Building self-confidence is beneficial for both physical and mental well-being. Confidence is a skill anyone can learn, and self-assured individuals often report increased happiness, success, and resiliency. Learning how to gain confidence starts with stepping outside your comfort zone, practicing positive self-talk, and celebrating progress.
What Is Confidence?
Confidence is the overarching sense one can believe and trust in themselves, complete with themes of competence, self-love, self-worth, and self-esteem. Someone confident in who they are feels secure, and learning to gain confidence is one of the best gifts you can give yourself.
Confidence Vs. Self-Esteem
Confidence is a general state of feeling capable and skillful, allowing individuals to feel assured in their abilities. Confidence can be specific to certain domains, such as at work or in a relationship. Self-esteem is more about how one values and perceives their worth. Both confidence and self-esteem can overlap and reinforce one another.
Confidence Vs. Arrogance
A confident person believes in their abilities and knows where they excel. Arrogance also includes themes of confidence but entails a sense of entitlement or superiority over others. Unlike self-confident individuals, arrogant people often devalue others to feel good about themselves.
Why Building Confidence Is Important
A desire to boost confidence often comes from wanting to move from feeling small to believing in yourself. Maybe you’ve grown tired of feeling insecure or incompetent and seek self-empowerment. Whatever the case, confidence can allow you to take necessary risks to improve your life and well-being.
Below are reasons why building confidence is important:
- Increased happiness: Feeling confident can help you feel better in your body and aligned with your strengths, thus increasing your happiness.
- Improved physical and mental health: Confidence can coincide with practicing better self-care, helping to boost physical and mental well-being.
- Higher rates of success: Confident people may be more persistent in seeking opportunities, sometimes resulting in more success.
- Increased resiliency: Confidence can build a sense of resilience to stress, which may improve your overall health.
- Easier life transitions: Confidence can simplify managing natural ebbs and flows as you progress through life.
What Keeps People From Being Confident?
Gaining confidence is not straightforward, and various variables can impact your self-assuredness. For instance, mental health issues, relationship dynamics, trauma, intergenerational family patterns, and external stressors can impede the development of self-confidence.
Below are the downsides of a lack of confidence:
- Social anxiety: People who lack confidence may excessively worry about what others think about them, sometimes manifesting as social anxiety.
- Avoidance behaviors: Low self-confidence can lead people to isolate themselves and engage in avoidance behaviors.
- Neglecting self-care: Prioritizing yourself when you lack confidence can be challenging. Unfortunately, neglecting self-care often worsens both your physical and mental health.
- Increased depression: A lack of confidence can exacerbate or cause symptoms of depression.
- Missed opportunities: Lacking confidence can sometimes coincide with stagnation in life because people avoid taking beneficial risks.
- Feelings of loneliness: Those lacking confidence may feel disconnected from others, further magnifying feelings of loneliness and isolation.
- Relationship challenges: People with low self-confidence may fear rejection or confirmation of their negative self-beliefs. As a result, they often use defense mechanisms, such as projection, to push others away.
- Substance use: Some individuals may use drugs and alcohol to relieve feelings of inadequacy or low self-esteem rather than make positive improvements.
15 Tips for How to Build Confidence
Identifying how to increase confidence can seem daunting, but slow and steady changes can go a long way when changing your self-esteem. Focus on things you can control, like self-care and self-talk, to take hold of your challenges and push forward. Building confidence starts inside but eventually feeds into your life, improving your relationships, success, and more.
Here are 15 tips for building confidence:
1. Develop Healthy Relationships
People are social creatures, and our moods often reflect on the quality of our relationships. Start by assessing your current dynamics with others when learning how to build your confidence. Aim to surround yourself with confident people who value their own growth and can be emotionally present for you.
2. Step Outside Your Comfort Zone
One of the best ways to build confidence is to seek novelty and try things outside your comfort zone. Doing so naturally exposes you to new stimuli, perspectives, and potential relationships. You also learn to handle scary things, fueling and empowering your self-esteem and assuredness.
3. Give Yourself Credit
Take a deep breath and reflect on when you stepped outside your comfort zone and into the arena. What matters most is that you tried, even if you failed. Stop, give yourself credit, and recognize your efforts. Consider writing down your achievements and displaying them somewhere. Seeing a tangible representation of your success can greatly improve confidence.
4. Set Short & Long-Term Goals
You can also increase confidence by establishing short and long-term goals for yourself. Achieving goals is inspiring and can help you pursue a life congruent with your values. Be realistic, but also focus on what matters most to you. Working through goals also provides deeper insight into your strengths and weaknesses.
5. Visualize Your Success
You can embody the feeling of success when you imagine yourself achieving your dreams. Close your eyes and envision yourself succeeding. Feel free to practice this often to build your confidence and hope for the future.
7. Practice Positive Self-Talk
Positive self-talk is one of the most important confidence-building tips. Your subconscious recognizes any negative things you say or think about yourself. Make healthy self-talk a part of your daily routine through positive affirmations. For example, tell yourself you are proud of what you did that day. Don’t be your own enemy and bully.
8. Increase Your Self-Care
Improving self-confidence requires taking better care of yourself. Self-care means intentionally fulfilling your needs and can be emotional, physical, spiritual, and interpersonal. Consider writing down a list of tangible activities that make you feel better about yourself. Then, commit to routinely practicing these things in your daily routine.
9. Stand Up for Yourself
People with low confidence and low self-esteem usually struggle with saying “no” because they want to please others or avoid conflict. Nothing is more empowering than saying no to something when “old you” would definitely have said yes. You and those around you may need time to adjust to these changes, but the outcome is worth the effort.
10. Stop Comparing Yourself to Others
Instilling confidence in yourself is impossible when you constantly compare yourself to others. You will never feel successful or proud if you look to others for self-worth. Stop trying to be something you’re not. Be honest, be true, and be authentic.
11. Follow Through & Track Your Progress
Another key to confidence is holding yourself accountable. For example, track your progress in real time when setting a goal. Set appropriate checkpoints, modifying them as needed. Balance honoring your needs while pushing yourself to achieve and succeed.
12. Be Honest With Yourself
Admitting you need help is good because it allows room for growth, expanding your knowledge, and improving overall confidence. Asking for support is a humbling experience and can show you exactly how to gain confidence in yourself.
13. Do Things That Bring Joy
One of the best ways to build confidence is to develop a loving relationship with yourself. Prioritize joy during this journey. You deserve to feel good in life and pursue happiness and love. Write down activities or small parts of the day that bring you joy, making an effort to prioritize them.
14. See Failures as Opportunities
Learning from past mistakes and harnessing failures into opportunities for growth is a natural confidence boost. Even the best leaders report long histories of regrets or flops. Try to pinpoint how to learn from past issues when ruminating over them. Think about how you’ve grown and what you can do differently.
15. Care for Your Body
The mind-body connection is powerful–looking after your body is another way to build confidence. For example, exercise can make you feel happier while getting enough sleep refreshes and recharges you. Going to the doctor and taking your medicine helps you feel proactive with your overall health. Any actions to improve your physical well-being can translate into increased confidence.
How to Find a Therapist to Help You Build Confidence
Therapy can offer helpful tips to build confidence and self-confidence skills when you need a boost. Mental health professionals can teach you how to become more confident and address underlying issues contributing to your challenges. You can use an online therapist directory to find the right therapist to explore healthy changes moving forward.
Final Thoughts
Confidence is an ongoing journey. Avoid confusing confidence with conceit or luck–you can choose to be confident and pursue things that make you feel better about yourself. With that, re-evaluating something that jeopardizes your confidence is worth the effort.
How to Build Confidence Infographics
