http://www.2knowmyself.com/self_confidence/building_self_confidence
What Is Self-confidence?
Self-confidence is the belief that you can handle a certain situation correctly. Self-confidence is knowing that you don't lack any of the necessary skills in order to successfully complete a task. This task could vary from a social activity like being able to approach someone you don't know, to a professional activity like the ability to complete a certain task that your work or your business needs.
Where Does Self-confidence Come From?
Without confidence you will surely miss a lot of available opportunities because you will be afraid to take the risk of trying something that you aren't sure you can handle. The following are some facts about self-confidence:
* Self confidence is never inherited, it's learned. The belief that you lack the genes or something like that is just a popular myth.(See personality and genes relation.)
* Self confidence is not general, instead you have different confidence levels for all the different activities you do. For example, you may be confident about your ability to drive a car but at the same time dread public speaking.
* Self confidence is not constant with time; it may change to the better or worse due to new events happening in your life.
* Self confidence may be independent of external factors, like being rich or having someone who loves you back.
What Can I Do to Build My Self-confidence?
You could be more confident through the total elimination of dependency upon others' judgment. This is because if you don't really have a solid knowledge of your abilities and of who you are, you will most likely be depending on others to tell you who you are and to define your abilities and limitations for you. If they were satisfied by your actions, then they may tell you that you are a good person; if not, they may label you a fool, an idiot or anything else that suits their own point of view. You will of course welcome these labels and add them to your idea about yourself because you've left the judgment to them from the beginning.
How to Eliminate Dependency on Others' Judgment
Correcting this problem is very simple: Get a piece of paper and write down your strengths and your weaknesses. Keep editing this paper until you are satisfied with what you've written. Now keep reading it daily until you are really sure that what you wrote down are your real abilities and skills. Now, whenever you are faced by someone criticizing you or labeling you, you can simply see if any of what he said matches your judgment of yourself. If it doesn't, just drop the comment.
Is it Rude to Disregard Others' Opinion About You?
You may think that it's rude to judge yourself without referring to others' judgment; but lets face reality, if you are twenty years old, you should know yourself better someone who's only known you for a few months and so your judgment will probably be the most relevant. Moreover, in such an imperfect world, you will never be able to get a sufficient answer to your questions and your quest for gathering clues from others will never end.(See this article for more information.)
Just like anybody else, you definitely have people who consider you their enemy, are jealous of you or just dislike you for one reason or another. People such as these will almost never tell you that you're great at something, or that you're talented at a particular activity and so you will find it extremely difficult to get an honest judgment of your abilities from anyone. Consequently, the best thing to do would be to depend on your own judgment of yourself.
Self-confidence and Making Mistakes
Some mothers shout at their children as soon as they break anything, stain their clothes, forget to do their chores or any other minor mistake. Treating a child in this way results in him thinking that doing something wrong is shameful and that making mistakes makes him different from other perfect people who do not make mistakes. When this child grows up and makes a certain mistake in front in public, like dropping a glass or having something go wrong during a presentation, it appears to him as an embarrassing situation and will cause him to think that he is not up to the standard of other people. These kinds of thoughts will gradually but surely damage his confidence.
A parent's role should be building self-confidence in their children by encouraging them to try new things and not to be afraid of making mistakes. The parent should teach them that, as a human being, error's are unavoidable; so it's best to accept your mistakes without criticizing or labeling yourself.
Self-confidence and Inferiority Complex
One very important thing to note here is whether your lack of self-confidence is because any of the reasons we mentioned earlier, or if it is because of a deeply rooted inferiority complex. If suffering from an inferiority complex is your problem, skip to this section. Simply put, inferiority complex is a disorder that develops as a result of feeling inferior when compared to your peers or friends. This can act as a barrier to building self-confidence and so it is necessary to deal with it first.
Self-confidence and Perfectionism
In the Solid Self confidence program i explained that one of the great causes for a lack of self-confidence is being a perfectionist. A perfectionist always sets impossible goals and very high standards that he can never meet and this causes his confidence to degrade as he success escapes him again and again. One example of these impossible standards could be "I must never make mistakes if I want to be great at what I do".
Lack of Self-confidence and Assertiveness
A lack of assertiveness in communication can also lead to having less confidence of your abilities. If you are assertive, this will help you feel that you are in control, important and more worthy of respect and attention. Assertiveness is the ability to express yourself and needs without being aggressive; it's also the way of communication that makes you stand up for your rights and never let them go while at the same time avoiding violating others' rights.
