Four ways to build self-confidence

Self-confidence is the positive feeling and attitude towards one’s skills and abilities. This is usually brought about by knowing one’s strengths and weaknesses, accepting them, creating a positive image of one’s self, and based on this, setting realistic goals for one’s self.

Self-confidence is an important tool for one’s psychology and health. It enhances a person’s relationship with others and themselves as they are focused on building the relationships in their lives rather than focusing on “not being good enough”.

Unfortunately, not a lot of people have a good level of self-confidence. Past experiences, background, environment, and some other reasons are major causes of this lack of confidence in one’s self.

And fortunately, self-confidence can be built up. Here are four ways to do so:

Develop Your Competence And Skills

Honestly one of the best ways to boost your confidence is to be great at what you do — like, really great.

And the only way to be great at what you do is to develop yourself through learning.

One of the things that encourage self-confidence is excellence in what a person does. To build your self-confidence, one of the things you should do is to develop your skills, abilities, and competencies.

So be open to learning, and keep your heart open every single day.

Surround Yourself With Positive People

One of the major contributions to your self-confidence is a person’s environment. And one of the key elements of a person’s environment is the people. Pay close attention to how the people [especially those around you on a daily basis] make you feel.

Do they make you feel good? Do they encourage, praise, commend, and honour you? You should stick around to this set of people. On the other hand, do the people around you make you feel bad? Maybe by making fun of you? Insulting you emotionally, gaslighting you. etc

By intentionally being conscious of the people you let come around you, you’ll be managing the communication in your life-limiting it to an uplifting attitude from others.

Do The Right Thing Always

According to Forbes, “most confident people live by a value system and make their decisions based on that value system, even when it’s hard and not necessarily in their best interest, but in the interest of the greater good.”

Basically, if a person recognizes and adopts a value system, making their decisions based on those values would build them up into confident people.

Stop Comparing Yourself To Others

If you’re fond of comparing yourself with others — whether it’s comparing your social media posts, grades, net worth, job, relationships, family, talent, wardrobe, economic status, etc — you need to stop doing so right away!

One of the major contributors to low self-confidence is comparing oneself to others. Truthfully, we are all made up of weaknesses as well as strengths. However, the problem of confidence comes to play when we fail to realize that we all are unique in our different ways and hence, should never compare ourselves to others.

Instead, zoom in on your strengths — build them up until they become sources of confidence. On the other hand, manage your weaknesses [if they can be managed], otherwise, it is also important to accept the weaknesses within us which are unchangeable.

In case the points mentioned in the previous paragraphs seem too ambiguous, here’s a simplified summary of building your self-confidence: be thankful for the good things in your life like your wins rather than the wins of others.