Fostering self-belief and self-confidence is an important part of growing and maturing as a person. During our lives, we’re expected to build our own self-confidence, but it’s not always that simple. Sometimes we don’t develop self-belief, or we don’t develop enough of it to be satisfied. When this happens, it’s up to us to make up the excess.
Building belief in yourself isn’t something that can be done overnight, though. It takes time, dedication, and effort to improve your own self-belief. In this article, we’ll teach you all about self-belief, how best to foster it in yourself, and the importance of keeping your confidence healthy and flourishing.
The Importance of Confidence
Confidence and self-belief are functionally the same, so we’ll be using these terms interchangeably throughout this article. Self-confidence is the ability to believe in yourself, your actions, and your abilities, even when facing adversity or opposition. Confidence and self-belief are important because they’re tied integrally to your identity; if you have no thoughts or opinions of your own, you don’t have your own identity, either.
If you don’t have an identity of your own, it will be difficult to get respect from others. When others don’t respect you, of course, your self-belief and self-worth will suffer. Unfortunately, this makes confidence a bit of a self-perpetuating cycle in both directions. This means that it’s more difficult to raise your self-confidence when it’s low, but it’s also easier to raise it when it’s already high.
When you have a decent amount of self-belief, it shows through in your actions. It will get you further in many aspects of life, such as:
- Love
- Your career
- Making friends
- Connecting with others
- Staying healthy
- Improving yourself
On the whole, when you have confidence in yourself, life is generally easier, more successful, and just smoother overall. Since you’re more or less expected to develop self-confidence by a certain age, not doing so can cause significant issues for you down the road. In the remainder of this guide, we’ll go over some of the best tips to developing self-confidence in yourself.
Change Your Mindset
People who have issues with self-confidence tend to fall into the trap of thinking negatively much of the time. One of the keys to increasing your self-belief, therefore, is to change this mindset. Instead of thinking negative things about yourself, it’s essential to think of positive things instead.
Whenever your mind falls into the pattern of thinking poorly of yourself, put it to a halt. Stop that train of thought! If you can, turn your negative observation into a positive one. It takes some practice, but if you can learn to compliment yourself every time you think something negative, you’ll find that you’ll end up noticing more of your good qualities naturally over time.
The key is to turn a criticism about yourself into a compliment. Think outside the box, or find the silver lining, so to speak. Follow the style of these examples:
- Instead of thinking, “I can’t make any friends,” tell yourself, “It’s good that I’m selective about the company I keep.”
- Instead of being self-conscious about the clothes you wear, tell yourself, “I have my own unique style.”
- Instead of worrying about how much money you make, tell yourself, “I know how to be thrifty with my money.”
Depending on what exactly you feel self-conscious about, it can be easy or difficult to come up with a creative affirmation. However, we encourage you to try anyway. Changing your mindset from a negative to a positive one is one of the first major steps towards transforming self-doubt into self-belief.
Weaknesses and Strengths
While complimenting yourself on the things you do well is an excellent way to build self-confidence, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your shortcomings will go away. While criticisms and weaknesses aren’t necessarily the same thing (the clothes you wear, for example, might be a criticism, but not a weakness), it’s equally important to know which traits of yours are which.
The difference between a criticism and a weakness lies in function. While the clothes you wear might affect how others perceive you, they don’t change who you are as a person. If you cooked for a living, for example, you would be just as good a cook while wearing white as you would be while wearing black. As such, it’s important to take criticisms with a grain of salt.
Weaknesses, on the other hand, are issues that fundamentally affect your success. For example, if you’re not particularly good at math, that could affect how eligible you would be for certain jobs. You’d have a difficult time becoming a math professor, for example. Strengths function in the same way, but from the opposite perspective: if you are good at math, you might have an easier time landing a math-related job.
It’s important to know where your strengths and weaknesses lie because they can affect your self-belief as well as your success. If you have a weakness that is keeping you from progressing in life, that can cause a hit to your self-confidence.
