How To Become More Confident
Confidence - who wouldn’t want a portion of that admirable character trait. Confidence makes you look attractive to people around you. It helps you stand your ground in precarious situations. It makes you believe in your personal values. Such an attitude is always impressive. Confidence, the Holy Grail of achievement and success, is definitely worth having.
Confidence is desirable
If you feel that you could better yourself, you might wonder: how do I gain or improve my confidence skills? Here’s the good news: soft skills, habits and patterns of thinking can be moulded through training. You’re not just stuck with your own character forever if you want to change it. Ultimately it all comes down to your mindset. Let’s have a look at how you can influence your mindset to become more confident. Keep on reading and I’ll reveal to you later another great skill that can be derived from confidence to make your life even more optimised and effective.
Real life Examples
We all know what it means to lack confidence, that situation we’re in when we feel weak. I remember being new in a role as an employee, and feeling terrified of the big office meetings, something you experience especially at the beginning of your career as a young person. When speaking up or asking a question you are always afraid to appear stupid or uninformed, so you prefer to keep silent and take it very personal if things don’t go the way you intended.
Maybe you can recall being scared to speak up in public, on a bus or train when witnessing a terrible quarrel between two strangers and not having the courage to tell them off or step in and calm them down. I remember such an event in my life very well and I can clearly understand the stress and discomfort that we find ourselves in unexpectedly.
I also read about an incident with a friend of mine who witnessed a pickpocket on the train stealing from people and no one was reacting although they could clearly see his action. My friend felt the responsibility to call the thief out. Later he shared his thoughts on social media which I was thankful for as it made me think. And here I am, writing about confidence and courage years later.
The lack of confidence derives from our feeling that we’re not in control of our impulses and the unpredictable situation we find ourselves in. The fear of being misunderstood or socially ridiculed also plays a big role. It's a terrible experience to go through and that’s why you might ask the right question: why are certain people naturally confident and untroubled, and you are not?
Well, some people are just born or raised with certain characteristics that will make their situation in later life much easier. But don’t worry! What you don’t have yourself, you can acquire through the effort of your will and personal training. It’s the same with confidence: it can be learned! But in order to learn, you need to understand what confidence is. Let’s break it down to figure out the exact steps on how to gain confidence.
Gaining Experience
Confidence doesn’t come from nothing. At the fundamental level it’s a primary instinct, a trust in life that we obtain in childhood when our mother nourishes us and the household surroundings seemingly conspire to help us live and flourish. Most of us have developed that instinct. But in some cases the childhood experiences might not have provided you with this positive life instinct. In this case you will have to dive deep into your soul through the personal layers of darkness, doing a lot of healing work to discover and gain that deepest, natural and innate trust in life. That’s the basis of all confidence.
As you grow over the years, you gain more experience which is the second source to derive confidence from. Everyone has some degree of confidence in themselves, because it comes naturally with growing experience. It’s the unknown which makes us shiver with fear. But once we get familiar with something, we become more comfortable with it, loosen up and begin to trust the process. That’s confidence, and all you need to do to gain that state of the mind is to make enough experiences.
Through growing experience you get to know your personal strengths and weaknesses. You start to recognise that you’re passionate about some things and that passion makes you better at doing those things. Slowly you get to know yourself and learn about your strengths and weaknesses until you come to a point where you can acknowledge that you’re just a human being that isn’t perfect and never had to be perfect. This thought alone lets you be more at ease with yourself and you stop trying to impress everyone at all times.
Nobody is perfect
You also become aware of other people’s imperfections which helps you put things in perspective: you might have problems, but other people have even worse problems, so you’re not in such a bad situation after all. This realisation shall not make you gloat over other people’s misfortunes, but it shall let you be grateful for who you are and what you have right here and right now. This mindset will make you more confident.
Confidence Is Knowledge
With experience you don’t just gain practical knowledge, but you can also use your thinking to continue informing yourself about the world around you. With knowledge comes power and confidence. Knowing stuff makes you look more competent in discussions. And if you are opinionated, you will feel more secure with what you have to say. That’s confidence! If you want to gain more confidence, go, read more and inform yourself.
Risk-Taking
With your growing experience and knowledge you become more willing to take risks in life, recognising that perfect safety is never possible and never guaranteed. You can’t hide to stay safe. That’s not a life. That’s a self-imposed prison in your mind. At some point you need to take some risks to discover new opportunities or learn something new. Developing that willingness to take risks in the outside world will reward you with confidence. Only confident people know intuitively that at some point you need to take a jump, no matter how well you have prepared. The risk is always there, and the quicker you embrace a healthy amount of uncertainty, the more trust you’ll develop for the process. And that will make you confident.
