Confidence is extremely important no matter what you do in life. Not only do you need confidence in your ability to perform but also in who you are as a person. I personally believe that there are two different type of confidence, situational and internal. In the blog I will explain what they are and how you can improve both.
Situational Confidence
This is type of confidence which most people struggle with. It’s essentially how confident you feel when performing a specific task. Every single person has this confidence in at least one task, think about it. It could be tying your shoelaces, talking to a close friend or the ability to go for a walk. The reason why situational confidence is surprising easy to build is because the answer is simple. You just must practice. No matter what the task is if you repeatedly go through the same process then you will eventually get better at whatever it is your doing. Let’s say its public speaking, the first time you may do it you might feel terrified, but if you practice with smaller crowds then and slowly build it up then you’ll feel more confident in your ability to speak to people. The way I like to think about it is situational confidence is like a muscle, the more you exercise it the stronger it will get. I’m sure you know people who complain that they’re out of shape and they never exercise or eat healthy, then you think ‘well of course you’re not healthy, you’re not working for it!’. The exact same concept applies for situational confidence, if you don’t try and push yourself it will never grow. Lots of people reading this might be looking for a quick fix to make them feel better or push them in the right direction but that’s not going to happen. The only advice I actually have for you that will truly make a difference to you is go and do what you’re uncomfortable with. Things won’t work out perfectly and they’re not supposed to but with time you’ll get better at whatever it is you want to improve.
Internal Confidence
If you’re looking to build your confidence overall, then what you’re trying to build is internal confidence. This is infinitely more useful than situational confidence and every single successful person has it. Internal confidence is when no matter what it is you must do you feel confident in doing so. This doesn’t mean that you don’t feel nervous, but it does mean that you will always put yourself forward for new opportunities without the fear of failure. There a few different ways that you can approach building this but by far the most useful is self-awareness. Now this is quite a large thing to start working upon and if you need any help with this then check out my free self-awareness workbook here or take my free self-awareness test.
If you want to improve your self-awareness right now go grab a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. On the left-hand side write down all the good things about you, things your good at and accomplishments in your life, then on the right-hand side write down all your bad qualities, what you’re not good and any failures you’ve had in life. The likelihood is anything on the left-hand side you will already be quite confident with and most problems you face will come from the right-hand side. Before even deciding what you want to do about it, I want you to fully accept every single thing on that page. I also want you to accept that there’s a good chance you might be wrong about some things on that page. I now want you to have the guts to face your weaknesses and show someone all the things on the right-hand side. By doing this you’re stepping away from your flaws and showing that you’re not going to let them hold you back. Accepting all your flaws isn’t an easy process but it is necessary. If you think you can pretend that they don’t exist, they will come to bite you in the bum, and you’ll regret not accepting them.
One thing that I then want you to focus on once you have a good idea of who you are is your perspective of life. This will be the determining factor of how you will see new opportunities. If at this point you still don’t put yourself in uncomfortable positions due to fear of other people’s opinion or due to failure, then you need a reality check. The chances of you being alive right now are minuscule. You’re on the only planet in existence which contains life in such a huge universe, and you can live your life to the fullest. Yet, you are consciously deciding that someone’s opinion who is also human and has made just as many mistakes as you, is going to stop you from experiencing something new or living a life that you want. Does that seem reasonable? Because that’s the reality. It might scare to think how much time you’ve wasted in the past because of other people’s opinion, I know I have, but the only thing we can do is learn from it and move forward.