Lack of Self-confidence and Negative Self-talk
Usually, the lack of self confidence is associated with negative self talk; which are the negative phrases and words you keep telling yourself while doing your normal thinking process. Stopping those negative words and phrases and replacing them with positive ones can not only increase your confidence but can help in fixing many of your emotional problems.
Lack of Self-confidence and Poor Self Image
Sometimes the underlying cause for a lack of self-confidence is having a poor self image. An example of this is if you think that you are ugly and so lack confidence whenever you meet new people. In order to know whether or not your lack of self-confidence is rooted in your poor self image; there is a small test that you can do: If you find that you feel more confident wearing your best shirt and much less confident when wearing something else, then your lack of confidence may be a direct result of the poor self image you have of yourself. In that case, fixing your poor mental self image is all what you have to do to restore your self-confidence.
Self confidence and love
People fall in love with those who can help them compensate for their weaknesses and those who have complementary personal traits. In my book How to make someone fall in love with you i described how presenting yourself as someone who is confident can increase your chance of making someone fall in love with you. It was found that women become more attracted to confident and assertive men especially if they were shy themselves.
If you found a way to convince people that you are confident you will definitely have more fans and you will increase your chance of making someone fall in love with you.
Self-confidence and Knowledge
When you know the benefit of something that you do regularly, you will be much more confident talking about it and doing it than if you were just doing it out of habit. Although you shouldn't have to provide an explanation to other people for what you, the power of knowing can still give your self-confidence a big boost. (See the power of knowledge.)
Self-confidence and Comparing Yourself to Others
Some people have developed the terrible habit of always comparing themselves to others; what's worse is that they choose to compare criteria that almost always puts them at the weak end of the comparison. They ignore all that is great about them and pick just this one thing that they lack and compare it to others. On finding that they are different, they feel less confident about themselves and their abilities. This behavior only results in damaging their already worn self-confidence. (Read this article to know how to avoid these unhealthy comparisons.)
Fear and Lack of Self-confidence
do you know that fear can also steal some of your self-confidence? If you are afriad of ghosts or of the dark, your subconscious mind will probably be a little confused as to why you think you should feel confident when you find yourself helpless in certain harmless situations like being alone in the dark. The more helpless you feel, the more your self-confidence will erode as a result.
You can still be confident even when afraid of something, but facing your fears will make you that much more confident than you already are.
Self-confidence and the Self Reinforcing Cycle
Just as your personality affects your behavior, so does your behavior affect your personality. Acting in a non-assertive way will result in your feeling less confident and will lead to a self reinforcing cycle; where your continuously decreasing self-confidence makes you even less assertive and this in turn weakens you further. This can also work the other way round, since by forcing yourself to act in a confident and assertive way, you will start feeling more confident which reinforces and strengthens you even more. (Check this article for more details about this reverse effect.)
The book “How to get over someone in few days” was released by 2knowmyself, the book is a 100% guarantee that you will get over anyone else you will be refunded. 2knowmyself is not a simple article website nor it’s a place where you will find shallow fixes, but it’s a place where you will find effective techniques that are backed by psychology and that are presented in obvious and understandable format. If you think that this is some kind of marketing hype then see what other visitors say about 2knowmyself
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Self-Confidence
from http://www.mindtools.com/selfconf.html
What is Self-Confidence?
Two main things contribute to self-confidence: self-efficacy and self-esteem.
We gain a sense of self-efficacy when we see ourselves (and others similar to ourselves) mastering skills and achieving goals that matter in those skill areas. This is the confidence that, if we learn and work hard in a particular area, we'll succeed; and it's this type of confidence that leads people to accept difficult challenges, and persist in the face of setbacks.
This overlaps with the idea of self-esteem, which is a more general sense that we can cope with what's going on in our lives, and that we have a right to be happy. Partly, this comes from a feeling that the people around us approve of us, which we may or may not be able to control. However, it also comes from the sense that we are behaving virtuously, that we're competent at what we do, and that we can compete successfully when we put our minds to it.
Some people believe that self-confidence can be built with affirmations and positive thinking. At Mind Tools, we believe that there's some truth in this, but that it's just as important to build self-confidence by setting and achieving goals – thereby building competence. Without this underlying competence, you don't have self-confidence: you have shallow over-confidence, with all of the issues, upset and failure that this brings.
Building Self-Confidence
So how do you build this sense of balanced self-confidence, founded on a firm appreciation of reality?
The bad news is that there’s no quick fix, or 5-minute solution.
