Having great self-confidence is one of the best ways to achieve happiness and success in life. There are many reasons people have low self confidence; maybe you were bullied at school, or your parents divorced and you blame yourself, or maybe you had harsh parents or friends who criticized you more often then they should have. Or perhaps you lost your job, or failed at a project, or didn’t perform well at school.
Whatever the reason for your low self confidence, it’s okay, but now is the time to move forward and become a happier and better person by gaining your self confidence back. Here are a few ways you can gain the self confidence you deserve. Your self confidence is there, hidden inside, you just need to access it. Here are some great ways to do that.
1 Take better care of your body.
When you are fit and in shape, you will naturally feel good about yourself.
This means eliminating poisons like food additives, processed foods, artificial sugars, high fructose corn syrup, and other poisons from your food.
It means not buying 99% of the things in the grocery store which contain these poisons.
It also means exercising regularly even if it’s just a few pushups a day or a nice 10 minute walk a few times per week if you are presently sedentary.
2 Stop comparing yourself to other people.
By comparing yourself to no one but yourself, you will improve your self image and help train your thoughts to be more positive toward yourself.
This is great for your wallet too, because there is no need to keep up with the joneses when you don’t need to have something better or as good as the next person.
3 Help someone in need
One great way is to do some volunteering for a cause you care about, or at church. This will be a huge boost to your confidence, because it helps get you out of the rut of thinking what people should do for you because now you are in power helping others!
This in turn helps to remove the victim mindset which is one of the culprits of a low self confidence. When you are helping others, it does several things:
It helps give you perspective, by seeing others in need it can help you realize how much you really have. After all, if you can help them then in at least some way you are better off then they are.
It helps to remove feelings of depression and a victim mentality that is a result of a circular way of thinking in which negative thoughts beget more negative thought and eventually spiral out of control. By helping others, both consciously and subconsciously you are training your mind to believe that you have power, you are not weak, and you have strength.
It provides much needed interpersonal biofeedback. When you help others, others will often (although not always) be grateful, and even the slightest hint of gratefulness for what you have done for them will cause both psychological and physiological changes in your body which will help to physically and literally fuel your self confidence. Without going into the deep science of it, for example, a burst of endorphins are released, which in turn causes positively unavoidable positive psychological reinforcement, which in turn gives you feeling of strength and power and happiness, which in turn reinforces and fuels your self confidence.
Even when others do not provide much or any biofeedback, still by helping others, by placing yourself in the position of power, you will fuel your internal strength and reinforce your self confidence. Since you are not a victim, but a provider, you are no longer thinking about what others can do for you, but what you can do for others, and this has a profound positive impact on your emotional security and self confidence. Moreover, the more you help others, the stronger these feelings and hence your self confidence will become.
4 Remember that failure is good. See it as a learning opportunity
Failure is a good thing, it is what builds character and what helps us to learn what works and what doesn’t. By remembering that failure is not bad but good, you won’t feel down and depressed when you don’t succeed the first time.
No one really succeeds the first time except in rare cases which is just a stroke of luck. Many businesses did not start out doing what they do today, because they took many failures before they found what worked. These failures helped to make the business strong and grow.
This works in your personal life too. You can try many times, and if it does not work out, it’s okay. Now you have learned something. You don’t learn much from success but you do learn a lot from failures.
Don’t be afraid to try something just because it might fail. It’s okay, it’s good actually, because when you fail you learn a lot about yourself and what really matters, and you will be able to succeed even better when you find what does work.
It’s not over when you fail, it’s only over when you quit. Fail a hundred times, and then the 101st time might be a success.
It doesn’t really matter though, because if you live only for the successes then you won’t be living very much of your life, because failures are also a part of life, and failures usually will greatly exceed the number of successes.
For example, no athlete starts out at the top. They must start at the bottom, persevere and fail day after day, until they grow strong enough to become the best after many years of hard, grueling work and many failures. If an athlete were to try and then after a few failures and a bit of pain just quit, then they could never be the best. Only the ones who stick in there succeed.
Athletes recognize and understand that failure is the path to success. You should understand and realize this in your own life too. One might even say that the road to success is paved with failures, and there is no other medium to pave it with.
If you want to get to the finish line of success, you must encounter many failures to get there. The failures are good things. Failure is only bad when you quit. So keep pressing forward no matter what. Don’t let failures get you down. Let failures make you stronger.
Learn to live and enjoy life during failures, too. When you stop seeing failure as a bad thing, life becomes that much happier.
5 Accept your weaknesses and focus on your strengths
Your weaknesses are OK. By accepting that you don’t have to be the best in everything, and that there will always be weaknesses, you can change your thoughts so that you are thinking about how to maximize what you are good at rather of thinking about how you are not good at things.
Focus on your strengths, and work on those! When you feel better about yourself, your weaknesses will improve naturally too.
6 Be a great friend to others
Many times it can be difficult if you have low self confidence because often you are also more concerned about not having many friends or why your friends don’t reach out to you more. This in turn causes you to feel bad, which causes your self-confidence to lower further, which causes your friends to reach out to you less. You need to end this circular downward spiral. It is easy to do, too.
All you need to do is stop focusing on what your friends can do for you, but rather what you can do for your friends. Similar to John F. Kennedy’s speech.
By being the proactive one and thinking about how you can be a better friend, and by being a better friend, you will be surprised when you discover that your friends will like you a lot more, you will get more friends, and then you will feel better about yourself, which will cause your friends to like you more, and will cause you to get more friends, which will make you feel even better about yourself, and so on and so forth. It is the polar opposite of the previous downward spiral, this is the upward spiral you crave! Just be a better friend and be the one who takes action, and everything will fall into place.
Moreover, when you get into a habit of being a good friend to your friends, it will naturally cause you to feel more loved, more happy, more confident, and secure in your life, because people love good friends.
7 Get in touch with God
Having a strong spiritual walk with God is probably the most important thing to gaining self-confidence. By getting close to God, God can help heal the emotional hurts and pains that are damaging your self-confidence.
By growing yourself spiritually, you can help to have a peace that goes beyond understanding that can get you through the most difficult times.
There you have it. By boosting your self confidence it will help you in all areas of your life. It will make you happier, healthier, and help you achieve what you want in life. It’s time to start living a better life!
Thank you! This post is very great, can be a life changer!