How to increase your self-confidence: Part 3
11. Failure is part of the journey
If you do a google image search for success quotes you’ll find that most of them have got a strong link to failure.
This isn’t some wishy-washy bullshit that is trying to make you feel better – it is fact.
Failing is part of life for literally everyone and it helps you grow and change as a person – if you let it.
Do you remember doing exams at school? How did they prepare you for them? The school typically gave you exam papers from previous years, your failure in any of them signalled to you which parts of a subject you were weaker on and needed to work on.
You could go as far to say that everything in life is a lesson.
Some things go perfectly to plan and you get taught you’re doing that right, other things go the opposite way and you learn what not to do.
You see, you can just decide that you’ve failed, let that failure become a part of you and let it trample your confidence even further.
Or, you can decide that that failure is a lesson.
Read this next bit at least twice.
“It isn’t what happens to us that defines us, it is how we react to what happens to us.”
Now read it again.
It is so often the case that we let low-confidence stop us doing things because we’re worried about the outcome.
(If you really struggle with that you can read my catastrophising blog here)
But what if you decided that no matter what happened you would find the positives in it and learn from the mistakes.
***
Example
Let’s say that you have a small presentation to do at work.
Just like half of the population of the world you’re worried about talking in front of people but you have to do it as it is part of your job.
The presentation gets across all the points you need to.
You managed to read your presentation word for word as planned but this meant you barely looked at your audience.
You felt uncomfortable and shifted from side to side as you spoke.
Your brain stumbled over some of the more tricky sentences you put into your speech but you did manage to say them all.
It would be fairly typical for someone with low-confidence to look at this and just rip themselves for pieces for giving a nervous speech where they barely looked at the audience.
But what is a more constructive way to look at this in terms of helping our self-confidence.
First find the positives
- Getting the talk done
- All of the necessary information being presented
- Managing to read your whole thing word for word.
Now learn from the negatives
- Use bullet points that you can improvise off of – this will create a more natural flow and allow you to look at your audience more.
- Bullet points also mean there’s no tricky sentences to struggle with.
- Plant your feet shoulder width apart and let them stay planted.
By taking stock in this way you can help to make yourself feel more confident about giving your next speech.
***
The above example could be applied to any situation at all, the important thing is that when you are faced with some form of failure you ask yourself “what can I learn from this?”
12. Lots of little goals, one big goal
I’ve said throughout this series that I believe self-confidence is made up of all the things you think are important to be confident at.
I wouldn’t be surprised if when you think about your self-confidence you will gravitate towards thinking about the most relevant thing that you are least self-confident at.
Finish this sentence for me.
If I was completely self-confident then I would _____________
Think big, pretend to yourself for just a moment that you ARE completely self-confident, what would you then do?
Whatever that thing is can be your big goal that you are ultimately aiming towards.
It is likely (if you’ve done this right) that the thought of actually completing this big goal is actually terrifying.
Scary goals are good, it means that they mean something to you.
It would be ridiculous to expect you just to do this big goal straight away so taking baby steps on the way makes a lot of sense.
***
Example
Let’s say that your big goal is doing a presentation in front of a room of people and that currently terrifies the bejesus out of you.
You’d start by building your confidence up by first speaking in front of 2 people.
And then speaking in front of 2 people again.
Maybe you speak in front of 5 people next etc etc.
***
As we said in part 1 confidence comes after the act, not before, so you have to go out there and earn the confidence and build it up with these mini-goals on the way to your big goal.
13. Visualise your success
As fluffy as this sounds it is actually something that can be really beneficial for your self-confidence and in particular your belief in your ability to do something.
You could think of this as being a meditation of sorts, if you’re hearing the word meditation and thinking that you’ll have to get some incense or something first then don’t worry.
You can simply think of meditation as just sitting quietly and thinking.
That’s literally all it is really.
It is the intention of what you’re thinking about that makes it beneficial to you.
In the last point I asked you to create a “big goal” to try and achieve.
We can actually increase our self-confidence by completing a visualisation exercise whereby we imagine ourselves doing the thing we want to do.
This is the opposite of catastrophising, instead of worrying about things going wrong we imagine ourselves doing whatever we want to achieve absolutely perfectly.
As if we couldn’t possibly do it any more confidently.
You can listen to a 30 minute progressive muscle relaxation exercise here which will help you with this if you’re not able to do it just in your own imagination.
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14. Smiling
I wrote a whole blog about this before – you can read that here
But the idea is very simple.
If you smile you can trick your brain into feeling happier.
Pull your biggest and goofiest smile right now and hold it for a minute.
I guarantee at the end of this you’ll feel happier.
Dive into the blog above if you want to read more about it.
Smiling inanely and becoming comfortable with it and being even more at ease in your own skin is a wonderful way to increase your self-confidence.
15. Exercise
No self-improvement blog would be complete without someone telling you to exercise but there’s a bloody good reason why exercise is included in all these things.
It works.
Physical activity stimulates the release of dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin.
These are brain chemicals which play an important part in regulating your mood.
That doesn’t mean you’ve got to go running if you don’t like running or yoga or weight lifting.
Try out a few things and do one that you enjoy – anything that gets the heart rate going!
16. Celebrate all your successes
One of the biggest things in self-development that people overlook is that we’re all running individual races in life.
We each have our own strengths and weaknesses so when it comes to success you need to measure it against yourself.
Not anyone else.
If you have financial success in business then the fastest way to feel like shit and that it doesn’t mean anything is to compare it to how much Jeff Bezos made in the same period of time.
Was it more sales than last week? Were they higher value sales? Then flipping celebrate it.
It doesn’t matter how small a success is, if it was challenging to you in any way then celebrate.
Who cares if the same thing would be easy for someone else?
That doesn’t matter at all.
I’m not saying that you should organise a party if you “just” get through the day without falling back into a particular bad habit you’re trying to overcome – for example.
But if you DO succeed in something difficult then give yourself a genuine well done – buy or do something to treat yourself.
What is the downside to being proud of a tough achievement?
And if you have an answer and it is anything to do with what other people think then please go back to part 2 of the series!
If it isn’t, then I’m just going to put it out there that you’re wrong.
Be proud of your achievements and successes.
Go forward in life with a sense of satisfaction in all that you’ve done.
Be the most powerful and self-confident version of yourself that you can possibly be.
But most importantly be YOU!
Self-confidence coach
I genuinely hope you’ve found all three parts of this series to be helpful to you and that these techniques and tools have started to make a change to how you feel about yourself.
If you’d like to work directly with me one-on-one as your self-confidence coach or for any other issue then why not book in a free no-obligation chat to see what we could achieve for you if we work together.
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