A high amount of confidence is important to succeed and be happy in life. A high level of confidence can land you the job, raise, date, friendship, and so much more. Everyone suffers from low confidence occasionally, and during those times, it is helpful to know how to boost your confidence up and get busy succeeding in life again.
10 Tips That Will Help You Boost Your Confidence
1. Smile
This sounds so simple, but it really works! Smiling does much more than give off an appearance of happiness. It releases endorphins that make you feel positive, which can help you to feel more confident. Just the mere act of smiling can help you feel as though you are confident in what you are doing whether it be talking, walking, or working towards your goal.
2. Debate Your Inner-Critic
We all have an inner-critic that tells us we are not good enough, not smart enough, not thin, funny, or witty enough. While that inner-critic can sometimes push us forward in life, it often talks us out of doing things that we know will benefit our life in some way.
The trick to quiet the inner-critic is to challenge it with a counter statement. For instance, when it says you are not good enough to accomplish that task you set out to do, tell it that you have not even tried yet and it does not know that for sure. The more you debate with your inner-critic, the less you will let it run your life and, therefore, the more confidence you will feel.
3. Share Your Opinion
Often in discussions, people will not voice their opinion because they are scared of negative judgement. This fear is not really justified. In most cases, people are much more open to our opinions than we visualize in our heads. By making an effort to share your opinions and thoughts with others, even when fear is present, you will increase your confidence in your value with each positive experience you have doing so. You will start to feel as though you have a lot to contribute to this world because what you say will often make a difference, change an opinion, or have a positive effect on someone.
4. Stop Comparing Yourself
Using other people as a measuring stick for self-worth can cause even the most intelligent and handsome person to have low confidence. Other people have talents, ideas, and insights that you do not have, but that doesn’t make them better than you. You also have talents, ideas, and insights that they don’t have, and that is something that you can be sure of. Just realizing that you are an individual with a lot of uniqueness to offer this world can boost your confidence dramatically!
5. Expand Your Comfort Zone
Your comfort zone tells you what you are capable of doing in life. In addition, you will always have a comfort zone around you. We are born with a comfort zone, and the only way we grow in life is to expand it. We take our first step, we say our first word, and we do something that seems scary like riding a bike. With each push against our comfort zone, we realize that we can do more and be more than what we thought we could.
Every day you should do something that pushes the boundary of your comfort zone. This way it will always be expanding and your confidence will always be expanding as well.
6. Learn Something New Everyday
Every time you learn something new, you expand your awareness about yourself and the world around you. With awareness comes confidence. For instance, if you read a self-help book that teaches you a new way to relate to people, then you will instantly have more confidence when you relate to people.
What you learn does not have to be as big as a new way of relating though. It may just be a new piece of information that shifts your perspective about yourself or the world. Even small bits of knowledge will help you build your confidence.
7. Do It Until You Succeed
If you have ever succeeded at anything (and I know you have), then you understand that the feeling you get from succeeding is always confidence. Building a deck, passing a course, and landing a date are all things that help to boost your confidence.
The problem is that many of us give up before we succeed. We let fear or our inner-critic talk us out of pushing forward, and this in turn confirms are suspicion that we could not do it, so our confidence takes a negative hit.
It’s essential to push towards what you really want in life. Even if one path will not lead you to success, you must get on another path and keep moving forward. The truth is that you will never move backwards unless you give up, and if you keep moving forward than logic tells us that you will eventually have to reach your goal. The confidence you will feel, and carry with you, from that hard-earned success will be worth every single step.
8. Do It More
Maybe you are lacking confidence in something that is not a personal goal for success. For instance, maybe an inability to speak publicly is an area that scares you and contributes to lower self-confidence about yourself. In this case, you should do it more until you feel confident doing it.
The old saying, practice makes perfect fits in well here. The more you do something, the better you get, without exception. Therefore, wherever you do not feel confident in life (that affects you negatively) should be something that you do more of in life.
9. Carry Yourself Confidently
Psychologists claim that a slouched posture and a lazy gait are associated with low confidence about oneself and the world around him. We do not need a psychologist to tell us this to know that it’s true. When we feel bad about ourselves, our body language slumps and sulks to match our negative feelings.
Carrying yourself confidently has the same effect that smiling does. It creates positive feelings about yourself and helps you to feel more confident, even if you did not start out that way.
10. Deal With Failure Effectively
Many people let failure lower their confidence. However, everyone in life who has succeeded has failed and pushed through it. People like Stephen King or Oprah, who have had massive success in life, have failed along the way. Nevertheless, they knew how to use their failure effectively and increased their confidence rather than decreased it.
You can do this by realizing that failure is just a lesson in life. It shows you a route that won’t work and allows you to pursue other options that might work. With each failure, you learn something new about success. Therefore, with each failure your confidence and ability should go up because you have eliminated another roadblock in your life.
The above 10 tips on how to boost your confidence are important and effective tools that you can use every day. Use them wisely, and you will start to feel more confident in yourself and the world around you from this moment on.