2 Ways To Boost Your Confidence

Confidence is critical for your success. Whilst you can achieve some of your goals with limited or fluctuating confidence, to achieve your biggest goals and dreams, confidence is crucial to help you face your problems and fears, and to keep going when things don’t go as planned!

There are all kinds of strategies, ways of thinking, patterns of behaviour and practical tips for improving your life and feeling better about yourself, but they won’t be much use if the foundation isn't there. That foundation is the real and authentic you. The ‘you’ that you know deep down you are. When you know who you truly are, you live more authentically. When you’re trying to live how other people want you to live, you spend your life trying to meet their expectations. This can have significant impacts on your confidence, as you’re not living in line with who you are. It takes confidence to be yourself in today’s world, and being yourself creates confidence – it’s a positive cycle.

Here are two ways to help you build your confidence and live your life more authentically:

1. Get to know your values

Personal values are a big passion of mine and I’m constantly reviewing my life and my values to see how they’re aligning. I’ve found that they’re one of the most important things that someone can know about themselves and are vital to building and achieving genuine unbreakable inner confidence. Your values can be buried deep inside you, right at the very core of who you are; and they’re the building blocks, the foundations and cornerstones for who you truly are.

A value is something in yourself, in others or in the world that’s most important to you, and can include things like: what you enjoy doing, work and career, family, relationships, where you enjoy being, personal achievement, service to others or freedom.

Why is it that some people and situations leave you feeling angry, frustrated, demotivated or deflated? It’s because one or more of your values is being denied or suppressed or the situation is in conflict with one of your highest values – and you experience that as a negative experience because it’s denying a fundamental part of who you are.

Conversely, when you’re in a situation or surrounded by people that make you feel really alive, amazing or buzzing, you’re living in a time when one or more of your values are being met and honoured.

Your values are uniquely yours. No two people will have the exact same set of values. You can have absolute confidence in your values, because they’re always there. When you get to know your values, you can start to make choices that align with them and adjust your life around them. It’s so simple and it feels amazing because all that really means is that you’re allowing who you are to live in the real world.

2. Exercise the muscle

Confidence is a muscle, and like any muscle, the more you exercise it, the bigger and stronger it becomes. But if you neglect it, it will shrink and become weaker. The problem is that unlike your biceps or glutes, which are easy to see, your confidence muscle can be harder to find.

How do you develop and build up your biceps or firm up your glutes? By doing exercises that are designed to work that muscle over a period of time until you see the results you were looking for.

It’s the same approach to building your confidence. We normally have more confidence when we’re doing the things that we have experience with and have a good idea of what we need to do, or we know that the likely consequences of getting it wrong won’t be significant, but when we’re trying something new or we fear the consequences of us getting it wrong are greater, our confidence may be low, if we have any at all!

It's easier to think that we can build our confidence by doing the things that we know we can do well, but that approach generally comes from a position of fear, and ultimately it ends up lowering our confidence as we continually put off the things that are holding us back.

Are you the kind of person that doesn’t take many risks, who goes through each day doing what needs to be done and doing it well, but not really stretching yourself? Do you sometimes talk yourself out of doing something because it’s too scary or because you think to yourself ”I’m not good enough”; ”that’s not who I am”; or ”I don’t really want it anyway”?

This type of person lives within what they know and what keeps them safe and comfortable. They spend their lives living in their ‘comfort zone’. The fewer risks they take, the less confident they need to be and so the less confident they become.

To work your confidence muscle, you need to be prepared to take risks – big or small. You need to be willing to stretch yourself in an unfamiliar direction, to try something new or try something in a slightly different way. You need to open yourself up to the possibilities around you and push yourself to increase what you know, what you do and who you are. The more open you are to risk, opportunity and possibility, the more confident you need to be, and so the more confidence you’ll develop. That’s your confidence muscle.

The question is, what are you going to do to exercise your confidence muscle?