6 Ways to Boost Your Self Confidence

 

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Many times in our lives we may have events that cause us to lose confidence in our abilities. Things that happen that make us question whether we are good enough to do something. Perhaps we have a reorganization at work that results in us having to take a lower position. Maybe a relationship that we thought was rock solid falls apart and leaves us questioning our own value. Perhaps you thought you were doing well, but your annual performance review and bonus are lower than you thought they should have been. Sadly these events and events like them can have a tremendously negative impact on our self-confidence. They can take you from feeling highly positive about yourself to questioning everything about yourself. 

Now when you walk into a room, your confidence is gone and you're tentative. When you have a decision to make at work, you are no longer confident and decisive, but instead, you are second-guessing yourself and are slow to make a decision out of fear of making the wrong decision. Your productivity starts to slide and your performance reviews are further impacted negatively.  One or several bad interactions have destroyed your confidence and have started a downward spiral.

The good news is that you don't have to stay in this downward spiral. You can recognize what is happening and start to climb your way back out of the pit of despair. You can regain your confidence and ability to make decisive decisions and perform at a high level. Reestablishing and boosting your self-confidence is possible and it just takes a few easy tricks. 

Positive Self Talk

It might sound like nonsense, but positive self-talk can have a dramatic impact on your emotional health and confidence. According to Dr. Martin Seligman, whether you view negative events through the eyes of a pessimist or an optimist can change the way you think about yourself. For example, if you struggle to close a sale at work the pessimist would say "I'm not good enough, I'm just a bad salesperson", but the optimist would say "Wow that was a tough client, how can I convince them". The pessimist took it personally and as a sign that they weren't good enough, the optimist took the opposite view, thinking they were good enough and just needed to identify a better solution.

When you find yourself feeling that you might not be good enough, stop and look at the positives in the situation. What did you learn, how would you do things differently next time or what can you still do to achieve your goals. Don't allow yourself to chat yourself down. Be your own biggest advocate and champion. When you show that you believe in yourself it becomes easy for others to see that and believe in you too. 

Exercise

According to Walden University, exercise has a range of positive benefits on your mental well-being. Exercise results in decreased levels of stress and anxiety. It helps to boost self-confidence. Your mental performance also improves in tandem with better sleep patterns. Of course, there are also the physical benefits of exercise. When you exercise you stay in better shape, get more sleep, are more able to take life's challenges, and can live a healthier happier life.

If you find that you are struggling with self-confidence consider starting a new exercise routine. If it's been a while, don't start with the hardest exercise, but instead make it easy to build your new habit. Do a brisk walk before breakfast, after lunch, or after dinner. Make it easy to get up and get moving. Over time as you build your habit you can incorporate more varied exercises or make them more rigorous. Whatever you decide to do, it's important to make it consistent so that the benefits of exercise build upon each other like compound interest, slowly building up your mental health and self-confidence. 

Healthy Eating

A lot of us tend to turn to food when we don't feel good about ourselves. Food, especially junk food, causes us to have momentary joy as we consume sugars, fat and high calories. Those good feelings are temporary, however. Have you ever noticed after you eat more pizza than you should, that happy feeling turns to sadness and disappointment in yourself. Instead of curing your negative emotions, it puts you on a rollercoaster ride of emotional happiness followed by sadness. What you thought might help actually made you more upset in the end. 

Instead of attempting to self-medicate with overeating and poor food choices, make fundamental changes to your diet to make it more healthy. While fried chicken tastes delicious it's terrible for your health. Instead, incorporate high amounts of fruits and vegetables into your diet. Avoid fried foods, processed foods, and fast foods that are high in calories and low in vitamins and minerals. Over time you'll see benefits ranging from improved mental health to better physical fitness. You'll feel proud of yourself and what you've achieved boosting your self-confidence. 

Get a Makeover

Sometimes the way things look physically causes you to judge how they might be on the inside. While we all know the idiom, don't judge a book by its cover, the reality is that this is just human nature. If you look in the mirror every morning and see someone that hasn't taken care of themselves physically, needs to cut their hair, wash their face, and put on clothes that are ironed, you will start with a negative perception of yourself, even before you get to the internal things that are dragging down your self-confidence.

Take care of yourself and your appearance but getting a make-over. Make an appointment with the barber and get that hairstyle you've always wanted to try. Start wearing crisply ironed clothes and if all you own are old tattered clothes, spring for a few new updated pieces that you will feel proud to wear. Take a shower and get ready every morning, so that you are ready and able to respond to the day's challenges. When you look in the mirror you will see someone that is put together and ready for anything. That can only have a positive impact on how you feel about yourself.  

Do Things With Purpose

When you wake up and go to work or go about your day without any goals, you have nothing you are working toward. When you have no purpose, you have no reason to do anything. You wander aimlessly from place to place, task to task, or Netflix show to Netflix show without feeling good. You aren't achieving anything and you know it. Don't allow yourself to fall into this trap.

Find something to work towards personally and professionally. At work, take on a project that interests you or sign up for internal training programs that you've always wanted to try. Work towards those goals of improved performance and achievement. They give you a reason to go to work and make a difference. In your personal life take up a hobby, whether it's making something or doing something. Plan things out and put deadlines on your calendars. Track your performance and give yourself rewards for meeting your goals. The more goals and the more achievement you have, even small, the better you will feel about yourself. The self-confidence will follow and you'll be on the road to feeling great about yourself. 

Lean Into Your Strengths

Sometimes in life, we may become overly focused on the things we're not good at. We struggle to identify a path forward or a way to improve our weaknesses. The truth is that everyone has natural strengths and talents and things that they are just not good at. It's important, to be honest about what you are and are not good at so you don't focus solely on the negative. Imagine spending your days focused only on what you are naturally not good at? You'll never be able to achieve greatness by focusing on things that you can't do well.  Instead, focus on your strengths.

When you focus on your strengths and talents you get to do things that you are truly good at. You achieve more than your realized you could and you achieve it more easily. In fact, people often prefer and enjoy doing the things they are talented at. There are multiple benefits here to focusing on your strengths. You'll have increased productivity, improved efficiency and you'll enjoy doing it. When you love what you do, the work becomes easy and you look forward to it. Lean into your strengths and you'll be so much happier and your self-confidence will soar. 

Have you ever struggled with self-confidence or found yourself second-guessing decisions you've made and your path forward? How did you overcome it? What did you do to get your confidence back and get back out there? I want to hear about it! Tell me by posting below or contact me!