How to become more confident.

Sam Walton, an American businessman and entrepreneur, said “If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.”

I am sure at some point in your life you wished to have more faith in yourself. We all have those moments when we lack confidence in our capabilities. The good news is that confidence is something we can work on and get better at it. When something happens, you can react to it in a positive or negative way and your reaction depends on your confidence level. All that together creates an outcome that increases or decreases your self-confidence. As you can see your level of self-confidence has an influence on your reaction and your reaction has an influence on your self-confidence. It might be a bit confusing, therefore let’s explore what influences our level of self-confidence.

Keith Johnson in his book “The Confidence Solution” highlights that you feel confident about yourself to the degree that you feel you are in control of your life. When we feel uncertain very often we ask ourselves questions that put us down even more. This is because we look at the situation in negative colours. Reframe the situation you are in as an opportunity to learn something new and look for possible solutions to improve the current state. Ask yourself the right kind of questions: e.g. what do I need to resolve first to feel my life is more predictable? The more predictable life feels the more confidence you feel.

Another aspect that has a major impact on your confidence is fear. We spend so much time fantasising about things that can go wrong disempowering ourselves in the process. Define what you fear but look how you can replace it with a more positive outcome. Focus on reward - things you can gain: success, happiness, new relationship, living your dream life etc.

How you act in life is a reflection of your self-portrait which consist of three elements: self-image, self-concept and self-esteem:

• Whatever your self-image is, meaning how you see yourself, this is how you will act. If you want to become a different person create a new self-image.
• Your self-concept is how you define yourself using adjectives. Use positive words to describe yourself e.g., unique, brilliant, amazing, instead of negative words e.g., ugly, stupid, a failure.
• Self-esteem is the value you place on yourself, how much you love and like yourself. You need to value yourself first so that you project that image on others.

Your self-portrait will determine what you achieve in life. The more confident you feel the bolder action you will take. And to talk yourself into taking those actions use positive self-talk instead of making judgmental statements about yourself. Look at your belief system. Your beliefs have an influence on the kind of action you take, which consequently determines the results you achieve. The way you behave is in line with what you believe about yourself, the world. And your belief system is based on what you’ve seen not what you see. Your brain likes familiarity that’s why we love our comfort zones. Visualise what you want to achieve. Make the possibility of what you want to accomplish more familiar for your brain and therefore more believable.

Most people have a negative belief system yet don’t even realise it. The author of the book gave a great example of looking at your income. Think or write down your current yearly income. Now remove the last digit and ask yourself: Do you believe you can do something really stupid in one year and reduce the income to that figure? Most probably you answered yes. Now take the initial income figure and add zero at the end. This is your potential income for next year that you can achieve. Looking great, right? But as you think that would be great at the same time you don’t believe it’s truly possible.

When I did that exercise, I felt for it. It was easy for me to believe I could reduce my income but not so easy to believe in the increase. I thought that perhaps I could reach the potential income, but… What appeared after “but” was my limiting beliefs that I created over the years. If you want to change your limiting beliefs you need to re-examine all existing ones first and then change them in a way so they could reflect the potential, something that hasn’t been achieved yet.

I do realise you might have slightly different expectations for this article. You might not have expected to read so much about your self-portrait or belief system. All the aspects discussed here has an influence on your confidence level because confidence is the outcome. To get it you needed to address the underlying causes of lack of it. The decision to work on yourself is purely yours. You can decide to do nothing, or you can start with a decision that you are not going to live the current way. That the only possible outcome is for you to be confident. If you decide to do some work:

• Get clear
• Get focused
• Get moving.