Self-Assurance - I can
Learning to be self-assured is about knowing what you can do, feeling confident in the skills that you already have and your ability to learn new skills if needs be. It’s about knowing that whatever situations come along you feel confident that you can handle it, or could learn to handle it.
Knowing what you are already good at is easier to know. Our world is filled with certificates and awards to showcase our training or level of skills. Even those with high achievement though often feel doubt and anxiety about their abilities, leaving their qualification feeling null and void. Building your self-assurance is about building your belief in yourself and your abilities. Developing a growth mindset is key to self-assurance, which centres not on perfection, criticism, judgement or achievement but the joy of the journey of effort, learning, improvement and growth. Developing skills to deal with processing constructive criticism, and deflecting unfair criticism, are also key to developing self-assurance. Learn to feed yourself with the confidence to know what you can achieve.
The benefits of good self-assurance
• Feeling good about yourself
You can feel good knowing that you don’t need to push for compliments from others or feel deflated because you haven’t got praise, attention and applause. Having self-assurance is having an inner feeling, a glow, about yourself and what you can or could achieve. It’s about not unfairly criticising yourself, telling yourself things are impossible, you’re useless or that you can’t do it.
• You are a learning machine, never limit yourself
Don’t dampen your success with limiting mindset beliefs. Whilst succeeding at everything is unrealistic, self-assurance means you are not afraid to try, or learn from your mistakes.
• Not being dependent on others
No-one is an island but you can enjoy the benefits of being self-sufficient and independent. While we all rely on others from time to time, learning skills for yourself, can make you feel confident and not helpless, afraid, timid or vulnerable when there is no-one around to help you. You also don’t find your problems, or your life’s progress, is on pause, while you wait for others to push you forward or fix things for you.
Read more: Learn more self-efficacy…
Read more: Learn more self-sufficiency…
• Self-protection
Having confidence in your skills can mean that you handle your own life, and don’t fall prey to those that allow you to lean on them, with the idea of taking advantage of you. It means that when a change or crisis hits, you aren’t left floundering in a dangerous situation or unable to cope with changing circumstances.
• Have fun, live a great life and make friends
Being self-confident with high self-assurance means that you can live your life how to choose, embrace what you enjoy, explore, try new things and make new connections. It means you’re not afraid to try, because you know you will learn if you fail. You have faith in your many skills and feel you can handle most situations with confidence.
• Helps to reduce anxiety
Anxiety is created when you feel there will be uncontrollable negative consequences to your actions (or lack of actions) or an unavoidable event will pushed upon you that you feel you unable to deal with. You lack faith in your ability to perform well, deal with the situation or deflect unfair, negative behaviour directed at you. You may have anxiety about controlling your life (you worry about negative consequences) or you may have perfectionist tendency’s where you worry about falling below a high standard. Examples of these can be:-
Negative consequences to your actions (a reaction to your actions)
This can be people reacting aggressively, or cancelling a relationship in response to your actions, such as saying ‘no’, enforcing a boundary or you worry that you’ve said something rude or inappropriate.
You do something embarrassing or to a bad standard that causes others to laugh at you.
You fail something, get criticised or get punished because you did something wrong.
Negative consequences to non-action (not doing something or not doing something enough)
You fail something, get criticised or get punished because you forgot to action something.
You get punished or criticised because you failed to get a high enough score or do something to a high enough standard.
You feel it’s given as your ‘job’ to remind people, make sure they get things done or generally do things to keep them happy, otherwise they will be cross with you.
Unavoidable event pushed upon you
Anxiety can be caused by dealing with negative events such as being bullied, facing aggressive behaviours, receiving criticism or physical threats without provocation.
You have to do something that you cannot avoid such as a work event, social event, public speaking or presentation, that you feel you do not have the skills to cope with.
There is an event that you feel pressured to attend where you feel you will be open to ridicule.
You have to take a legal or work related assessment, exam or other type of judgment. You worry that you won’t perform well enough.
Self-assurance can help you feel less anxious
Self-assurance can help with anxiety because you are skilled up to feel confident in many different situations. Being self-assured about your assertiveness skills can make you less anxious and feel better able to control your life. Being self-confident means that you are skilled in:-
Assertively defending yourself from ridicule, rudeness or attempts to criticise and undermine you.
Dealing with genuine failure by being funny or laughing at yourself without it reducing your self-confidence.
Learning many skills to a respectable standard so as not to feel embarrassed about putting out a terrible performance.
• Helps to reduce depression
Self-assurance is about fulfilling your own feelings of worth based on what you know you are capable of. You don’t need other people’s praise to feel good about yourself and you know how to deflect other people’s attempts to undermine you. Gaining value from winning against others doesn’t appeal to you because you already know you are valuable.
Depression can understandably come from specific events in your life such as grief, loss, illness or disillusionment with life but it can also be triggered by general life, mindset expectations.
General depression can come when things that should be fun and light up your life (that other people seem to enjoy) become just another anxiety trigger for putting out a performance and potentially being judged and criticised. You feel that certain fun activities are just another form of judgement about your level of (or lack of) achievement, competition / comparison with others or performance. This judgement can come externally from others or internally from your own negative mindset.
People prone to depression often struggle to enjoy things purely for the sake of enjoyment. They’ve learnt that fun comes from winning, achieving, being best or succeeding but the idea of doing something competitive or judgeable, even for fun, also makes them feel anxious. They are constantly on ‘achievement’ mode. On the opposite side, often they also struggle to gain enjoyment from things that do not involve a sense of achievement or winning. They cannot absorb joy because the act of joy involves an anxiety and an energy effort or drain.
Examples of how pleasure is reduced…
Being creative – is spoiled if you are constantly thinking how your creation is not good enough.
Going for walks – is boring. There needs to be a point, distance, steps, timing? A way to measure performance and succeed.