However, when you are aware of where your weaknesses are, you can put time into improving them or allocate yourself extra time to working around them. In the same way, when you know where your strengths are, you will know ahead of time when you will excel at something, and this can help boost your self-belief, too.
Believe in Yourself
The most efficient way to cultivate self-belief is simply to believe in yourself. Sounds easy, right? Well, for many of us, it’s really not that easy. Self-belief is not often something that can be flipped on like a switch. Instead, it takes time and practice put into reminding ourselves of what we can do and what we’re good at in order to develop a strong belief in yourself.
However, it’s important to consistently remind yourself to believe in yourself, even if you don’t entirely believe it yet. When we don’t believe in ourselves, we tend to worry too much and let our stress cloud our judgment, even if that judgment is actually sound.
When you’re in a situation where you’re questioning your self-belief, take the time to stop, pull yourself back a bit, and consider how competent you really are in what you’re doing. If you’ve never done it before, make up for your nervousness by doing research to supplement your lack of experience.
Despite our best efforts, sometimes our anxiety still gets the best of us. However, try leveling your head and restoring some equilibrium the next time it feels like you can’t believe in yourself. You might have more belief sequestered away inside of you than you think!
Accept Yourself
An integral step on the path to believing in yourself is to accept yourself. When we are young, we all go through phases of trying to fit in and trying to be well-liked. However, as we age, we learn that changing yourself to fit others’ preferences isn’t necessary. Each of us is unique, special, and admirable in our own way. No one on this Earth has any right to tell you to be anyone other than who you are.
While you are a valuable human being just the way you are, accepting yourself doesn’t mean you should abandon your aspirations towards improving yourself. You should always be setting goals towards becoming stronger, better, and more competent at various things. However, the way that you do this is entirely up to you.
In the same way, it’s crucial not to linger on and complain about your weaknesses. Instead, it’s much more useful to accept your weaknesses and work on improving them. Lingering on your weaknesses will only cause more self-doubt, and complaining about them will get you nowhere.
However, accepting yourself is sometimes easier said than done. Especially for people who regret things they’ve done and choices, they’ve made in the past, accepting yourself can feel impossible or even wrong. Doing so will open up many doors you may never have known existed, and in addition to promoting your sense of self-worth, accepting yourself can cause healing, too.
Visualize
An extremely useful tip for helping yourself to reach your goals is to visualize how and when you will reach them. Depending on how concrete and detailed our goals are, this can be easy or difficult, but it’s an important exercise to undertake nonetheless. Our goals are projections of who we are, so no matter how little or how much progress we make on them at a given time, they’re important things to both respect and pursue.
If you don’t feel like you have any goals, that’s something that you should change right away. When we have a lack of goals, we feel stagnant, useless, and frankly, just bad. If you could do anything with your life, what would you do with it? Visualize where you would be in the perfect world (don’t forget to keep things attainable, though) and visualize how you might get there, too.
Some things you might think about visualizing could be:
- Your dream job and how you might get there
- Your dream house, complete with location and furnishings
- Where and how you see yourself in ten years
- A family that you might start with the help of a significant other
When we take the time to visualize our goals, they instantly feel more attainable to us. After all, it’s easy to dream or wish for something, but if we actually take the time to plot out how we might make that dream or wish come true, it feels so much more within reach. Even if we only do this vaguely or only once, knowing how to succeed in the back of our minds can help us in strange and unexpected ways.
What’s more, visualization is unique and exceptional because it can be done in any way. For example, someone who is good at math might visualize themselves earning over 50k a year by landing a teaching tenure at a university. However, someone who’s more free-spirited and creative might imagine themselves as becoming a successful entrepreneur or artist. Plus, in a visualization, no one can tell you you’re wrong!
