5 Tips to Have a More Self-Confident Attitude
Doubting yourself is a habit. So is believing in yourself.
Self-confidence is nothing more nor less than believing in your capabilities.
It’s knowing that, no matter what happens, you’ll figure it out and handle it.
Lack of self-confidence is based on the fear that you won’t be able to handle something. It leads to playing safe and living small.
Everyone has fear. The confident people don’t let it stop them.
This confidence comes from two places. First, they have taken action before, even when they didn’t know the outcome. Whatever the outcome was, they handled it. Second, they have the right attitude.
In a previous article, I talked about the actions you can take to increase your self-confidence. Here are five tips on how to have the right attitude.
Tip #1: Use confident body language
You might have heard about “power poses”. Scientific research has proved that if you stand like a superhero — fists on hips, chest out, head up — you feel more powerful. It’s because not only do our emotions create our body language, but how we hold our body reinforces our emotions.
To feel more self-confident, you can trick your emotions by using confident body language.
Examples of confident body language
Confident people look others in the eye, rather than looking at the floor or off to the side. Don’t stare, or lock gazes — that’s an aggressive threat behavior. Keep your head up. Look them in the eye, glance away, look back, glance away… There’s a natural flow to connecting and disconnecting when interacting with others. Study characters on TV shows and in movies if you need models.
Put your shoulders back and chest forward. Hunching your shoulders to protect yourself is an instinctive response when you expect an attack. You’re trying to make yourself smaller (so it’s harder to hit you) and redirect the attack to someplace it will just hurt, not kill you. Shoulders back and chest forward says to the world that you’re confident no one will attack you.
Use open body language. Keep your arms and legs spread and relaxed rather than crossed and tense. This indicates that you can deal with anything that approaches you. You are not scared or protective. You’re confident.
Key takeaway #1
Adopt confident body language to trick yourself into feeling more confident. Keep your head up, look people in the eye, relax your shoulders, and don’t cross your arms or legs.
Tip #2: Keep your word
Whenever you make a promise, to yourself or someone else, keep it. It doesn’t matter how small and unimportant it is. If you said you’d do it, do it.
The reason for this goes beyond reliability being a good personality trait. If you get into the practice of always doing the things you have committed to, you’ll build the belief that you are the sort of person who does that. You will not be stopped or turned aside when it because difficult or unpleasant. You’ll do the job because that’s who you are, and somehow, you will find a way to get it done.
That is what self-confidence is all about. You believe that you’ll be able to deal with whatever happens.
What happened when a city kept its word
New York City was having a crisis. Crime was skyrocketing. Murders were up. Armed robberies were up. Assaults were up. Tourists were beginning to stay away, and the wealthy were beginning to suggest relocating to other cities. Something needed to be done, and quickly.
Mayor Rudy Giuliani put a new head of the police force in place. He made a few changes that seemed obvious, such as changing the shifts of the officers to provide better coverage during high-crime times of day.
But one of his decisions was controversial, called the “Broken Windows” policy. Instead of hiring more police to go after the high-visibility crimes, he hired more police to go after the low-visibility crimes. If someone was vandalizing a building, they got arrested. If someone was parking in a no-parking zone, they got a ticket.
The message this sent was clear. New York’s police cared about all the laws. And the violent crime rates dropped. Overall, New York had a 55 percent decline in crime. They had a 65 percent decline in homicide, and a 74 percent decline in shootings. And when a violent crime did happen? You’d better believe they were able to deal with it.
Key takeaway #2
Keep your word to yourself and others. No matter how trivial something is, if you agreed to do it, do it. The practice of finding a way through difficulties will increase your self-confidence.
Tip #3: Hold your own ruler
Another common way of losing confidence is to give the ruler for our success to another person or group of people. We let them judge whether we have achieved an appropriate goal or not. Or even if the goal is one we should be striving for.
This leads to us questioning and second-guessing everything we do, wondering if these arbiters of success will find it worthy.
Confident people, on the other hand, accept that their actions will be judged but don’t concern themselves with those judgments. They have an internal ruler that they use to measure their success. They know when their actions are getting them closer to their goals, and when they’re not making progress.
You can certainly ask for feedback on what you’re doing. Ask for advice to help you understand your different options.
But when it comes time to decide what your goal is, and how you will pursue it, hold your own ruler. No one else gets to tell you how to reach your dreams, or which dreams are the important ones.
Living someone else’s life
My closest friend in high school made the mistake of letting her parents hold her ruler. We all want to please our parents, and recognize that they have a lot of accumulated life wisdom to share with us. But when we make crucial decisions, such as where to go to college, we can’t base those decisions on someone else’s ideas for our lives.
My friend was a gifted artist. She received a scholarship to attend Alfred University and study art. However, her parents were concerned that she wouldn’t be able to make a living as an artist. They convinced her to go to a local college to study accounting. There would always be a need for accountants.
As you might imagine, she had no love of accounting. She managed to struggle through the classes well enough to graduate. But she picked up a number of bad habits to cope with spending her time and energy on a subject she hated. After drifting aimlessly through her 20s, she finally got a job with a cable company as an order scheduler. A job which had nothing to do with accounting…or art.
At the other extreme, my mother wanted me to attend Vassar. She was certain that I’d make connections with all the right people and find a wealthy man to marry. Even at that age, I knew what I cared about was numbers. I wanted to go to an engineering school and study math. Even if I had no idea what I’d do with it after I graduated. I held my own ruler for measuring success.
