Self-Confidence - I am valuable

Self-Confidence is the ability to provide yourself with value and to believe in your abilities and capabilities. It’s is being resilient to receiving lack of support or criticism. Self-Confidence is having the strength to follow your own path and not need to be fed confidence by others in order to keep feeling confident about yourself. Self-skills are ways that you feed yourself with what you need for mental and emotional security, without relying on others to boost your needs.

Confidence is built on two self-skills:-

Self-Assurance – I can

The belief that you have wide ranging skills to a good level, or have the ability to learn new skills to a good standard.

You believe in growth, that anyone with hard work and perseverance, can improve themselves and their abilities. People with high self-assurance don’t fear challenges or trying new things that they’ve never done before. They know that with practice, they can learn.  People with high self-assurance usually have a wide range of skills due to their ‘give it a go’ attitude. Read more…

Self-Approval – I am

The belief that you are unconditionally valuable and deserve to be treated with respect.

People with high self-approval walk away from or avoid people and situations, which involve them (their time or possessions) being treated with disrespect. They also don’t judge their value on their achievements, their appearance, their skills, how they compare to others, their acquaintances or any other high status items they may possess. They are unconditionally valuable without evidence, based on their own opinion. Read more…

The benefits of being more self-confident

• Feeling good about yourself…
…despite what others say about you, or whether they tell you you’re amazing or even worse reject or criticise you.

• You’re not open to manipulation or coaxing by others…
…who play on your insecurities and use them to minimise or use you for their own benefits.

• Don’t have your value held hostage by others…
…who control you by only giving you value in exchange for doing things towards their preferences.

• You learn to love growing and learning new things…
…without the looming fear of failure, you will grow lots of skills and become really good at them and push yourself to new heights.

Avoid these things for more confidence

• Fixed mindset: Being a perfectionist.
Perfectionism can drive you to create great things but it can make you afraid of failure, or afraid of engaging in anything new where you might not perform a perfect task.

• Receiving intense criticism from yourself or from others
Criticism, whether it comes from yourself or from others can be part of the learning process but constant, intense, un-fair or un-constructive criticism can be damaging to self-confidence. When your focus is constantly on your failures then you start to judge yourself based on those, and not your successes or things you’ve learnt from failure. You start to invalidate your successes (even if they were amazing) by where you’ve gone wrong, or where it could have been better. No-one feels confident when they are focusing on how they aren’t good enough.

• High achievement as your standard output
Winning or achievement can feel great, getting a sense of joy from being the best or achieving a great score. When this becomes your normal level is when this becomes a burden. You no longer feel joy at winning (which is now your standard) but only feel anxiety or fear of losing, being less than first, or not achieving a high score. Learn to let go of the need to win, accept that its ok to be average, to lose, or to opt out sometimes. Trying your best counts. Learn to be glad for the winning team. Learn to value yourself not by what you can achieve and appreciate your wins.

• Using arrogance as confidence
Sometimes arrogance (the belief that you are more valuable than other people) can feel like confidence but it is not. Arrogant confidence is built upon a constant supply of status and success, but life doesn’t deliver this constantly. No-one can win, achieve or hold status forever. Arrogant confidence can come crashing down once those things are challenged.

• Stop comparison or competition with others
You can always be a different person depending on who you compare yourself with. Stop comparing yourself with others who may be putting out only their best life. You don’t know how they are feeling about themselves, or what they have had to do to succeed. Maybe things aren’t as they seem or they’ve had to make major sacrifices or work really hard to get where they are. Competing with others can take you down paths that you don’t really want but you feel compelled to be invested, for the feeling of the win. Be authentic to yourself and what you want to pursue in life.

• Valuing yourself on your achievements, appearance, money or success
If you are used to valuing yourself on high achievement, being the best or appearing to have high status through other external factors, this can sometimes bring high but fragile confidence. Basing your value on being high status, or always achieving well, can make you feel amazing but it leaves your self-confidence and self-value floored when you meet failure, challenges or the removal of factors of status.

How to become more confident

• Build a book of your favourite affirmations
Collect ones you like from around you (from others or films for example). Read them to yourself or write them out and make them part of your mindset. Live them, make them your motto for life.

• Develop a growth mindset
Learn growth mindset skills and approaches. Incorporate growth mindset affirmations into your book. Learn that failing is part of succeeding. It’s how we learn. Be brave enough to grow new skills, explore life and have fun.

• Create inspiring, uplifting vision boards
These help you focus and visualise where you want to head in life. Maybe you want to create one that showcases your skills or proudest moments just to remind yourself how fab you really are.

• Build your verbal skills and assertive techniques.
Read through the blog and absorb each technique and verbal advice.

• Self-Mastery
Learn all the 13 self-skills and how to apply them, to learn to support yourself without the positive or negative influence of others.

• Self-Approval
Value yourself for who you are, not what you can achieve or showcase as status.

• Self-Compassion
Be kind to yourself, its okay to take your foot off the pedal, not be first, or put out a top performance all the time.