Six practical exercises to build great self-confidence
Find and develop interests and skills. Make a list of things that you might like and that you might be good at. Try them. When you check those that you like and do well, look at your skills and what you put into doing them. Enjoy and feel your capabilities.
Risk being rejected. Think and write the situations where you fear being disapproved and what is the worst that could happen. Will the consequences be that bad? How long would the discomfort for it last? And above all, think about the times you feared disapproval and rejection. How many have happened?
Adjust your perfectionism. Dare to be imperfect. Write down each time you leave something less perfect than you would like. Observe the natural consequences; you will see that they are not necessary. This awareness will relax you in the following tasks and challenges.
Face your fears. Please make a list of the fears you have had since childhood and until now, mark the ones you have already overcome, and think about how you did it. Try it with the ones you have left on the list. If it is difficult for you, before you resign, have a psychologist or psychologist who will support you and make it easier to achieve your goals.
Improve your self-esteem. Observe yourself for a whole week, and write down each day and in each thing, you do what qualities and limitations or faults have been revealed. Value your qualities and observe your limitations. Accept them.
Identify what depends on you; feel control. Write down the situations, feelings, and thoughts that are worrying you or making you feel bad lately, and mark those you could do something. Get going!
We are not born with self-confidence, although sometimes our parents and significant others have taught it to us naturally; when this is not the case, we must know that we can acquire it, that we are the ones who have the responsibility to build it. We often do not do it because we do not know where to start or because we have tried hard but without success.
Do the same with your negative habits.
This distanced point of view should not only act when considering your possibilities of action but also as a method to detect those thoughts that undermine your levels of self-confidence. Having a good image of yourself is not about having an objective image of yourself (that would be impossible, with the number of things you know about yourself) but having a helpful self-image.
What makes the difference when it comes to building a positive self-image is selective attention. When you do not hold yourself in particular regard, all that information about you and your actions comes to you having passed through a filter that makes you see everything in a pessimistic key. In this way, you will have a propensity to pay close attention to things that go wrong, while your merits will go unnoticed. Since this bias is going to be there whatever you do, could you take advantage of it? Detecting those thoughts about yourself that are unfair and recognizing them as such will help you to downplay them.
Changing your thoughts to work in your favor
As you see the amount of unrealistic negative thoughts about yourself, you will be more aware of your ability to actively participate in building adequate levels of self-confidence because you will realize that what you knew about yourself was skewed by your mood. You can also turn the situation around by fighting back with positive thoughts and paying more attention to what speaks well about you. This will not only change your perception of your personality, but it will also cause you to act differently, and, as a final effect, it will improve your levels of self-confidence.
Stop always comparing yourself to the same people
It would help if you stopped comparing yourself to other people. If you can’t help but compare yourself, it’s because you probably don’t know them well enough. Today social networks and the media make it very easy for specific people to offer only their best side and keep many other things under lock and key. And all this, with or without a paid image consultant.
The importance of feeling comfortable with yourself
Think, for example, of the time you have spent choosing the photos to upload to your virtual profiles or of the meticulousness with which you choose specific phrases. That’s what a lot of people who get news about you constantly do every day, and it is quite possible that many of them still care more than you do in making sure that all this news speaks about a fascinating personality. Therefore, working on self-confidence should include a phase in which you go from idealizing these people to humanizing them.
s, that is, consider their flaws or the lack of information about them.
If our way of thinking already incorporates patterns of selective attention, the mass media and the Internet make this restricted access to a few pieces of information even more definitive. This brings us to the next point.
Believing in yourself is the foundation for your self-confidence.
If at this point, you are still wondering what self-confidence consists of, we will detail this most critical aspect a little more. This characteristic is typical of all people, although people have it more developed, and others who have it much less. The important thing is that we all have this intrinsic perception.
Self-confidence is based on the image that we have created of ourselves since childhood. We are shaping a self-image about the experiences we live, and of course, mainly to the interaction, we maintain with other people around us …
This concept that we develop about ourselves helps us to trust and believe in our abilities, in our ability to acquire learning, and ultimately, to continue growing through experiences. Trusting yourself is the basis for an excellent personal assessment, which means better self-esteem and greater security.
Personal valuation
What happens when we have low self-confidence? What happens is that we underestimate what we can achieve, and in that way, we do not dare to carry out our dreams and illusions. We block ourselves from challenges and settle into comfort. We thus limit our experiences and capacities to develop ourselves.
Why are there people with better self-confidence than others? This has to do above all with the value we place on the opinion of others how the valuation of other people and their criticism affects us. When we give more importance to what others say about us and try to meet their expectations without having previously observed our motivations, dreams, and worth in the face of difficulties, ait is inevitable to create a distorted and undervalued image of ourselves.
So how do you build good self-confidence? Can all of us build and nurture it? Next, we will see how we can work on self-confidence if we focus first on our self-knowledge.