Self Confidence Empowers Imperfection (Part 2)

Last week, we began a discussion of actions you can take every day to boost your self-confidence so that you can begin empowering your own imperfections. Here are seven more.

Do Good Deeds

This is perhaps one of the most effective ways to boost your confidence. Ironically, it is also one of the most overlooked. Many people tend to see confidence as an internal and personal issue. They fail to see that confidence is also intimately tied to what you do and how those actions are perceived by others. The most positive and beneficial of these actions are good deeds.

You need to start interacting with the world differently if you want the world to consider you differently. You also need to start interacting with the world differently if you want to begin looking at yourself differently. Start this process by giving more of yourself in order to help others. Love more. Care about those around you more. Take the actions necessary to change the lives of the people around you for the better. When you do so, you will also begin to change your own life for the better. The people around you will begin to take notice of your good deeds. You will begin to receive positive feedback because of those deeds. This, in turn, will begin to allow you to feel better about yourself.

Do Good Work

How do you work? How do you feel about work? How do you perform the everyday tasks that you need to do in order to live your life? Your answers to these questions are important because those answers can help give you real insight into what is going on inside of you when it comes to confidence and self-awareness. How you work is directly related to how you feel about yourself.

So, how do you work? If you work at less than your optimum level, it could be because you don’t feel that you’re capable of more. You settle for less in your life, so when it comes to performance, you also settle there. To change this behavior, you have to consciously do even the smallest of tasks to the best of your ability.

Think about washing dishes. It’s a mundane task that everyone everywhere does. When you wash a dish, try to wash that dish in the best way that you can. Make sure that the dishes, as well as all the other dishes, are as clean and dry as possible before you put them away. Wipe the sink down and leave the kitchen clean. When you take the time to do the smallest of tasks to the best of your ability, the habit tends to bleed over to other areas in your life. You soon find that you’re doing good work each and every time a task presents itself.

Be Prepared

Preparation ties into the idea of performance. If you want to perform well, it stands to reason that you have to prepare for that performance. However, many people with low confidence tend to avoid this preparation, mainly because they want to avoid being in the spotlight of having to perform. They don’t think they can do well. Because of this, they avoid preparing to perform well. The end result is a self-fulfilling prophecy – they end up not performing well and, thus, reinforcing their low self-confidence.

It’s time to break this cycle. The way to do this is by actively preparing to perform at your very best each and every time that you are called on to perform. A great way to accomplish this is through the process of visualization. Athletes use visualization to picture their movement in their mind’s eye before they perform those actions. They see themselves performing those motions successfully, so when they actually get to the time when they have to perform, they are much more likely to be successful.

You can do the same thing. Picture yourself breezing through some activity that you have to perform. See yourself doing that activity perfectly. See yourself doing that activity with pleasure. The chances are you will be happier and more successful at the activity as a result. You will also be more confident the next time you are called on to perform.

Be Principled

Low confidence can be a result of a lack of solid personal principles or a lack of fortitude to stand up for those principles. People who experience this often simply drift through life, being influenced by other people’s actions. They don’t always agree with this influence and often find themselves doing things that they don’t agree with, which brings very little satisfaction. This conflict reinforces the low confidence they have in themselves and magnifies their view of their imperfections.

What’s the answer? It’s simple. Be very clear about what your own personal set of principles and morals are and are not. Once you are clear about your principles, be prepared to stand on those principles and act accordingly. You will find yourself not being swayed by the opinions of others. You will also find yourself taking actions that you do agree with and that do bring personal satisfaction. As a result, your self-confidence will increase, and you’ll begin to accept yourself with greater conviction. This greater belief in yourself and in your abilities allows you to not only embrace your imperfections, but also to also see them as tokens of your unique position as you.

Think Before You Speak

Have you ever heard the saying, “still waters run deep”? Like all adages, there is a strong element of truth in that one – one that applies directly to self-confidence. You see, a lot of people who lack confidence often also lack a powerful voice. They don’t speak up when they need to speak up, or they say things they don’t mean or believe in order to fit in or to deflect attention away from themselves. Either way, they end up feeling bad about their actions, or lack thereof, and this decreases their confidence even further.

If find yourself in this cycle, you must develop the habit of thinking before you speak. Consider carefully both what another party to the conversation is saying and what your potential response might be. Remember, when it comes to speech, less is more. When you consider what it is that you want to say and what the impact of those words will be, you tend to gain more influence during a conversation. This is especially true if people have come to see you as someone who considers carefully what they have to say. You gain more impact when you open your mouth, and this impact begins to build your confidence.

Stand Straight

We have discussed that actions influence emotion, mood, and thought. This doesn’t only apply to conscious action. It applies to unconscious action as well.

Proprioception is the way we orient ourselves in the world. It helps us to decide which way is up; it keeps us upright and moving forward through the world. The process of proprioception is largely done automatically and unconsciously. We don’t have to think about it. It simply happens. Yet even though it happens largely without our knowledge, it is still influenced by how we feel inside. So, because posture is one of the biggest things that proprioception manages, posture is also impacted by negative thought processes.

You can do something about it, however. You can consciously decide to improve your posture by standing up straight. When you stand fully erect, with your shoulders thrown back, you begin to feel better about yourself than you did when you were slouching. Why? Your brain interprets the new posture as a sign of positive external activity, and your mood and feelings begin to change. You feel better about yourself, and your confidence grows.

Get Competent

How do you get good at something? How do you learn to perform a task better? How do you develop a specific ability? The answer is simple. In order to get better at anything, you have to practice. Practice builds competence. Competence increases performance. Better performance increases confidence, which, in turn, motivates further practice. It’s a positive feedback cycle.

The challenge is that low levels of confidence promote avoidance when it comes to the practice that builds competence. It’s a vicious circle. You don’t think that you are any good at something. That feeling reduces the motivation to practice. The lack of practice guarantees little or no competence which reinforces the idea that you’re no good. It’s time to stop this nonsense and get competent. Take the steps you need to take to motivate yourself to practice. Internalize that the act of practice will assuredly build competence. That competence will guarantee superior performance. Because you practice, you get more competent. Because you’re more competent, you perform better. Because you perform better, you have more confidence in what it is that you are doing.

This is the end of this four-week series, but it’s only the beginning of your journey. You’ve seen that the process of embracing your imperfections is a positive one. You’ve learned about the reality of imperfection, and that perfection is largely a fictional and unattainable ideal. You’ve learned how to begin embracing your imperfections. You’ve seen how to appreciate the imperfections that are inherent in beauty, and you’ve been shown specific ways to empower your imperfections by developing confidence in your abilities. Remember, what you’ve learned is only the start. Positively embracing your imperfections is a lifelong habit – one that will allow virtually unlimited growth and development free of the tyranny of perfection.