7 Tips to Improve Your Self-Confidence

It is first important to understand what self-confidence actually is. If you want to improve your self-confidence you must first understand it.

In simple terms Self-Confidence is: "A feeling of trust in one's abilities, qualities, and judgment".

In short, it is the confidence that you can do things, have good qualities and can make the right decisions and calls when you need to.

The good news is that it's an easy process to improve confidence. By following the following simple tips, you can quickly change how you feel about yourself and improve your self-confidence.

1. Always Have a Positive Attitude

There's no doubt about it, those with a positive attitude enjoy greater success and happiness than others with a negative attitude. Much of how we feel is just a matter of perspective. It's how we view the world and how we think the world views us. If we have (and show) a negative attitude towards others, it prevents us from being happy, and has a negative effect on those we are close to, and other friends and associates. Having a positive attitude gives us confidence in ourselves and our abilities. We may not be perfect, nobody is! But we shouldn't let self-doubt and lack of confidence prevent us from leading full and happy lives. You can easily redirect your negative thoughts and frustrations into positive and steely determination to succeed.

2. Discover Who You Are!

You need to stop what you're doing, and start to try to understand who you are and what are your core principles. Many people have a negative image of themselves. Learn to honestly like yourself. If you're not yet the person you want to be, decide how realistically you can best achieve the qualities and abilities that you seek. Understanding yourself is first step towards building your self-confidence.

Find out who you are as person. Ask others who love you, or who are close to you, what are your best qualities. If our self-image is going to be dominated by what our mind perceives others think of us, let's make sure that we get the best and most important opinions, those who care about us! We may not be perfect, but we are important to others, and that's important. Understand your strengths and weaknesses, take a critical but positive look at yourself. You will find out who you really are, and can start to develop habits and qualities that will redirect you to where you want to go.

3. What Do You Fear?

Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said at his first presidential inauguration ceremony as 32nd President of the United States, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself".

A key reason for lack of self-confidence is fear. How can you feel confident in your abilities if you fear the outcome of your actions, or assume failure? So what is "failure", and what are our benchmarks and standards for success? Failure for many is a realisation that you may not have achieved the high standards, qualities or other parameters that you have set for yourself. You may have been undermined, bullied or intimidated in childhood, and this has damaged your self-image. You may have experienced a traumatic event which has impaired your self-confidence. For you to rebuild your self-confidence you need to identify exactly what it is that you fear. Once you have identified the root cause of your fear, you can start to move forwards. Fear only drags you back, overcoming fear is life enhancing. Sometimes you might need the assistance of a healthcare professional. Don't hesitate to seek this help if you need it.

4. Preparation and Reflection

It is lack of preparation that makes us feel insecure so to overcome this, you need to plan ahead to the point where you are no longer unsure of the outcome.

Having properly prepared will give you a more secure mindset, and this will relieve most of your insecurities about future events. It is very important to reflect on how you overcame any lack of a preparation, and this will help you to become more secure. This will boost your self-confidence, and remove self-doubt.

5. Become an action taker, not a procrastinator

Self-confidence is the product of positive action, self-doubt is the product of inaction and procrastination. So ignoring something important, finding other things to do which are less important (or procrastination) only feeds self-doubt.

Expand your comfort zone and try to take things one step at a time. Positive action to tackle issues head-on when they occur is one of the best ways to boost self-confidence.

6. Be kind to yourself

You don't deserve to torture yourself. Focusing on your flaws, and any negative aspects of your personality or abilities, will just make you feel worse, and serves no useful purpose. This can spiral into a self imposed world of negativity and an self-doubt. Human beings are flawed. We are bad at some things, and we are good at other things. The key is to always concentrate on the good things, and to praise yourself when you have achieved something useful or positive.

7. View failure as the wrong path to success

Everyone has experienced some failure in their lives. Even the most successful people have endured some failure, but successful individuals learn from failure They avoid that path in their future actions in business and their personal lives, and go on to achieve success. So you too can learn from your mistakes, and soon put yourself back on the road to success.

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