Boost Your Self-Confidence with 3 Simple Tools
Learn how to boost your confidence when you find yourself in a slump.
Self-confidence can be a fickle friend. Sometimes you are full of confidence and believe in yourself. Believe that you can do anything you set your mind to. That is how you should feel. But do you?
Earlier in my life, I didn’t have the confidence I have today. I would doubt if I was actually capable of doing my job or if people would like me for who I am.
I worked at that and tried out a lot of different strategies, to improve my self-confidence. I learned that sometimes it does not have to be hard to change yourself if you start small and work on it with determination.
You have the power to change by taking simple steps. Let me outline what I did real quick:
- Conquer your feelings with clear strategies.
- Practice badass success stories.
- Master your learning! Then move on.
Conquer Your Feelings
Feelings are one of our most basic mechanisms of being. They are part of our fight or flight reactions and have been the backbone of our survival as a species. That means we can’t really take them lightly. They are very important to us, but that does not mean we have to be slaves to our feelings.
The two most important things you need to know about your feelings in this context are:
- It is hard to control your feelings, but you can control how you react to them
- You can choose how strong your emotions are. At least to some degree.
When we experience an event that brings us out of balance. Maybe you have a bad meeting at work and your confidence in your abilities start to crack. That is the time when you start your training.
You accept your feelings and look at the event. It is very often not the events themselves that are problematic, but our judgment of them. You can teach yourself self-control in your reaction to events. It is the judgment of events that makes the emotion, not the event itself.
You can teach yourself to observe events without judgment or to make a different judgment of the event. Maybe the meeting was bad, but it was an opportunity to learn. If you do a follow-up meeting, you can shine even more.
When you start to control your judgments, it will help you in limiting your emotional response.
Secondly, you can train yourself in limiting the power of your emotional response. One of my favorite quotes of all times is:
You can choose how much it hurts!
I may be misquoting this since I didn’t read the book in English. The quote is from one of my favorite books: Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson. The boy in the book lives with his family in the Norwegian mountains and this is the key lesson from his father.
I think this is the only book that has ever made me cry. (Except Harry Potter, who didn’t cry a little when a certain person died)
Back to the point. You can wallow in your emotions or you can observe the emotion, accept it and let it go. It takes time and training, but you can do it. You can choose how much you want to hurt.
Those are two different strategies that can be trained and help you in controlling your response and thus the impact your emotions have on your self-confidence.
Practice Badass Success Stories
I first bumped into this in an article about job interviews. The author had a great point. Before an interview: write down your success stories in preparation. You should actually practice doing that whenever you have such a story.
That hit home for me. And not just for job interviews. Writing down your success stories is a way to remember them and to have an arsenal of your own successes whenever you are doubting yourself.
Personally, I don’t share most of my stories. The professional ones I do share when I interview for jobs or when I want to bring my experience into play at work. My more personal stories I keep to myself.
Read your success stories whenever you need to boost your confidence
I know Journaling is very popular in most self-help articles. And I do think there is something to it. I just don’t have the time, energy, discipline to do it. And I find it a little boring.
Instead, I focus on writing short success stories in my notebook (Onenote on my computer). The format I use is half a page with:
- Context: What was the situation in which you had success?
- Challenge: What was the challenge you faced?
- Solution: How did you solve this?
- Result: What impact did it have. Especially what impact on other people, how did they react or respond?
I may even share one or two if anybody wants to see what they look like?
Master Your Learning and Let Go
Life will give you lemons. You will encounter problems and difficult times. That is part of life. In some of those situations, you will probably feel your confidence go down the drain. That’s ok.
The key is to not dwell on it. Consider what you can learn from the experience and then let that experience go.
Freedom from stress does not necessarily involve giving up anything, but rather being able to let go of anything, when necessary, and know that one will still be all right. — Timothy Gallway
Letting things go can be very difficult but there are many different tricks you can practice to do just that. The key is to distract yourself from the problem and focus your attention on something positive or neutral.
The best thing you can do in most situations is to consider how you can do something nice for someone else. Doing good things for others is one of the safest ways to feel better and to boost your confidence. It’s really about getting your head out of your own … hrm, navel, and look to the world outside.
To sum up
- Conquer your emotions with a clear strategy. Choose how much it hurts.
- Have a personal arsenal of success stories. Use them to boost yourself.
- Learn from your experiences and let them go. Don’t dwell on the past.
Maybe this can be an inspiration: