BUILDING SELF CONFIDENCE

Everybody needs a sense of balanced self-confidence based on a firm appreciation of reality. Some people have low self-confidence whilst others may be over-confident. Neither of these are balanced.

If you are under-confident, you’ll avoid taking risks and stretching yourself; and you might not try at all. Conversely, if you’re over-confident, you may take on too much risk, stretch yourself beyond your capabilities, and may be faced with failure.

With the right amount of self-confidence, you will take informed risks, stretch yourself (but not beyond your abilities) and try hard.

By using the following 3 steps, you can build your well balanced, self-confidence which will also build success.

Step 1: PREPARE FOR YOUR TRANSITION

You need to take stock of where you are now, think about where you want to go, get yourself into the right mindset and commit to completing your journey to balanced self-confidence.

You need to assess where you are now to know how far you need to go to reach the outcome you are striving for.

·      Identify and take pride in your achievements

·      Identify your core strengths

·      Identify what is important to you

·      Identify what you want to achieve in life

·      Manage your mindset

·      Commitment

Achievements

Look at your achievements so far in life, listing the 10 best things you have achieved so far. This can be things such as coming first in a school race or exam, helping someone else achieve something, highest sales achieved in the month or best customer service award, or something that had a positive impact on your business.

When you have thought these through, write them down in a word document and print them off. Now pin them up where you can see them regularly.

Strengths

Think about your strengths. You may find this tricky but ask yourself this question…

What would my friends and family consider to be my strengths?

Your strengths are often highlighted by the things you enjoy doing.

Things of Importance

Think about what is important to you. The things that motivate you and drives you forward.

Think about what your values are.

Want to achieve

Think about what you want to achieve in life. Your dreams and ambitions. Setting yourself goals and targets is a great way to build on self-confidence. Make them short targets to begin with, be specific, make them measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based.

Mindset

Stop the negative self-talk. When you find yourself in a negative or vulnerable situation, work on positive self-talk. 

The power of positive affirmation is incredible, so every day tell yourself how good you are, how wonderfully in control you are, how you can achieve anything you want in life.

Commitment

You must make a promise to yourself that you will remain committed and will do everything in your power to achieve a sense of balanced self-confidence by achieving the goals you set.

You will be faced with doubts along the journey, so when this happens, write down these doubts and start to challenge them calmly and rationally. Most of the time, these doubts will disperse.

If you find the doubts are caused by genuine risks, set additional goals to overcome them.

Step 2: START YOUR TRANSITION

Now you have set your goals, you need to work your way towards them.

Skills

Look at the skills you will need to get there and whether your already heave the skills. If you don’t, look for a way to acquire those skills, a solution, program or course of some kind that will give you the necessary skills.

Celebrate

Start with the small goals and get into the habit of achieving your goals then it will be much easier to tackle the bigger, tougher goals. When you achieve a goal, celebrate. Keep these mental images strong as they will help you through the less positive times. Achieving goals, no matter how small they are, will boost your self-confidence.

Learning opportunities

Learn to accept failure as a learning opportunity. We all need to fail sometimes, in order to learn. We all make mistakes when we are trying something new. Look at this as a positive not a negative. Don’t shy away from things for fear of failure as you will miss the opportunity to learn. Remember the saying “If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger”

3. BUILD YOUR SELF-CONFIDENCE

Now you have started building your self-confidence, you will have become more familiar with success. You will no longer be shying away from opportunities for fear of failure, so now you need to stretch yourself and your self-imposed boundaries. Set yourself bigger goals that are a little tougher to achieve knowing that you will get there.

You need to make sure that you do not become over-confident at this stage. You must make sure you are not over-stretching yourself and look out for the signs that you are starting to enjoy cleverness for it’s own sake. In other words, keep yourself grounded.

As long as you keep stretching yourself enough but not beyond your abilities, your self-confidence will grow with you. You will celebrate each growing achievement in the knowledge you earned your growing self confidence as you put in the effort.

Grow your self-confidence until you reach a balanced state of self-confidence.

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