Superiority and Inferiority
Another important step on the journey to improving your self-belief is to stop thinking of yourself as inferior. No person on this Earth is fundamentally more valuable than you are. Some people might be better than you at chess, and other people might be less adept than you at cooking, but no human being is fundamentally superior or inferior to another. As we said before, every human being is unique, and every life is sacred and special.
As such, if you think of yourself as inferior to other people, your self-belief will reflect that mindset. It’s good to recognize that some people can do things better than you, of course, but that doesn’t mean that you’re inferior to them in any way. After all, the human condition allows constant improvement and change. If you’re worse than someone at something, the chances are that if you practice and work hard enough at it, you can change that!
In the same way, avoiding feelings of superiority is equally important. Your self-belief and self-confidence should never rise to a level where you believe you are in some way more valuable than your neighbor. While some of us do things better than others, in the end, each of us is a body controlled by a brain. Not one aspect of our identities can change that.
Body Language
Body language might not be something that immediately comes to mind when working on your self-belief since it has more to do with the body than the mind. However, physical improvements can give just as much of a boost to your self-confidence as mental improvements can. Think about it: If you suddenly lost ten or fifteen pounds, you would probably feel more confident in your appearance, right?
In the same way, changing your body language can make you feel more confident, and it can change the way that others interact with you, too. When you project a confident aura with your body language, people will defer to that, and you will come across as more confident yourself. Likewise, if you betray an unconfident posture, you will come off as unconfident around others, too.
Imagine talking to someone who’s confident and likable. They probably do things like:
- Show good posture
- Maintain eye contact
- Speak clearly and purposefully
- Hold their head high
In contrast, someone who is not confident will likely do things like:
- Show hunched, closed posture
- Speak quietly and indistinctly
- Avoid eye contact
- Fidget or play with something while they speak
When you come off as confident, others will treat you differently. When others treat you like you’re confident, you will start to believe it, too. In this way, people who are lacking in their own confidence and self-belief can benefit from a “fake it ‘till you make it” philosophy.
Good Support
Having strong, loving, and supportive people behind you is an enormous help when your self-belief comes into question. When you have people that care about you backing you up, they can affirm you when you’re feeling low, support you when you need help, and talk sense into you when you’re being irrational.
In the same way, being around negative people can only hurt your confidence. When you’re around negative people who tear down your self-belief every day, it’s doubly or even triply hard to build yourself back up. Having a strong, reliable support system in place helps to mitigate this.
Think of a support system as your self-belief safety net. If you ever get too ambitious in your endeavors, your support will be there to bring you back down to Earth. In the same way, if your self-belief falls too low, your supportive people will be there to talk some sense into you.
Unfortunately, not everyone has a support network that they can depend on, and they don’t just appear out of thin air. If you need validation from others, there are many online and over-the-phone resources with people who can talk to you. Therapy might also be an excellent option, as a therapist will act almost like a friend in many ways. You can unload your worries and fears onto a therapist, and in return, they will help you figure out how best to fix them.
The secret to building a strong, valuable support network is to attract the types of people you want to hang around. If you’re looking to attract upbeat, supportive people, try your best to act the same way towards them. This can be tough if you have negative people surrounding you, but the effort invested will pay off in time.
Self-Care
Self-care is an essential part of maintaining success and confidence in yourself. Even the most successful people in the world need self-care to be successful. Without proper self-care practices, not only will your confidence suffer, but your health, mental state, and emotional balance will, too.
Self-care is all about forgiving yourself, giving yourself a break, and letting things go when they go wrong. For example, in a relationship setting, someone who’s been through a bad break up might take a long, warm bath, buy themselves a cheering-up present, or just talk to a friend for their opinion. It’s unreasonable to think that that person would go back to dating immediately; forcing someone to date when they’re already hurting from a bad break-up is a recipe for disaster.
