10 Tips to Help Build Self Confidence

Self-confidence provides the foundation for
a happy and fulfilled life.

It helps us achieve goals. It enables us to feel comfortable in our own skin and in relationships with others. Without self-confidence, life’s challenges can leave us feeling stuck, frustrated, anxious and even depressed.

Confidence isn’t something we are necessarily born with. We may have had experiences in life that have undermined our confidence in certain areas, such as relationships, work or self-esteem. A confident business person can have difficulty building an intimate relationship, or a parent can fear not being good enough, to return to work. We all need to work on developing self-confidence, in some area in our life.

The good news is, with a bit of effort and guidance you can build the confidence you need to; succeed at work, enjoy a loving relationship or simply increase your self-esteem. Confidence can help you regain your motivation, to do all those things you’ve been wanting to do, but found yourself avoiding.

We’ve provided 10 handy tips and reminders below, to support your journey in growing confidence.

10 Tips for Building Self Confidence

1. Maintain Self-Respect: Respect is a primary building block for confidence. Become aware of how you speak to yourself, too often we have an inner critic ready to judge negatively. Make a concentrated effort to replace your inner critic with respectful acceptance of your mistakes and supportive recognition of your successes.

2. Mistakes are gifts for Learning: Remember we all make mistakes. Beating yourself up about them drains your energy. Ask yourself what can I learn from this that will be helpful for me in future. Praise yourself for your attempt to learn.

3. Small Steps are More Valuable: When we are trying to improve our life many people mistakenly think only big steps will do it. So you ignore all the small steps you make. Learn to recognise and praise yourself for the smallest steps and you’ll find the big ones become smaller and more achievable.

4. Discover Your Values: When we live life according to our personal values our confidence and happiness blooms. Make a colourful poster of 20-30 personal values that make you feel good and inspired when you live by them. Post it on your wall to remind you this is you.

5. Set Small Goals: It’s great to dream and have big goals, but it’s really important to break them down into manageable steps. When steps are too big, you might find yourself avoiding doing anything. Make the initial steps small and easy, and remember to congratulate yourself, on each one you achieve, along the way.

6. Positive encouragement: Always respect your efforts. Even if you don’t get the result you are looking for respect your effort and explore what can be learned from the situation.

7. You are what you think: Huge amounts of research indicate that positive thoughts about ourselves and the life around us have a considerable impact on how we are able to get more satisfaction, fulfilment and enjoyment from life. Look out for the things that are good and you will feel good.

8. Change takes time: As you progress it is crucial to keep reminding yourself that change takes time. Notice and value all your small steps along the way and see how your confidence in what you are achieving can strengthen and increase as time progresses

9. Employ Gratitude: When we are grateful for what already exists we create a hugely powerful positive energy which nurtures self-confidence. Make an effort to notice 10 things you are grateful for about you everyday and see how your confidence grows.

10. Never Give Up: The key to confidence and success is keeping going. Research shows that people who have achieved confidence and fulfilment have held the belief that no matter what happens, they won’t give up. So tell yourself this: “I will keep trying until I succeed”. If you hold this is mind your success is just a matter of putting in effort and maintaining patience with time.

What Can I Do When Self-Help Doesn’t Work?

Still feel Stuck? Self-confidence strategies can be very helpful, however, sometimes old patterns in our life keep us feeling stuck, despite all our efforts at self-help. In these situations, counselling and life-coaching can help you out of the stuckness so you can move forward, more quickly, towards your goals. If despite your efforts, you find the changes you want aren’t happening, try finding out how counselling and life coaching can help you.

Click here to learn how counselling and coaching can help: Self Confidence Coaching

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