True confidence is a rare thing indeed–which might come as a surprise! Often what we think of as confidence in the outside world is anything but! Most of the time, it’s bravado, overcompensation and a whole lotta fake it till you make it.
But is it any wonder that confidence is so hard to come by in a society that asks us to feel so terrible about ourselves? Many of us are much more in touch with our perceived shortcomings than we are with our real talents.
It’s not just a matter of having it or not having it! You can work on growing your confidence–and it actually will grow all by itself when you work on your underlying issues of self-love and self-worth.
So today I’m sharing a quick confidence-boosting guide to help you begin your own confidence journey!
Some of the tips here are about mindset: which is confidence in who you are. However, the others are about building confidence in what you do. This is the piece of the confidence formula that typically gets overlooked!
But look at it this way: if you read all about how to feel happy, does that actually make you a happy person? Nope! But it’s only when you change the way you think and take real-world action that allows you to create happiness.
Similarly, if you only do the action steps and don’t do the mindset work, don’t be surprised if your progress is slow! Rewiring your mind is so important! Otherwise, you’ll just fall back into your same old (unconfident) habits.
So let’s dive into it!
How To Feel Confident
How To Feel Confident Tip #1:
Radical Self-Acceptance
We live in a society that literally teaches us to feel terrible about ourselves. When we live in a perpetual state of fear and self-doubt, we’re good consumers. (That’s what most traditional marketing is designed to do!)
The end result is that most of us spend our entire lives believing we are somehow deeply flawed. But the real truth of it is: you are exactly as you are meant to be! You are a magical divine creature and any thought that tells you otherwise is a straight-up lie. It’s time to remember that you are not meant to measure up to some completely artificial vision of perfection. You are here to be divinely you–and you do not need to stress or hustle in order to do that.
How To Feel Confident Tip #2:
Tackle Your Disempowering Beliefs
It seems like a crazy thing at first but we all have disempowering and negative beliefs about who we are and what we can do in this world. But when you tell yourself “I’m just not that talented or hard-working” are you really telling yourself the truth?
We believe these stories and regard them as factual. But in reality, they’re just beliefs we’ve chosen for ourselves–and it might be time to choose again. We get to create exactly the reality we want for ourselves and that begins by choosing what we want to believe about ourselves.
How To Feel Confident Tip #3:
Combat Negative Self Talk
The soundtrack of negativity in our minds can be one of our biggest barriers to confidence. , Of course, it’s going to be tough to try new things and put yourself out there when your Inner Mean Girl won’t shut the ‘eff up. But you don’t have to let that voice run the show! It takes practice but over time you can learn how to tone down that mean part of you and leave more room for the real you to grow and thrive.
How To Feel Confident Tip #4:
Create Your Sasha Fierce
Sometimes the best thing to do for your confidence is to create a confident alter ego! This works by totally altering our own sense of identity. You think of yourself as shy or awkward but your Sasha Fierce doesn’t have to play by those rules! She’s sassy, she’s confident and she can get things done. But when you step into those shoes you temporarily tap into a very real part of you–just one that you haven’t given yourself permission to access. But the more you connect with your Sasha Fierce the more she will start to feel like the “real” you.
How To Feel Confident Tip #5:
Do Something New
Our brain loves to convince us that if we just stay around at home and worry or plan enough then we’ll suddenly feel confident in our own abilities. But that’s not how confidence actually works! We always learn the most from actually doing something new. Your brain is going to try to convince you this isn’t wise–but it’s trying it’s best to protect you! There is just no way you can sit around worrying about something until you feel ready. At some point, you’re going to just have to go do it!
This seems terrifying at first but it works: the more you try new things, the less scary they become. Over time, this helps you to build your self-trust muscle–and yes!–in turn, it will create more confidence.
How To Feel Confident Tip #6:
Remember Your Achievements
At times, it seems our brains love to show us an eternal cycle of our most painful moments. Hands up if you’ve ever found yourself lying awake in bed at 3 am thinking about some embarrassing moment from your past? Our brain is just priming us to be aware of such things in the future as a way of protecting us. But unfortunately, its efforts are not only ineffective but they also cause us more turmoil and added stress!
On the flip side, when was the last time you went through your mental Rolodex searching for your most golden moments and triumphs? It’s all too easy to believe that “we suck” or that nothing ever goes our way when we only focus on the bad stuff. It might not pop up into your mind as easily as the negative stuff but remembering the positive moments is important.
How To Feel Confident Tip #7:
Know The Difference Between Memory & Facts
How often have we overly embellished some long-ago event, thinking about how much we offended someone, how stupid they thought we were etc, etc.
