your self-confidence.
Get Rid of the Monkey
So how do you get rid of the monkey sitting on your shoulders? The answer is quite simple. When you want to remove something, the best way to do it is by replacing it with something new. So you just need to recognise whenever you are talking negatively to yourself and stop yourself right there. Then all you need to do is talk positively with yourself. That’s all. Sounds simple right? Well it really is.
One way to remind yourself of all the positive things that you can tell yourself is to remember all your accomplishments. Those accomplishments can be anything. The gravity of that accomplishment does not matter. For example – your accomplishment could be as simple as making a bowl of rice for your family or yourself. Anything which you have done successfully.
Remember all of those accomplishments and write them down. Now read them to yourself every time you start thinking negatively. Remember the feeling which you got when you got those accomplishments. Your self-confidence is bound to increase when you get rid of the monkey.
Use Personal Affirmations
You should learn how to use personal affirmations to drive up your confidence levels. So what are personal Affirmations? A personal affirmation is a statement that you tell yourself which allows you to reaffirm your worth. When you tell yourself these statements again and again, you start believing that they are true. Your brain will catch up with all the words that your mouth is saying in no time. Then your affirmations will be instilled in your sub-conscious mind which will make it all natural for you.
While making an affirmation statement for yourself, you should always start with – I am someone who……………., rather than start with – It is……! You should always use the present tense while making affirmations, because you want to believe that you are the person you are trying to become right now. Do not use negative language. All your affirmations should be positive in nature.
Just make a list of affirmations for yourself and read it every morning first thing in the day. Reading them will boost your self-confidence.
Envision Your Success
One of the biggest things that successful people are able to do is envision their success. They know how their successful future would feel like. You should be able to envision everything in detail. Think about the people that will be with you when you become successful. Tell yourself the kind of house you would want to live in.
Think about how your surrounding would smell and the way you would talk with people. You should know how you will feel emotionally when you are successful. Your brain will interpret all these things you think very vividly in the same manner it would interpret them like when they would be real. Now, think, just how much this ability of envisioning your future along with your affirmation list would boost your confidence! You will be like a different person totally, but in a good way!
All of this would contribute towards the formation of a strong self-image. A strong self-image would liberate your mind towards success. Your self-image would be so strong and positive that you won’t even think about anything else than what you have been reaffirming yourself about. Self-confidence is all about the self-image after all.
Manipulate Your Past
Something is only wrong when we feel it is wrong. Often we dwell on our mistakes which we can’t change now and think about only if we could have done things in a different manner. So let me tell you something, it is not the right way to think. Don’t for a second dwell on your past. It is only taking the present from you which you can use to build a better future.
But how does it help in being confident? Here is how. When you stop dwelling on your mistakes and accept them for what they really are which is learning about methods which won’t work, you get to move on. A failed attempt should act like a whisper in your ears telling you to try again. But with most of us, a failed attempt is like a whisper in our ears telling us that we will fail again.
Not that you won’t fail again. You can fail again. But that shouldn’t dictate the way you go about your life. Like Benjamin Franklin said, ‘I didn’t fail the test, I only found a 100 ways which won’t work.’ Learn to embrace your failures. They are your guidelines towards a better and confident future. The more mistakes you make, the more ways you know in which don’t have to behave to fail again. So just think it as this – by failing more, you are increasing your odds of winning. So keep failing until you win.
Observe Others
One really vital thing which you can do is observe others. Look at people who are successful and whom you think are similar to you. If you feel like they can win, you will feel that you can do it as well. You will be basically influencing yourself towards achieving your goals.
Building self-confidence is a simple art which anyone of us can do. But surprisingly enough, we don’t. Never belittle yourself or your accomplishments.
Conclusion
There are just no limits to what we can achieve. Instead of knowing this, most of us are so low in confidence. But you can easily change that. All you need to do is follow the steps I have mentioned above. You can change yourself by changing the way you think. These methods are not all black and white, you can try your own ways, but just remember, feel good about yourself. It is really important that you do.
One thing that I would want you all to always remember is, never to associate your success or failure with your confidence. These are both results in nature and results are not in our control. We can only control the process. So regardless of what the results are, pat your back and congratulate yourself for trying. Then try again. There is nothing to lose, only to learn. Stay confident guys, you can do it!
0 Comments