In the same way, if you push yourself in other areas of life, such as business, pleasure, or passions, you can run yourself into the ground. Self-care is not giving up, and it is not wimping out, either. Self-care is a necessary function for every human individual, and anyone who doesn’t think so either don’t have the right ideas about self-care or really needs some self-care themselves.
Celebrate Success
When you succeed at something, that success should always be celebrated, no matter how small. Every single step forward you take in life is one step closer to your dreams and your goals. Even if the only success you can celebrate today is getting to work on time, celebrate it! Give yourself a pat on the back and remember that even the smallest victory is still a victory.
When you learn how to consistently celebrate your victories, it helps to accomplish several things, such as:
- Encouraging yourself to look at your victories instead of your failures
- Rewarding yourself for hard work and effort
- Playing into self-care when you celebrate a job well done
- Boosting your own confidence
Over the course of your lifetime, you will have a number of large victories. The memories of these victories will stay with you forever, especially if you celebrate them in a notable way. However, the small victories that you forget with time are important, too. Even something as simple as waking up without snoozing your alarm is worth taking a moment to smile about since this can brighten your entire day.
When you celebrate each little victory, even if it’s by doing something as simple as patting yourself on the back, you improve your own mood and make your day seem a bit brighter. The power of accomplishment is amazing, after all, and harnessing that whenever we can works very well to our advantage.
Be Persistent
Persistence can feel daunting when your self-esteem is low. However, it’s essential to cultivate the ability to be persistent, even if you can’t use it all the time. When our self-belief is low, it can feel like being persistent makes us a bother to others, and that’s never a good feeling. However, more often than not, this is us imagining things that don’t exist.
We still desire things for ourselves when our self-belief is hurting. That means that we have every right to be persistent and pursue the things that matter to us, even when we really don’t feel up to it. What’s more, persistence is an excellent way to succeed. Rarely has success come to anyone without failing a few times first!
If you feel like you have no accomplishments to your name, that may be because you haven’t been persistent enough. Giving up after one or two rejections is far too soon. If you need proof, the following famous people all had to fail multiple times before they found success:
- Walt Disney was fired from the newspaper he worked for because he “lacked imagination”
- J.K. Rowling was rejected from 12 different book publishers before publishing Harry Potter
- Bill Gates’ first business venture was an utter failure
- Oprah Winfrey was told she “wasn’t fit for TV”
- Stephen King’s Carrie was rejected by 30 publishers before finally being accepted
All of the people above are household names, and they all failed (some multiple times!) before finally finding their success. This is all the more reason why each success should be celebrated, especially since many of them are hard-won. However, don’t be afraid to fail once or twice, too – it might mean that success is on the way.
Draw Your Boundaries
Those of us who have low self-esteem tend to let others walk over us. We do this because we think, naïvely, that it will make others like us more. However, this is both an excellent way to batter your own self-belief even more and invite the wrong types of people to be friends with us.
Despite what you might at first believe, telling someone no is not going to ruin your relationship. Now, if this is in regards to your boss, you may want to think things over a little, but your boundaries are yours and yours alone. If someone close to you becomes offended when you say no, they may need to reevaluate their priorities, and you might be better off without them in your life anyway.
A loving, respectful friend will respect your decision (and ability) to say no. We are all people with the free will to make our own decisions, and while it’s always beneficial to be polite when we say no, it is still our human right. If you need to cancel a night out with a friend to perform some important self-care, a good, supportive friend will understand and support you.
Conclusion
While boosting your own self-belief might seem like a daunting task, in most cases, it can be rather effortless. By adopting some small habits into your routine, your self-confidence is capable of rising naturally with minimal help. This ties into our resilience as human beings and our ability to overcome seemingly impossible odds.
Regardless of whether your confidence is naturally low or naturally high, adding a few of these tips and tricks into your daily routine can only benefit you. After all, these tips don’t just benefit your self-belief; they benefit your person as a whole. As long as you’re willing to put in the time, effort, and dedication required, you can change your self-belief for the better in no time.