But that “memory” dear friend is often created on a bunch of our OWN assumptions and stories. The most painful part of anything is the meaning WE create. And the cool thing is that because we were the ones who created meaning the first time, we also get to create new meaning anytime we like.
How To Feel Confident Tip #8:
Learn How To Say No
Few things can make you feel crappier than a violated boundary. Yet most of us still get our wires crossed because we haven’t communicated them! No one teaches you how to say no in school. Instead, we’re taught how to cooperate–which of course is also an important topic. But since we only place importance on how other people feel by default we forget to place importance on our own needs, desires and preferences. That means there are entire legions of us out here who’ve never worked on creating their no muscle.
Think about that: not learning how to say no can lead to crazy problems over a lifetime. Assuming that you’ll never need to say no means that you’re assuming everyone else will treat you well all of the time. Clearly, that isn’t rational or logical. Yet that’s exactly how most kids are raise.
How To Feel Confident Tip #9:
View Everyone As Equal
We tend to have perfectionist fantasies about ourselves and the world. That means we often imagine that other people are so much more confident and accomplished than we are! The truth is most people are suffering from acute cases of self-doubt. When you realize that, you can stop automatically believing that everyone is more worthy and deserving than you are. Taking them off the pedestal will help you shift the way you see yourself.
How To Feel Confident Tip #10:
Take Personal Pride
Yes, I could work in my pajamas most days. And yes, I definitely rock the yoga pants most of the time! But I definitely also challenge myself to get up and get fully dressed: cute outfit, hair done, makeup. This isn’t about what people can or can’t see. It’s about how I feel. If I want to feel like a bad-ass coach, how do I best accomplish that? Sometimes the yoga pants definitely do not make the cut.
Going the extra mile isn’t an exercise in chasing some external ideas. It’s about showing up for yourself. Even if you’re “just” writing, it’s amazing what a little self-care does for your emotional state. Self-confidence isn’t always about doing BIG crazy things. Sometimes it’s these “little” things that can add up over time and create amazing changes!
So what did you think? Which confidence technique are you going to apply to your own life?
Confidence is a muscle you can grow, just like anything else! Don’t settle for thinking of yourself as just not having it. Take action and create a more confident you, starting today!
PS Looking for more? You might also want to check out this post about 3 must-know life coaching tools or this one about how to be more positive.
Did you find this post useful or inspiring? Save this pin to your Personal Growth board on Pinterest!
Video Transcript
Confidence is one of those things I get asked about a lot! And I really do have a few solid pointers to help you feel more confident. So if you’re feeling a little less than confident lately, then this is the video for you! So be sure to keep watching.
What’s up guys? Ny name is Jenn and welcome back to my channel. I am a mindset coach and a spiritual business advisor and you have found my youtube channel. This channel is where I bring you two new videos every week all about the art of combining manifestation and the law of attraction and the weird magical stuff with very practical mindset and personal development tips. So if that sounds like something that you are interested in then be sure to hit that subscribe button.
Let me start out this video by saying I was not a confident child! I was not a confident teenager. I was not confident really at all until I would say pretty recently in my life. So if you’re looking for somebody who is just naturally felt confident their whole entire life that is definitely not me! Confidence is something that I have had to work on. It is something that I have had to go out and figure out how to get and I can say I feel pretty confident most of the time now as you can tell. I make videos. I put them on the internet which is something that I think even five years ago if you had told me that I was going to do I probably would have freaked out! So I’ve come a long way in the Confidence Department! I wanted to make a video for you guys today because one of the things that I really want you to know and that I’ve talked about so much on this channel before is that you can do be and have anything you want in this world.
I would challenge you to think very carefully about your dream future and about what you really want in life and about the kind of person you would need to be in order to create that world. I can pretty much guarantee you that successful happy future version of you is also confident. So why not start working on your confidence now? Why not start working out how you can start to feel that way now? Because it isn’t the things in the outside world that make you feel that way. Confidence is an inside job.
Today I’m going to give you guys five pointers on how you can start to feel more confident starting now.
So the first confidence pointer I’m going to give you today is for you to simply start to remember are your accomplishments. I think we get really future-focused as a collective. We get really obsessed on where we’re going. We think about graduating from school or graduating from a program or about finishing a class. We think about getting to the next level in our job, to getting a raise or a promotion in our career. We think about these things and we get really sucked into this future vision of where we’re going. Of course, it is wonderful to have a vision of where you’re going. It is essential actually to have a plan about where you’re gonna go next.
But this can sometimes come at a cost! And the cost sometimes is we become so focused on where we’re going that we forget to give ourselves a good old pat on the back for what we’ve already done, right? So for most of us the way that this works is we set a goal. we set a target, we want to go after something. And then we get there. But then the second we get there it’s almost like it’s not enough. Like we barely give ourselves a moment to take it in to celebrate it before we are already on to the next thing.