The good news is that building self-confidence is readily achievable, just as long as you have the focus and determination to carry things through. And what’s even better is that the things you’ll do to build self-confidence will also build success – after all, your confidence will come from real, solid achievement. No-one can take this away from you!
So here are our three steps to self-confidence, for which we’ll use the metaphor of a journey: preparing for your journey; setting out; and accelerating towards success.
Step 1: Preparing for Your Journey
The first step involves getting yourself ready for your journey to self-confidence. You need to take stock of where you are, think about where you want to go, get yourself in the right mindset for your journey, and commit yourself to starting it and staying with it.
In preparing for your journey, do these five things:
Look at what you've already achieved:
Think about your life so far, and list the ten best things you've achieved in an "Achievement Log." Perhaps you came top in an important test or exam, played a key role in an important team, produced the best sales figures in a period, did something that made a key difference in someone else’s life, or delivered a project that meant a lot for your business.
Put these into a smartly formatted document, which you can look at often. And then spend a few minutes each week enjoying the success you’ve already had!
Think about your strengths:
Next, use a technique like SWOT Analysis (explore personal SWOT Analysis here) to take a look at who and where you are. Looking at your Achievement Log, and reflecting on your recent life, think about what your friends would consider to be your strengths and weaknesses. From these, think about the opportunities and threats you face.
Make sure that you enjoy a few minutes reflecting on your strengths!
Think about what's important to you, and where you want to go:
Next, think about the things that are really important to you, and what you want to achieve with your life.
Setting and achieving goals is a key part of this, and real self-confidence comes from this. Goal setting is the process you use to set yourself targets, and measure your successful hitting of those targets. See our article on goal setting to find out how to use this important technique, or use our Life Plan Workbook to think through your own goals in detail (see "Tip" below).
Tip:
A good way of getting going with this is to use the Mind Tools Life Plan Workbook. Supported by worksheets and advice, this guides you through a simple 5-step process for setting your life goals, and for organizing yourself for success.
Inform your goal setting with your SWOT Analysis. Set goals that exploit your strengths, minimize your weaknesses, realize your opportunities, and control the threats you face.
And having set the major goals in your life, identify the first step in each. A tip: Make sure it’s a very small step, perhaps taking no more than an hour to complete!
Start managing your mind:
At this stage, you need to start managing your mind. Learn to pick up and defeat the negative self-talk which can destroy your confidence. See our article on rational positive thinking to find out how to do this.
Further useful reading includes our article on imagery – this teaches you how to use and create strong mental images of what you’ll feel and experience as you achieve your major goals – there’s something about doing this that makes even major goals seem achievable!
And then commit yourself to success!
The final part of preparing for the journey is to make a clear and unequivocal promise to yourself that you are absolutely committed to your journey, and that you will do all in your power to achieve it.
If as you’re doing it, you find doubts starting to surface, write them down and challenge them calmly and rationally. If they dissolve under scrutiny, that’s great. However if they are based on genuine risks, make sure you set additional goals to manage these appropriately. For help with evaluating and managing the risks you face, read our Risk Analysis and Management article.
Either way, make that promise!
Tip: Balanced Self-Confidence
Self-confidence is about balance. At one extreme, we have people with low self-confidence. At the other end, we have people who may be over-confident.
If you are under-confident, you’ll avoid taking risks and stretching yourself; and you might not try at all. And if you’re over-confident, you may take on too much risk, stretch yourself beyond your capabilities, and crash badly. You may also find that you’re so optimistic that you don’t try hard enough to truly succeed.
Getting this right is a matter of having the right amount of confidence, founded in reality and on your true ability. With the right amount of self-confidence, you will take informed risks, stretch yourself (but not beyond your abilities) and try hard.
So How Self Confident Are You? Take our short quiz to find out how self-confident you are already, and start looking at specific strategies to improve your confidence level.
Step 2: Setting Out
This is where you start, ever so slowly, moving towards your goal. By doing the right things, and starting with small, easy wins, you’ll put yourself on the path to success – and start building the self-confidence that comes with this.
Build the knowledge you need to succeed:
Looking at your goals, identify the skills you’ll need to achieve them. And then look at how you can acquire these skills confidently and well. Don’t just accept a sketchy, just-good-enough solution – look for a solution, a program or a course that fully equips you to achieve what you want to achieve and, ideally, gives you a certificate or qualification you can be proud of.
Focus on the basics:
When you’re starting, don’t try to do anything clever or elaborate. And don’t reach for perfection – just enjoy doing simple things successfully and well.
