Learning how to be more confident is not easy! But, having self-confidence will cost you the life you’ve always desired.
What has a lack of self-confidence cost you?
Trying new things? Creating valuable and intimate friendships? Pursuing your dream career? Finding the love of your life? Has lacking self-confidence drifted you away from your dream life?
Just think about it! In the end, who will be the one who will push you over all those hurdles? To write the final scene of the TV episode before the deadline? Or do just one more audition after 10 rejections?
Who is going to be affected if you hold yourself back for the comfort of others?
You.
And you can’t do any of that without confidence.
Let me tell you. Getting up after you’ve fallen on your ass is always hard. But, it’s nearly impossible when you don’t have the confidence to do so.
Learning how to be more confident is crucial to creating the life you want. When you lack self-confidence, you’ll end up keeping yourself safe from the life you want.
I don’t remember losing self-confidence or when the negative self-talk began. When I went to college, my lack of self-confidence held me back in so many ways. Everything from making friends, succeeding in class, choosing a major, and more.
My self-confidence manifested as a lack of self-trust. I needed others to validate every choice I made. And rejection felt like the world was ending.
So I set walls to keep myself safe. In the end, it was my own beliefs that led to the experiences I had.
I avoided being seen, so I felt invisible. I needed others to validate my major, so I pursued something that I wasn’t interested in. I avoided failure, so I never tried anything new. I avoided rejection by rejecting everyone else so making friends was really hard.
Although these walls kept me safe, they also kept me from the life I truly wanted to live. I didn’t pursue my passions, build intimate relationships, or live in my truth. It was during this time that I started to wonder how to be more confident.
When I started learning how to be more confident, I realized that self-confidence is a mind game. It’s about strategically choosing new thoughts and making them a habit. That habit turns into a new belief. That new belief into action.
Self-confidence is a journey you are on your whole life. But, here are a few principles I learned that sped up my confidence journey.
Let’s get into the tools that I use when learning how to be more confident:
Spend Time Alone Doing Esteem-Building Activities
The hardest thing to do when you lack self-confidence is to spend time alone. It is much easier to live in the noise of life because it distracts you from your negative self-talk.
When I first started this journey, separation was key. It allowed me the space to listen to myself and learn from my thoughts.
1. Create a list of the things that you like to do, skills you would like to learn, etc.
2. Every week, plan 2-3 activities to do alone.
You are doing little things to force yourself out of your comfort zone.
By doing them alone, you are getting used to the feeling of being alone in public. You put yourself in spaces to meet people who will support these different interests. You are able to experience things and make an opinion about them without the input of others.
Analyze Your Negative Self-Talk
When you are learning how to be more confident, it is easy for negative self-talk to get in the way. It can feel overwhelming and debilitating.
During this journey, negative self-talk was the hardest thing to shake. I still have trouble with it! But, I have come a long way.
Analyzing my negative self-talk was a big part of that. I learned to recognize when an experience triggers my emotions. I would grab my journal and do this exercise:
Trigger: What was the experience that triggered this emotional response?
Thought: What was the negative thought?
Mini Journal Entry: In a stream of consciousness, explore why that experience was painful and emotional for you.
Experimental Solution: What is a tool that you can use to keep from emotionally spiraling from these triggers in the future? (i.e. replacing with positive affirmation, mental pep talk before those kinds of interactions, new action to add to routine)
The key to gaining confidence in yourself is thinking of your thoughts and emotions as information. Avoid getting angry at yourself for having the thought. Instead, think of the thought as neutral information.
The analysis of negative self-talk can help you to understand your triggers. And emotionally prepare for them ahead of time. From there you can put tools in place to help you to develop new habits for those triggers.
Start Turning Your Dreams Into Reality Today!
Ready to start taking control of your life, but don’t know where to start? I have a FREE checklist that is perfect for creating an action plan for your dream life. Start achieving goals that really matter to you!
Use Objective Experiencing to Escape Negative Thought Cycles
The worst part of about low self-confidence is negative thought cycles. One triggering experience can lead you to spiral. You over-analyze everything and everyone (i.e. “Am I talking too much?” “I don’t think they like me.” “I can’t do that, I’m not ____ enough”).
Objective Experiencing is an idea that I picked up when listening to Making Sense *link to podcast episode* When learning how to be more confident, this was a more tangible form of meditation that I could use during my especially anxious moments.
Bring your focus to the feel and movement of your breath.
Let your mind naturally wander to different thoughts and experiences (i.e. the chirping of the birds outside your window, the sound of your dog chewing on his bone, the thought that you haven’t since that important email yet.).
Between each thought/experience, bring your focus back to your breath.
Learning how to be more confident requires you to bring yourself back into the present moment. Objective experiencing is a great tool for getting present.
* activity 2: 5 senses *
Don’t Reflect on Where You Want to Be Too Much
When we lack self-confidence, it is easy to fantasize about the world we want to live in. We dream up what our lives could look like. And that’s all fun until you come back to the dim reality you feel you are currently in.
The gap between our desired reality and our current reality starts to feel like an abyss. We begin to feel that we are stuck and the desire we have to change our lives dwindles.
One of the things that hurt my journey was over-focusing on the future. It kept me from the present moment, which led to more anxious feelings and negative self-talk.
Although thinking about the future can be helpful. I would spend hours thinking about how far away I was from my end goal, instead of doing the work to get closer to it.
Decide where you want to go. Decide the next 1-5 actions. Get back to the present moment and take action.
Reflecting on your goals and aspirations is helpful to develop into your ideal self. But, it is important that we do not spend too much time in the future.
Yes, it is good to know what direction you are heading and what your dreams are. But, we can start to value the fantasy over the active accomplishing of that goal.
Trust in yourself is important to learn how to be more confident. Action builds confidence because it leads to the evidence we need to trust ourselves. We learn that we can accomplish what we set our minds to.
*CTA 2: *
Learning How To Be More Confident is a Long Journey
The journey to be more confident is a hard one. But, with these tools, you’re one step closer to living the life you’ve always dreamed about.
Remember: Learning how to be more confident is about strategizing your way through releasing negative and unhealthy mindsets. Self-confidence is self-neutrality, not self-absorption.
It is about accepting yourself as a human, and learning that you’ll be ok no matter how bad you fail.
Leave a Reply