Part of this is because we’ve all been ingrained with this idea that we have to hustle. wW have to get on this treadmill of life. We have to keep going. We have to keep going but it really is essential for you to remember what you have already done. And when you remember how far you’ve come, when you remember your accomplishments, when you remember who you already are, that is already going to give you more confidence.
Because if you keep looking at what you don’t have you are always going to feel lack. If you remember what you already have then you get to feel happy the way you are right now. And that is a huge part of being confident.
Tip number two for how to be confident is to stop comparing yourself to other people. This is such a big big point for happiness, for confidence, for everything. And I know that we live in the comparison age. So I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again no doubt: but you can open your phone at any time of the day, get on social media and be bombarded with a whole bunch of images of beautiful people doing amazing things. And it’s really really tempting to start to think that there is something wrong with you because your life doesn’t look like that.
Well my friends let’s remember that the life that you are looking at especially on Instagram and Pinterest and in places like that it is highly edited. I mean it’s actually highly edited on Facebook as well but those places are like really edited photoshopped even sometimes. You are getting such a filtered version of reality that it isn’t reality at all anymore. It is a fantasy. It is a creation. It is a social media presence that doesn’t really exist in the real world.
However our brain does not remember that! Our brain might know that logically but it can still let us feel incredibly terrible about ourselves because, you know, we woke up. We wear our hole-y pajamas instead of our cute little matching set you know. Our hair looks a mess instead of beautifully done. You know our makeup is not done today and someone else’s makeup is beautifully done.
Like you know there’s so many ways to compare yourself to other people and find yourself feeling negatively. So I did not come up with this saying. I’m sure you’ve heard this before but the famous saying of this is: comparison is the thief of joy and it is 100% true. As long as you keep comparing yourself to somebody else, again you are always going to come up short. So the same is within the first one. Any time that you constantly come up short in comparison to something you are not going to feel good. You are not going to feel confident.
So it is so crucial for you to do what you have to do to not compare yourself. And this goes for social media too. I’m talking about social media specifically because I think that’s a big one for many of us but in your real life as well you need to stop comparing yourself to your best friend, to this person online, to this celebrity, to that person. Whoever it is, stop comparing it. Stop comparing your life. Stop measuring yourself up. If you have to go cold turkey, go cold turkey. You know, take Instagram off of your phone for a weekend. Do what you need to do get yourself away from that cycle! Because that cycle is not leaving you anywhere good, okay? So do what you need to do for yourself.
Tip number three for how else you feel more confident is to change your posture.
So posture is a huge factor actually when it comes to confidence. And this might sound like maybe backwards like my posture would be better, if I felt more confident.
But you can actually hack it back the other way. So our body and our mind are linked and that means that yes! Our thoughts can inform our posture right? So if you’re feeling nervous, if you’re feeling vulnerable, you tend to do these crunched over kind of things right? And like protect yourself and feel closed off right? That is just what we do as animals.
But you can also create confidence through your posture instead right? So instead of waiting to feel confident, to have the confident posture you can put your body into the confident posture and then your brain eventually catches up.
There’s a whole video on this: Amy Cuddy’s power postures video. I think it’s a TED talk actually. But you should go watch that is amazing. She will go into some really great power poses for you to understand. But just as a starter tip for you guys, of course, standing up, shoulders back, no crunched over shoulders, no blocking yourself with your hands or your arms. No cross arms! Like keep yourself open.
Keep your shoulders back. Keep your chin level to the floor. That’s a big one!
If you’re walking around through the world, chin level to the floor. You don’t want to be like this. (looking down) You got to be up here right? And this might sound completely insane at first but it really does work. If you can force yourself to stand like a confident person your brain will catch up, and it will make you start to feel more confident. So that’s a really easy one that you can start to do right now. So stay straight you guys! Do it right now.
So tip number four for how to feel more confident today: is to stop listening to your negative self-talk. And I know that that is a lot easier said than done! But we all have this inner soundtrack voice. Actually I was reading somewhere that some of us don’t have an inner soundtrack and like that thought just blows my mind!
But most of us have a voice inside our mind and many times that voice is not a nice person. Many times that voice is telling us all kinds of terrible things about us. It is what I like to call our Inner Mean Guy or Inner Mean Girl. And because this voice is so loud and because his voice has been talking to us for so long, it is tempting to think that that is just the way our brain thinks.
Or to think that that is us and we’re just doing us a favor. “I I’m not mean to myself and just imagine what my life would do! My life will explode if I’m not mean to myself on the inside.” I can assure you that that is not true!