Set small goals, and achieve them:
Starting with the very small goals you identified in step 1, get in the habit of setting them, achieving them, and celebrating that achievement. Don’t make goals particularly challenging at this stage, just get into the habit of achieving them and celebrating them. And, little by little, start piling up the successes!
Keep managing your mind:
Stay on top of that positive thinking, keep celebrating and enjoying success, and keep those mental images strong. You can also use a technique like Treasure Mapping to make your visualizations even stronger!
And on the other side, learn to handle failure. Accept that mistakes happen when you’re trying something new. In fact, if you get into the habit of treating mistakes as learning experiences, you can (almost) start to see them in a positive light. After all, there’s a lot to be said for the saying “if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger!”
Step 3: Accelerating Towards Success
By this stage, you’ll feel your self-confidence building. You’ll have completed some of the courses you started in step 2, and you’ll have plenty of success to celebrate!
This is the time to start stretching yourself. Make the goals a bit bigger, and the challenges a bit tougher. Increase the size of your commitment. And extend the skills you’ve proven into new, but closely related arenas.
Tip 1:
Keep yourself grounded – this is where people tend to get over-confident and over-stretch themselves. And make sure you don’t start enjoying cleverness for its own sake…
Tip 2:
If you haven't already looked at it, use our How Self Confident Are You? quiz to find out how self-confident you are, and to identify specific strategies for building self-confidence.
As long as you keep on stretching yourself enough, but not too much, you'll find your self-confidence building apace. What's more, you'll have earned your self-confidence – because you’ll have put in the hard graft necessary to be successful!
What is Self-Confidence?
Two main things contribute to self-confidence: self-efficacy and self-esteem.
We gain a sense of self-efficacy when we see ourselves (and others similar to ourselves) mastering skills and achieving goals that matter in those skill areas. This is the confidence that, if we learn and work hard in a particular area, we'll succeed; and it's this type of confidence that leads people to accept difficult challenges, and persist in the face of setbacks.
This overlaps with the idea of self-esteem, which is a more general sense that we can cope with what's going on in our lives, and that we have a right to be happy. Partly, this comes from a feeling that the people around us approve of us, which we may or may not be able to control. However, it also comes from the sense that we are behaving virtuously, that we're competent at what we do, and that we can compete successfully when we put our minds to it.
Some people believe that self-confidence can be built with affirmations and positive thinking. At Mind Tools, we believe that there's some truth in this, but that it's just as important to build self-confidence by setting and achieving goals – thereby building competence. Without this underlying competence, you don't have self-confidence: you have shallow over-confidence, with all of the issues, upset and failure that this brings.
Building Self-Confidence
So how do you build this sense of balanced self-confidence, founded on a firm appreciation of reality?
The bad news is that there’s no quick fix, or 5-minute solution.
The good news is that building self-confidence is readily achievable, just as long as you have the focus and determination to carry things through. And what’s even better is that the things you’ll do to build self-confidence will also build success – after all, your confidence will come from real, solid achievement. No-one can take this away from you!
So here are our three steps to self-confidence, for which we’ll use the metaphor of a journey: preparing for your journey; setting out; and accelerating towards success.
Step 1: Preparing for Your Journey
The first step involves getting yourself ready for your journey to self-confidence. You need to take stock of where you are, think about where you want to go, get yourself in the right mindset for your journey, and commit yourself to starting it and staying with it.
In preparing for your journey, do these five things:
Look at what you've already achieved:
Think about your life so far, and list the ten best things you've achieved in an "Achievement Log." Perhaps you came top in an important test or exam, played a key role in an important team, produced the best sales figures in a period, did something that made a key difference in someone else’s life, or delivered a project that meant a lot for your business.
Put these into a smartly formatted document, which you can look at often. And then spend a few minutes each week enjoying the success you’ve already had!
Think about your strengths:
Next, use a technique like SWOT Analysis (explore personal SWOT Analysis here) to take a look at who and where you are. Looking at your Achievement Log, and reflecting on your recent life, think about what your friends would consider to be your strengths and weaknesses. From these, think about the opportunities and threats you face.
Make sure that you enjoy a few minutes reflecting on your strengths!
Think about what's important to you, and where you want to go:
Next, think about the things that are really important to you, and what you want to achieve with your life.
