Beefing Up Your Confidence (8mins)

As long as you look for someone else to validate who you are by seeking their approval, you are setting yourself up for disaster. You have to be whole and complete in yourself. No one can give you that. You have to know who you are – what others say is irrelevant.
― Nic Sheff

Confidence is ‘the belief in oneself and one’s powers or abilities.’ This feeling can easily be mistaken for the feeling of knowing you are better than others or that you do not care about what others think which is incorrect confidence is not about other people it is about yourself how you view yourself, how you reflect yourself and knowing your capability and capacity.

Success and Confidence, Which Comes First?

According to Jim Taylor, Most businesspeople, when asked which comes first, confidence or success, they usually reply success because they believe they need that big boost to get their confidence going. But the problem with that reasoning is that you likely won’t achieve a substantial success (unless you get lucky) because, lacking confidence, you won’t take the risk of giving it everything you’ve got that is necessary for real success. At the same time, confidence isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition, that is to say, you either have it or you don’t. Instead, confidence lies along a continuum from very low to very high confidence. The goal is to progressively build your confidence through a combination of initial belief and increasingly greater successes. But, when you get right down to it, confidence must come first. Not 100% confidence, mind you, but just enough to take your shot and experience a modicum of success. That small amount of success then
boosts your confidence which, in turn, raises your level of performance which results in greater success, which increases your confidence, until you are caught in a virtuous cycle of self-sustaining confidence and success.

Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people don’t. They sit in front of the TV and treat life as if it goes on forever. _Philip Adams

How to Develop Confident You
We all have times of doubt. However, the key to overcoming those doubts is developing confidence. Not only will you feel better about your own abilities and yourself, but you will also reassure others and they will want to work with you. Here are some ways to help you improve your confidence:

1.The first step to improving your confidence is by harnessing the (power of positive self-talk) I didn’t know how powerful this could be until when i gave it a try when i was called upon for an impromptu speech boy! I can still recall how my heart raced i felt like asking for the ground to swallow me up (glad it didn’t) before i began to speak, i had to practice the power of self-talk by cutting out that internal voice in my mind that keeps telling me that it’s not possible. I had to block it out and started asking myself of what the worst case scenario could be, i realized it wasn’t that bad as the voice in my head. After experiencing something i feared doing for the first time i realized that it was not as frightening as i thought.

1. Understand your strengths and weaknesses:Acknowledge your strengths and feel good about them. Also, know yourweaknesses so you understand where to compensate by beefingup your skills or hiring a good team.

3.Learn from failure:

Don’t view failure as the end. When you fail, look for lessons you can learn and then move forward. Understanding your mistakes, and knowing how to avoid them in the future, can
improve your confidence.

4.Focus on positivity:

Negativity can drain you and drag on your confidence level. If you want
confidence, focus on the positive things around you. you can write out lessons you’ve learned as one of the ways to stay positive. Here’s an example of a friend who listed down 29 lessons learned.

5.Change your posture:

You might be surprised to discover that you can improve your confidence simply by changing the way you hold yourself. Practice good posture you and will automatically feel better. As you portray confidence, you will start to feel it. Here’s a TED talk that will do the trick Amy Cuddy did a great job of demonstrating how our body language determines how we feel, which in part determines who we become. Towards the end of the talk, she provides examples of “power poses”: easy stances you can mimic for a minute or two before going into a meeting or phone call that literally enhance your feelings of confidence. I can attest that they work.

6.Interact positively with others:
Smiling and appropriate eye contact with others can help you feel better about life and yourself, and also project a confident image to others.

7.Take care of yourself:

When you feel healthy and alert, you are more likely to feel confident and capable. Exercise, get the right amount of sleep, and eat properly, and you’ll feel better and more confident. Be prepared: I recently gave a presentation to a group. The fact that I prepared ahead of time and was ready allowed me to feel confident. The more you prepare, whether it’s for an important meeting or whether it’s ahead of a launch, the more confident you’ll feel.

Moral support is a very important part of beefing up your confidence always confide in someone associating that can help you feel better about yourself. Opening up about your fears and feelings will not only make you feel better but it will give you another view of how other people see you and hearing someone tell you that you can do something can give you that one extra nudge into doing something. Sometimes attempting something alone may be over whelming so you may try to find a partner that may motivate you, {you’ve got to choose a positive attitude } a good example is jogging, when you feel lazy to go jogging your partner will call you and expect to see you at your jogging spot this will help you in getting started in whatever project you want to indulge in. Always consider the fact that if it can be done by others you as a person can also do it, it only requires for you to take one single step to begin a journey and it only gets easier as you move along. Need more? here are 13 kick-ass ways to boost confidence

Have you been faced with something you needed confidence to overcome, how did you go about it?

Think Positive, Think Different.

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