Responsibility & Freedom
I hope you can slowly recognise that life experience, knowledge, and the awareness of uncertainty will imbue you with a strong feeling of responsibility. It’s in taking responsibility where you'll find confidence. It’s in taking responsibility of something or someone willingly where you discover the meaning of life. That will give you confidence by default. Just pick your weight to carry and the confidence will reveal itself to carry your burden with you.
In personal responsibility you also discover personal freedom. The right to freedom is also the right to taking full responsibility of your actions, speech and thoughts. Freedom comes with personal responsibility and risks. I cannot stress it enough. If you want full protection, you don’t want freedom. Protection and safety have their place in life, but so do uncertainty and risk. You need to have the courage to balance these two aspects of reality. The process of finding it out will provide you with courage - and confidence is just another word for courage.
Confidence or courage doesn’t represent the lack of fear. Courage is knowing how to deal with fear and to do your thing despite the fear. Confidence is the courage to be and live on your own terms, knowing life and knowing yourself well enough. Confidence is the courage that results in self-determination. You mature into it by allowing yourself to have experiences with the world, taking calculated risks within the context of your own capacity.
Confidence & Balance
In order to take risks, to trust the process, to achieve confidence and courage, you need to bring a healthy dose of lightheartedness into your life. You can’t be confident if you worry all the time. You have to trust the process and know it’s not all about you. Let life unfold and just be a part of it. Enjoy the process. Lightheartedness will prevent you from overthinking. Of course you need to think and gain as much knowledge as possible. But even in thinking you can exaggerate.
Overthinking and dwelling on stuff long and too intensely only makes you hesitate and procrastinate. If you want to be confident and make the decisions you want to make, set yourself a limit to your thinking and planning processes, and then once you reach the personal threshold, make the decision with the limited amount of information you have. That’s what it means to take risks and embrace uncertainty. That’s how you proceed in life and gain confidence. Find the sweet point between thinking and acting. Don’t overthink, but also don’t overact. Find the balance.
Everything that I have just mentioned takes us to the revelation of the one skill that you can derive from confidence to make your life more effective and purposeful. Are you ready for the disclosure? Here it is: the other character trait that goes very well with confidence to achieve success in life is... DECISIVENESS. Decisiveness is the ability to make decisions quickly and effectively. If you are decisive, you have to be confident. What is decisiveness and how do you derive it from confidence?
Decisiveness
Decisiveness comes from a constructive mindset. It’s the inner impulse that pushes outward so that you seek to put in practice what you envisioned in your mind. Decisiveness is a drive to action, a compulsion to impact the environment around you. With decisiveness you don’t want to keep your decision in your mind, you want to push it out into the world.
When it comes to making a decision, it’s easy to get stuck while thinking, planning, and considering. However, decisiveness is solution-oriented and strives for action. It wants to make the change visible, even force it through, when no solution presents itself organically.
To become truly decisive you need to balance the opposites: on the one hand you don’t want to lose yourself in too much planning, as this will make you too stiff and passive. On the other hand, you don’t want to be totally spontaneous with no clear structure or strategy, as this reduces your chances to act intelligently. You need the best of both worlds and develop a template for action that stays flexible enough for you to adapt as the process unfolds.
Here’s one little practical hack on how you could improve your decisiveness skills: when facing a decision, instead of working your way up from the present position, take your end goal as your vision for action and then move backwards, figuring out the essential steps in between that would bring you closer to your goal. This will hopefully prevent you from losing yourself in too many little details that come along with the process. You have to find the right balance between thinking and committing to action. That’s where your willingness to take risk and confidence will turn out to be very crucial.
In a nutshell
Decisiveness and confidence are character skills that you can learn and practise. Don’t worry if you don’t have them straight away. They can be developed if you give yourself enough space to experiment, make mistakes, and have experiences. That’s what life is for. You grow by getting to know life, and not by constantly protecting yourself from changes. Your best life is outside your comfort zone, and that’s where you’ll find your confidence.
To sum it up, you gain confidence from the following:
- your primary instinct which is trust in life;
- your experience over the years;
- knowing your strengths and weaknesses and using them to your advantage;
- awareness that no one is perfect and everyone has their own problems;
- through your own knowledge and the research you do;
- acceptance of uncertainty and risk-taking where necessary;
- deep sense of personal responsibility for your life and the surroundings;
- courage to speak up and express your opinion where it’s crucial;
- finally, by developing and cultivating the skill of decisiveness which is the ability to make decisions quickly and effectively.
You shouldn’t be surprised that it all comes down to personal development and that the more you are, the more you can still become. The most important thing is to have trust in yourself, to never doubt your self-worth, and to keep on moving in whatever you do.
BLOGGER: HUBI