Setting and achieving goals is a key part of this, and real self-confidence comes from this. Goal setting is the process you use to set yourself targets, and measure your successful hitting of those targets. See our article on goal setting to find out how to use this important technique, or use our Life Plan Workbook to think through your own goals in detail (see "Tip" below).
Tip:
A good way of getting going with this is to use the Mind Tools Life Plan Workbook. Supported by worksheets and advice, this guides you through a simple 5-step process for setting your life goals, and for organizing yourself for success.
Inform your goal setting with your SWOT Analysis. Set goals that exploit your strengths, minimize your weaknesses, realize your opportunities, and control the threats you face.
And having set the major goals in your life, identify the first step in each. A tip: Make sure it’s a very small step, perhaps taking no more than an hour to complete!
Start managing your mind:
At this stage, you need to start managing your mind. Learn to pick up and defeat the negative self-talk which can destroy your confidence. See our article on rational positive thinking to find out how to do this.
Further useful reading includes our article on imagery – this teaches you how to use and create strong mental images of what you’ll feel and experience as you achieve your major goals – there’s something about doing this that makes even major goals seem achievable!
And then commit yourself to success!
The final part of preparing for the journey is to make a clear and unequivocal promise to yourself that you are absolutely committed to your journey, and that you will do all in your power to achieve it.
If as you’re doing it, you find doubts starting to surface, write them down and challenge them calmly and rationally. If they dissolve under scrutiny, that’s great. However if they are based on genuine risks, make sure you set additional goals to manage these appropriately. For help with evaluating and managing the risks you face, read our Risk Analysis and Management article.
Either way, make that promise!
Tip: Balanced Self-Confidence
Self-confidence is about balance. At one extreme, we have people with low self-confidence. At the other end, we have people who may be over-confident.
If you are under-confident, you’ll avoid taking risks and stretching yourself; and you might not try at all. And if you’re over-confident, you may take on too much risk, stretch yourself beyond your capabilities, and crash badly. You may also find that you’re so optimistic that you don’t try hard enough to truly succeed.
Getting this right is a matter of having the right amount of confidence, founded in reality and on your true ability. With the right amount of self-confidence, you will take informed risks, stretch yourself (but not beyond your abilities) and try hard.
So How Self Confident Are You? Take our short quiz to find out how self-confident you are already, and start looking at specific strategies to improve your confidence level.
Step 2: Setting Out
This is where you start, ever so slowly, moving towards your goal. By doing the right things, and starting with small, easy wins, you’ll put yourself on the path to success – and start building the self-confidence that comes with this.
Build the knowledge you need to succeed:
Looking at your goals, identify the skills you’ll need to achieve them. And then look at how you can acquire these skills confidently and well. Don’t just accept a sketchy, just-good-enough solution – look for a solution, a program or a course that fully equips you to achieve what you want to achieve and, ideally, gives you a certificate or qualification you can be proud of.
Focus on the basics:
When you’re starting, don’t try to do anything clever or elaborate. And don’t reach for perfection – just enjoy doing simple things successfully and well.
Set small goals, and achieve them:
Starting with the very small goals you identified in step 1, get in the habit of setting them, achieving them, and celebrating that achievement. Don’t make goals particularly challenging at this stage, just get into the habit of achieving them and celebrating them. And, little by little, start piling up the successes!
Keep managing your mind:
Stay on top of that positive thinking, keep celebrating and enjoying success, and keep those mental images strong. You can also use a technique like Treasure Mapping to make your visualizations even stronger!
And on the other side, learn to handle failure. Accept that mistakes happen when you’re trying something new. In fact, if you get into the habit of treating mistakes as learning experiences, you can (almost) start to see them in a positive light. After all, there’s a lot to be said for the saying “if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger!”
Step 3: Accelerating Towards Success
By this stage, you’ll feel your self-confidence building. You’ll have completed some of the courses you started in step 2, and you’ll have plenty of success to celebrate!
This is the time to start stretching yourself. Make the goals a bit bigger, and the challenges a bit tougher. Increase the size of your commitment. And extend the skills you’ve proven into new, but closely related arenas.
Tip 1:
Keep yourself grounded – this is where people tend to get over-confident and over-stretch themselves. And make sure you don’t start enjoying cleverness for its own sake…
Tip 2:
If you haven't already looked at it, use our How Self Confident Are You? quiz to find out how self-confident you are, and to identify specific strategies for building self-confidence.
As long as you keep on stretching yourself enough, but not too much, you'll find your self-confidence building apace. What's more, you'll have earned your self-confidence – because you’ll have put in the hard graft necessary to be successful!
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