Playing a game – triggers competitive, comparative feelings and a sense of self-worth reduction if they lose or anxiety about how they might lose.
Reading – often ends up being books about their chosen subject that they aim to excel in.
Sports – triggers anxious, competitive performance feelings.
Socialising – ends up being a comparative environment, discussing achievements or lack thereof.
Social games – darts, snooker, bowling, pub quiz or escape rooms can also trigger performance anxiety.
Often they fall to non competitive forms of enjoyment to find stimulation such as physical stimulation such as eating, drinking or drugs
Read more: Learn to find more joy…
joy reducing mindsets include
High comparison or competition with others
This is when someone is competitive with others or has expectations of constant high standards (perfectionism). They compare themselves to others and feel they should be always be better than them. Even the joy of the highest success is dampened by being overtaken by another.
High achievement
People can become depressed as a reaction to being in a highly critical environment, where high success is the normal. Such high performance output can be exhausting to keep as a constant. People can develop negative thinking, always looking for how they, or their performance, could have been better rather that appreciating the success they have achieved. Judging themselves (and others) and looking for negatives becomes the normal way to approach things.
Struggling with setbacks and challenges
Skills in self-positivity can help depression, as can mental and emotional resilience skills. People become prone to depression when they struggle to process challenges or set backs in life. This can include things that reduce their perceived status or authority in a subject (or their value as they see it) eg. Losing their job/position, partner, finances, not achieving something as high as they normally would or being overtaken/replaced.
Read more: Mental and emotional resilience…
Read more: Persistence and perseverance…
Basing their value on their achievement or status, or the appearance of it
Some people base their value on what they can achieve with their skills. People in sports, business or academics often fall into this category.
Some people use status or good looks to boost their self-assurance. People from celebrity or successful families thrive off of their perceived success.
Using external support for your inner confidence in this way, means that high confidence using these means, is often fragile. While things are good they feel great but when it’s not, they don’t.
Building healthy self-approval can help with this mindset.
Self-assurance skills can help you to overcome these challenges by learning to value yourself on your own scoreboard, not comparing yourself to others, being resilient to setbacks and keeping a positive mindset.
building self-assurance
• What are your weaknesses, focus on conquering them.
Beating our fears can be scary but rewarding once we conquer them. Learn to beat challenges in your life rather than work around how to avoid them.
Write a list of your fears and weaknesses, how and where could you improve?
• Build a growth mindset
Learn to persevere in the face of set backs, criticism or challenges. Learn to be consistent and persistent. No one wins all the time and basing your value on your successes can be a weak basis for your self-worth.
Challenges and failure are the building blocks for success. They can be disappointing but learn to embrace them and grow, rather than see them as something to feel bad about.
Read more: Growth Mindset…
• Know what you can do and what you need to work on
Be honest about assessing your skills and be willing to learn more, to build them up. Are there skills that you are missing? How can you learn and build these skills?
Build your self-confidence in what you can achieve. Be honest about what skills you already have. Look to see if you are under valuing or underestimating what you can already do.
Maybe you are over estimating how good you are and blocking yourself from learning more.
• Believe that you can learn new things
Remember what you have already learnt, already achieved or are already good at to help you remember that you can achieve success. You’ve been a learner before and grown to be an expert.
You’ve done it before, you can do it again in a different area.
• Self-fed confidence in your current abilities
Learn to listen to your own voice and opinions rather than need outside influence to bolster you. Your opinion matters. You may need to stand against the ideas and opinions of others but just because your opinion is different, doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Believe in yourself. Learn to listen to your self-talk, what is it saying to you? Is it positive or negative?
Having self-fed confidence means that you are more resilient to those people who may try and convince you that you are less worthy or less skilled for their own pleasure or gain.
• Use self-discipline to learn new skills or build on existing ones
Self-discipline is the keystone skill for consistent growth. It means you waste less, focus on what’s needed and stick to a plan for success.
• Know that your value isn’t based on what you have achieved or can do
Beat the feeling that if you aren’t good at something now it means you are worth less as a person or lower status. Basing your worth on your achievements or skills means that your self-confidence is fragile. No-one has consistent success so this means your confidence rises and falls with your success. It also means that you fear trying anything new where you might not showcase good knowledge, skills or performance, which will slow your growth. Periods of high achievement can trigger feelings of arrogance, which is never good.
• Affirmations and self talk
You may not realise it but you talk to yourself all the time. It might not be out loud but you tell yourself things all of the time. This self-talk can filter your view whether something is possible, valuable, positive or negative.
Themes in your head that you may cover can be:-
Your worth as a person: attractiveness, success, achievement.
What your skills are or what you could learn to do (or not!) This can be physical or intelligence
What is possible for your vision of the future
How to view each situation positively or negatively
Ways to guide your self-talk into growth centred themes is by using the following methods:
Writing or reading daily affirmations – hack your thoughts into power
Mood and vision boards - create images and themes things you’d like to have or a future you’d like to manifest
Journalling – being aware of what thoughts go through your head
Using affirmation cards – place them around your life to pop into your unconscious when you look at them
• You are not a label – change is possible
We like to group people with labels: athletic, posh, geeky. While these help us to get an idea of who someone may be (either positively or negatively) it also can box people into groups that they feel they are trapped in. Someone may feel they are trapped into boxes such as fat, ugly, un-fit, poor, low class, loser, pretty but dumb or mumsy. This can mean that they feel that they simply are (or aren’t) a certain type of person but change is possible. Anyone can change ‘labels’, it just takes time and effort to learn new skills or work towards a goal. Labels can also change depending on which group you are with. One groups ‘poor’ may be another groups ‘rich’. Don’t let a label, that you’ve given yourself or that’s been given to you by others, stop you pursuing something outside of that box.