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“Nerves and butterflies are fine – they’re a physical sign that you’re mentally ready and eager. You have to get the butterflies to fly in formation, that’s the trick.” ~Steve Bull
Performing in front of an audience is one of the scariest things you can do, and yet some people make their living doing just that.
Do you imagine that they are perfectly confident and never feel scared?
If you think that, you’d be wrong.
I doubt that anyone wakes up one day and is confident from that day forth.
Self-confidence is the belief that you can handle whatever comes up and that you deserve good things and happiness in your life. Confidence is an essential part of happiness
Building your confidence can be done in many ways. Here are 3 tips to get you started.
1. Look at what you’ve already achieved in your lifetime.
- Make a list of your achievements.
- Pat yourself on the back and accept compliments from others.
- Refer to your list of achievements when you begin to feel down.
Give yourself huge credit if you’ve finished school, raised a family, managed your rent or mortgage for years, completed some task that at first you thought was hard, grew tomatoes, stood up and won against a company or person who was trying to defraud you, overcame an illness, reached your weight loss goals, found your way when you were lost, learned another language and so on.
Many of us take our achievements for granted, and thereby miss a key ingredient of self-confidence.
The beauty of acknowledging your achievements is you have proof of what you can do, and a reason to believe that you can do it again.
2. Make a list of your strengths.
Dwell on and build on these strengths
Get started by looking back at #1. The achievements you accomplished were likely related to strengths of character, behavior, and skills.
3. Take control of your thoughts.
When your mind begins to drift to self-doubt, pull yourself back with positive self-talk about the things you noted in #1 and #2.
That inner critic is alive and well in all of us, but you are in charge. You may well have to get rough with your thoughts in order to keep them in line. But it’s worth it. Your happiness depends on gaining and keeping your confidence.
[See Wednesday’s post for more tips]
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