And I can assure you that your negative self-talk is not helping matters at all. So I know that if you are really ingrained in this thinking behavior, it is really hard to snap out of it. So be gentle with yourself! Don’t expect you to just snap out of it. But you can start to notice this pattern. You can start to notice when your Inner Mean Girl starts chirping away at you.
And you know the things that that voice is telling you are not helpful. That is the voice that is going to tell you that you look like crap, you shouldn’t bother trying, that no one likes you, bla bla bla bla blah. It’s the voice of all your worst fears and of course if that voice is loud and ongoing constantly, it is going to be really difficult for you to feel confident about yourself. Because of course, who would feel like that? If there was somebody actually in the room with you telling you that, you would find that hard to get over as well. So when it’s inside of your brain it doesn’t make it any better. Most of us just don’t have any practice at managing our thoughts. We don’t understand this process. We don’t understand that this voice is not really us. This is just part of our ego that is trying to make us play small.
But your default thoughts that just come to you the way they are are probably not doing you any favors. And if they’re really not doing you any favors, that is a sign for you to go in and start doing some mindset work and some brain retraining. Because you do not have to live your life with this mean girl talking to you all the time! You can disengage. You learn how to slow it down. You can learn how to not listen to those mean words and that is going to do so much to help you feel more confident in your day to day life. So that is a very key point for everyone to understand.
Okay tip number five and my last tip for you guys today on how to feel more confident: This one is maybe a little bit unusual but I’m going to suggest that you take this advice to heart. And the advice is: do one thing a day that scares you. Okay so maybe it’s not every day. Maybe it’s more like once a week but the whole point of this is that you are pushing yourself beyond your limit. So what really creates the best confidence is a deep sense of self trust. When you can deeply trust yourself in any situation, when you really understand that there is nothing that you can really mess up and that you are going to be okay no matter what, that is unshakable confidence and that my friends does not just happen overnight. You can’t wish your way into it. You have to develop it over time by practicing. We are all faced with things in our day to day life that we didn’t want, didn’t expect. And sometimes those things are very scary and can make us feel a lot of anxiety.
So one of the ways that you can help to alleviate that is by kind of setting yourself up for the best results by practicing by learning new things, by doing new things, by pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. The more practice you have pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, the more that you’ll be able to see that you are not drowning. You are swimming. You are figuring things out. You are making things happen. Even if you don’t understand it. Maybe even if you feel nervous, even if you feel scared. You figure things out. The more practice you have at doing things like this, the more confidence you are going to feel. Because you are going to literally see just how powerful and just how badass you are.
So I know people think that they need to have the confidence first, before you take the scary action, before you do the thing. And by scary action–by the way you guys–I don’t mean you know going rock climbing or anything like that necessarily. Like sometimes doing something new, doing something scary is simply going to the cafe you’ve never been to before by yourself, going to a movie by yourself, you know asking somebody out. Like they can be very everyday things. But as long as they are pushing you out of your comfort zone a little bit that is what is important.
So most of us think that we need to feel the confidence first before we can do the things. But that’s actually completely backwards. The more you push yourself to take the action and do the thing, the more that you will have practice doing this and then that develops your confidence. So you can develop your confidence like a muscle, just like you can happiness.
The more that you practice putting yourselves in these situations, the more confident you are going to feel in any situation. So you need to learn how to trust yourself implicitly. And when you trust yourself implicitly, there’s literally nothing that is going to faze you anymore.
Like I said at the beginning of the video, I wasn’t always confident. Talking on camera did not come easily to me. I had to practice at it, you know. Making podcasts and things like that, putting myself out there in the online world, all of that stuff was brand new to me and it all terrified me at first. And the only way it got better was by showing up and doing it every day.
So you don’t have to be signing up for YouTube or starting a podcast or anything but these are the same tips that can apply to your life. You can build your confidence muscle. There’s so much you can do to become a more confident person and like I said at the very beginning of this video, if you think about your dream future, if you think about who you really want to be in life, I guarantee you confidence is part of that equation.
So why not do yourself a favor and start to work on your confidence now?
So what did you guys think? I would love to know which tip resonated the most with you and which part of your confidence you are going to go work on first. Thank you guys so much for being here! I really do appreciate you watching my videos. If you like this one, please give it a like. If you have a friend that could use this message, then pass it along to them. If you want to learn more about me come on over to my site. I have a free class called How To Feel Better that you can sign up for over there and that will really actually help you to take another stuff towards your confidence and happiness as well.
If you want to watch more for me you can go ahead and hit my latest upload right here and if you want to hit the subscribe button you can do that right here. Other than that I’ll be back next week same time same space. Stay tuned and until then just remember, get ready for the miracle! See you guys.