Unlike my friend, I thrived in college, because I was doing something I was passionate about. I added minors in computer science and music, both of which were peripherally connected to math. I enjoyed it so much, in fact, I stayed an extra year to pick up a masters degree. And then launched into a 22-year career with IBM for which my degrees were very relevant.
Key takeaway #3
Don’t allow other people to dictate your goals, or decide whether or not you are successful. Hold your own ruler and measure your own success.
Tip #4: Chase improvement not perfection
Much study has been done on mindset, and its impact on your life. If you believe that you were born with a certain skill or aptitude, you have a fixed mindset.
People with a fixed mindset will not risk doing anything that could shake their self-image. This is compared to people with a growth mindset, who believe that their skills and aptitudes continue to grow with practice and training.
A fixed mindset is a very brittle type of confidence, the confidence that you can do exactly what you previously did. If you then fail, your confidence is completely destroyed.
Instead, to build a robust self-confidence, concentrate on building skills and incremental improvement. Believe in a growth mindset.
Failing at something the first time you try it does not mean you are incapable of doing it. It means that you need more practice. Have confidence in your ability to learn and improve, rather than your ability to complete a task.
Mindset and math
In one study, students were given an easy math problem to solve. Half were praised for being smart, reinforcing a fixed mindset. The other half were praised for working hard, reinforcing a growth mindset.
They were all then given a choice for which problem to solve next — an easy problem like the one they’d just solved, or a harder problem.
The students who were praised for being smart overwhelmingly chose the easier problem. The ones who’d been praised for working hard, on the other hand, overwhelmingly chose the harder problem. They had more self-confidence in their ability to eventually find a solution.
To illustrate just how much performance depends on self-confidence, researchers tried another test. They gave all the students an easy problem, timing how long it took them to solve. Again, they praised some for being smart and some for working hard. They then gave all of the students an impossible problem.
After letting the students struggle with the impossible problem for a while, the researchers gave them a third problem, similar to the first one they’d already solved.
The students with the fixed mind set, whose confidence had been shaken by the impossible problem, took longer to solve the third problem than they had to solve the first problem. The growth mindset students, whose confidence in their ability to work hard had been strengthened by the impossible problem, solved the third problem faster than they had the first problem.
Key takeaway #4
Improve your self-confidence by having a growth mindset. Believe that you can improve your skills and abilities through practice and training, and look for opportunities to challenge yourself.
Tip #5: Stand your ground
Taking a stand increases your confidence. If you believe something to be true and right, don’t let peer pressure convince you otherwise. That leads to self-doubt, and questioning other things you believe to be true and right. You’ll end up needing validation and approval from others, and will never be truly secure.
When I think of standing your ground, I often think of old western movies, where the sheriff walks out into the street, hand on his gun, and tells the bandits to leave his town. A gunfight usually ensues.
In real life, standing your ground is rarely so dramatic. It’s a group of friends gossiping about someone else, and someone quietly saying, “I bet if you knew the whole story, you wouldn’t say that.”
It’s someone buying candy at a convenience store waiting for a clerk who is taking an extra long break. When their friend says, “Come on, just take it and go,” they count out the change for their purchase and leave it on the counter.
You don’t have to convince the entire world to agree with you about your beliefs. And you can stand up for your beliefs without being argumentative, aggressive, or pushy. But you shouldn’t give up on what you believe, just because it’s convenient.
Reclaiming the right of self-rule
One of the most famous people to urge others to stand up for what they believe in was Mahatma Gandhi. Although he originally thought of himself as a member of the British Empire, attending law school in London, his views shifted over time as he saw how Indians were discriminated against by other British people.
In 1919, the Rowlatt Act allowed the British government to indefinitely imprison Indians, and to do so without needing a formal trial. Indian citizens were outraged. Many participated in violent riots. British soldiers shot and killed a group of protesters, including many women and their children. Gandhi urged Indians to refrain from rioting, and to use non-violent means of protest, for example boycotting British goods such as textiles.
To protest the unfair salt tax imposed by the British, which declared making your own salt to be a crime, he led a march to the sea. There, his followers harvested sea salt, in direct violation to the law. Hundreds of his followers were beaten by officials, many seriously injured, but none offered any resistance beyond their presence.
Gandhi himself was repeatedly jailed. Eventually, he was assassinated by someone who disagreed with his politics. However his beliefs are still followed today by many people. He is a national hero to the people of India, who have created a holiday in his honor, as well as erected many statues to him.
All because he stood his ground for what he believed in, and encouraged others to do the same.
Key takeaway #5
Taking a stand for something that you believe is right and true will give you greater self-confidence. Allowing yourself to succumb to peer pressure or other forces will drain your confidence.
Conclusion
Self-confidence is the belief that you can handle whatever life throws at you. You can increase your self-confidence through having the right attitude. These five tips are the best ways to quickly gain a self-confident attitude.
The five tips for boosting your self-confidence
In this article, you learned to:
- Use confident body language
- Keep your word
- Hold your own ruler
- Chase improvement not perfection
- Stand your ground
More importantly, not only did you learn what to do, you learned why to do it.
By practicing these five methods of boosting your self-confidence every day, you will be able to increase your self-confidence.
Ready to have a better tomorrow?
I’ve created a cheat sheet to help you increase your confidence and get control of your life. If you follow this daily, you will level up your life very quickly!
