You CAN learn and develop SELF-CONFIDENCE! (EASY and SIMPLE tips)

Do you have self-confidence? If you do, great because there’s nothing sexier than someone that has a lot of confidence on him/herself. If you don’t, don’t worry, just know it’s a skill and you can learn! On today’s post I will give some tips and hints about how to develop and improve your self-confidence!

Do you know what’s the difference between self-esteem and self-confidence? Even though one impacts the other and sometimes they go together, they are quite different! Self-esteem is about how much you appreciate and value yourself, and self-confidence is about how much you believe and trust your abilities.

A person with a high level of confidence might have a low self-esteem and vice-cersa, they are not attached, but there are good chances that if one of them improve, will help the other as well.

Even when people are confident in some areas, they might have problems in others because confidence is about you believing in your capacity of doing something, and I don’t know any human being that is capable of doing everything, and that takes me to the first topic, know yourself!

Know Yourself

Make a list with all your strengths and weaknesses, it will help you to raise your awareness about the things you do well and the ones you don’t. Some people have the habit of saying something like “but I’m not good at anything”, that’s not true, it’s a limiting belief and you have to defeat it! To understand better limiting beliefs, have a look at this post here!

It’s impossible! Everybody has a gift! If you cannot find yours, ask people around you. If you hear 2 or 3 times the same positive thing about yourself, you must believe it! To become aware of your strengths will help you to build your self-confidence, and it might even improve your self-esteem!

Now, about your weaknesses, you have two ways to deal with them, either you accept or you change! You don’t have to be good at everything, is perfectly fine if you don’t want to develop some areas, just don’t feel ashamed and don’t allow them to impact you negatively.

If it’s something that bothers you a lot and will make a huge difference if you improve that in your life, then you need only 2 things: knowledge and practice! Knowledge is something that is available for free on the internet, you just have to search, and practice I will be covering on the next topic!

Physical and Mental Practices

Knowledge without practice is just knowledge, knowledge with practice becomes a skill! Have you ever heard the saying that practice makes it perfect? You cannot expect to become good at something if you don’t practice a lot of times before!

If it’s something that you cannot practice physically, you can do it mentally! Your brain does not know the difference between what’s real and what’s imaginary! Science has proven it! There are some experiments in sports that show that mental and physical training generate similar results.

If you need to strengthen your confidence in things that are hard to train physically, like public speaking, tests and exams, just close your eyes and imagine as real as possible, and tell yourself things like:

I can do it
I feel comfortable in this kind of situation
There’s no reason for anxiety and concern

Self-suggestions work wonders! And by the way, this work of visualization and suggestion is also known as hypnosis!

Inner Dialogue

The way you talk to yourself inside your head, might build you as a person or destroy you! That’s the power these inner voices have! So please, learn how to control them!

Meditation is one way to learn this, you need to become aware of the kind of thoughts you have and start to monitor them, and when you hear a negative thought, fight back, don’t let your mind crush you all the time!

The problem about the voices inside your head is because probably you believe them, and confidence is about believing in your capacity to do something, so if your inner dialogue tells you the opposite, won’t help you at all!

You will have to learn to control your mind and align your thoughts with the things that you want to achieve, when you change inside, the external reality changes as well!

This same mechanism “inside out, outside in” also happens in the connection between body and feelings, which takes to to the next topic, body language!

Body Language

When I studied theatre, I’ve done a very interesting exercise about body language and I would like to share it with you so you can try it at home.

You have to walk for a few minutes as if a line was pulling certain parts of your body, these points are: forehead, nose, chin, chest, belly, hips, knees and feet.

You start the exercise walking for a few minutes as if you were being pulled by your forehead, then you change to your nose, chin and so on, until you test all the points that I’ve just mentioned.

You will realize that when you change the way you walk, the way you feel changes as well! You can even describe how is the personality and character of people who walk that way! It’s a very simple exercise that can show you in practice how body language impacts you.

Next time you catch yourself feeling lack of confidence, observe your body language! Probably your shoulders will be slumped, your chest shrunken and you will be looking down, so if you need and extra dose of self-confidence, change your body language because it works like magic! Open your chest, lift your shoulders and look forward, and you will see how your self-confidence will be back in a minute!