How to be more self confident
I used to always want to lose weight, because I thought it would make me feel more self confident. I thought I would look better in my clothes, more attractive and as a result others would think I looked good and that in turn would make me feel more confident.
I then went on a really strict diet, I lost all the weight, was the lightest I have ever been. I looked how I had dreamed I would, but I felt miserable and not at all confident. I didn’t understand it. I was so sure that losing all of the weight would make me feel self confident, but without the weight, I was the same if not slightly worse than before.
This is when I really started to delve into what creates self confidence. When I Iooked it up in the dictionary it said self confidence was, ‘to be secure in yourself and your abilities. Your ability to trust yourself.’ It’s your overall opinion of yourself.
When I lost weight following a really strict diet, I wondered why didn’t that create self confidence, and what I realised was that the way I motivated myself to follow the diet was essentially by shaming myself into it. I would wake up, look at my body, grab my fat and tell myself how disgusting I was. I would tell myself I had no self control and that I wasn’t good enough.
This belief system was constantly playing in the background, and so once I lost the weight it just shifted to another area in my life, which then had me again turning to food for comfort.
It wasn’t until I worked on my self confidence, that I could lose my weight for good and feel confident in myself, regardless of what size I was.
Three key pillars to build self confidence are:
Building trust in yourself
Being willing to experience any emotion
Being very conscious and deliberate in how you think about yourself
The first pillar your ability to trust yourself, comes from knowing that you will do, what you have said you will do. You will follow through on your plan. You will take care of yourself. You will do the responsible and useful thing for yourself, even when you don’t feel like it.
This is very different from saying you will do something and then hope that you follow through, as this leaves room for self-doubt, which is the opposite of self-confidence. If you can’t count on yourself, you will feel insecure and “at the effect of” instead of in charge and in control of yourself.
The ability to trust yourself comes from consistent follow through on your word to yourself. You aren’t born with self-confidence; you earn it for yourself by keeping your word and doing what you said you would do.
This is why losing weight when done the right way, actually builds your self confidence as you are constantly building on evidence that you can trust yourself as you follow your plan, and do your work.
The second pillar of self confidence is knowing that you can experience any emotion and the worst that can ever happen is an emotion, a vibration in your body. So much of my life was spent avoiding feeling a certain way. I wouldn’t put myself out there, as I didn’t want to risk rejection. I would eat until I felt completely full, just so I didn’t have to feel discomfort.
Most of us spend too much time in self-doubt because we don’t believe that we can handle anything that comes our way. When we are willing to experience any emotion and we know that the worst thing that can happen is just the feeling, we will build enormous self-confidence in ourselves. Because the ability to feel, is our safety net for anything we want to do. It takes the risk out of everything and gives us a “bring it on” attitude. If you know that you have your back no matter what, that you will support yourself, and allow emotions, even the difficult ones to be there, without pushing them down or trying to run away, you will be able to handle anything.
The third pillar is your opinion of yourself. How you think of yourself is what generates or depletes self-confidence. If you think about it, confidence is a feeling, and self-confidence is a feeling about the self. All of our feelings are going to come from our thinking, so the way we think about ourselves will determine whether or not we feel confident. A self-confident person is going to think they are good, and capable, and worthy. They are going to think they are strong and competent.
Why so many of us are not self confident is because we don’t understand how to manage our minds, so we feel out of control with our feelings and actions. This leads us to let ourselves down consistently. It undermines our ability to trust ourselves and stay in integrity. We are afraid of feeling our emotions. We don’t want to feel any negative emotions, so we hide and avoid them. This leaves us scared to do anything that has the risk of failure.
We are always questioning our ability because we have to do it perfectly, or we will feel negative emotion. Our opinion of ourselves is very low. We don’t spend a lot of time thinking highly of ourselves. Our brains are programmed to see what’s wrong, so that’s what it’s always looking for. It finds negative thoughts that create negative emotions. This is the opposite of self- confidence.
Beliefs that impact our self confidence are thoughts like:
I don’t know how
Confidence is something you either have or don’t
They are just lucky
The less risks I take the better
How I look, my background, intelligence, upbringing etc
I am damaged
Fear means you are not confident
Confident people are comfortable and don’t feel afraid
To increase your self-confidence you need to change your thoughts about yourself. And one great way to do this is to start considering the possibility of what you can create in the future. The more certain you are of the possibility, the more confidence you will have moving toward it. Afraid of failure. Afraid of disappointment. Imagine your life if you were willing to feel both of these feelings without resistance. Your identity is built on your beliefs about yourself. Your identify is not fixed, because your beliefs can change because you decide to change them, as they are simply thoughts that you have about yourself.
But why this is not as simple as it sounds, is because of your human brain. Your brain does not produce self-confidence naturally. It produces fear, worry, and doubt. So if you want to increase your self confidence you will need to work against:
Your brains natural instinct
Your programming
Your existing beliefs and thinking
The belief that you are born with self confidence is one of the excuses so many of us use to hold ourselves back. The great news is, it is not true. To build self confidence you simply have to train your brain to produce self-confidence, and you do this by building trust in yourself.
Fear doesn’t prevent self-confidence—the unwillingness to feel fear it what stops us from being self confident.
