Increase your confidence: 15 practical tips

Confidence is one of the most important attributes (or is it a skill?) in work and in life. But how can someone get more of it??

Here are some practical things you can do:

1. Realise that nobody’s perfect -?being OK is fine, and it’s OK to not be perfect. And you already ARE OK, you're already good enough.
2. Self talk - what you say to yourself makes all the difference - you don't have to do it in front of a mirror, but you DO have to say good things to yourself (in your head, and sometimes out loud), rather than bad things. "I can do this", "I deserve this".
3. Positive and supportive talk not just yourself, but with your partner if you have one. Make it a game, and then a habit, to only say positive things: "this party or event is going to be great", "what I really like about that person is...", "The good bits of our day have been..." "You'll be fine because you're good at...."
4. Make a list of your strengths. Everyone has strengths, including you! Once you are clear about what you're good at, you can make sure you use those strengths - confidently.
5. Make another list - of the reasons why you are lucky. It's easy to take our lives and our situations for granted. Making this list will help you to feel good about yourself.
6. Look at the good stuff that happens to you, focus on the good stuff - and Ignore the bad stuff that happens, or at least don’t dwell on it. Life is going fine for you!
7. Get rid of a bad boss if you've got one. Or if your boss is fine but you have a bad job, get rid of that job. You deserve better than a bad job or bad boss, and they'll just drag you down and ruin your confidence, even though it's not your fault at all. How to get rid of a bad boss? Vote with your feet, start looking for someone / somewhere better, and then when you find something better, leave.
8. Associate with positive people: friends and colleagues who will build you up and encourage you, not people who will criticise you and bring you down. No more negative friends!
9. Find what you’re good at - then you can do it and you’ll feel good. This may require some experimenting and maybe some failures along the way. Keep experimenting and learning so you can keep adding to the things that you're good at.
10. Do -> get -> feel - control the circle. What I mean by this is that what you do affects what you get (praise and thanks, or criticism and complaints). What you get affects how you feel, of course. And then how you feel affects what you do. So you could be stuck in a bad circle where your boss treats you badly (this is what you are getting) which then leads to you feeling bad, so you then do a bad job. If you are criticised you'll feel less confident and therefore probably perform worse, which leads to more criticism. But you can break this circle! You can decide to do a great job even though you don't feel like it, you can decide to ignore what you've got or how you feel, and rise above it - breaking the circle.
11. FIDO stands for Forget It and Drive On - the idea being that you don't dwell on problems and mistakes and failures in the past, but you learn from them and then move on from them - forget them and drive on, to the future. We all make mistakes (unless we're not doing anything difficult!) and that's fine - don't keep punishing yourself for things that didn't work out.
12. Take small steps towards a big objective, towards something difficult or ambitious, which will give you a feeling of progress, building up your confidence as you go along. You can do it - in fact you ARE doing it! However difficult the challenge is, you can certainly do the first steps dn then the second, building your confidence as you go along.
13. Learning builds your confidence, because it's basically you becoming more awesome! So: always be learning. What are you learning at the moment? What are you going to learn next?
14. Don’t compete with others, or even compare yourself with other people. You are you! Yes, sometimes you'll be better than them at something, but often you won't. There are always people who are better than you at things (and the best ones tend to publicise themselves more than the failures!) so comparing will only lead to knocking your confidence. Just be happy to be you!
15. Forget trying to master anything - from tennis to marketing, from the piano to sales, you'll never totally master it, so don't get depressed about the remaining bit where you're not perfect. And trying to achieve perfection will take up all of your time, which could be spent on other things. It's better to dabble in lots of things, and just have fun with it. Have the confidence to play the saxophone badly (or at least well enough) and to try for that big contract even though you might not get it every time. Perfection is for losers / people who can’t prioritise / people who will never be happy.

Onwards and upwards!

CC

PS Want to be a freelance management trainer like me? Check out www.becometrainers.com