Building self confidence and self esteem is essential if you want to grow, move forward, shine your light and let the world see what you’re made of. Maybe you’ve been asking yourself “How do I build my self confidence?” or is there something you’ve always wanted to do but you’re not totally convinced that you can get there? Have you shared your goals with others only to hear that “It’ll never happen” or it “Won’t work” leaving your self belief more than just a smidgeon shaken and stirred. Perhaps you’re left wondering where your self confidence went and if you should just chuck in the towel right now. The good news is that you can build up your self esteem and increase your confidence. We show you how, in 4 easy peasy steps that will give you the right stuff to believe in yourself and show your fabulous stuff to the world.
4 Great Tips to Build Confidence and Self Esteem
Your self belief you affects everything you do, influencing the success of every goal you work towards. Whether you think you can or you can’t, chances are, you’re probably right. Ready to go hot stuff? Here are our four scientifically proven tips that will bring your ambitions to life by increasing self belief.
Lets start with the meaning of self belief. Psychologist, Albert Bandura, spent a lifetime researching self-efficacy (the belief in your capabilities). The definition of self belief is the trust that you have in your own abilities to achieve your goals. When you have self believe you know that when you set yourself a goal, even if there are setbacks, you’re pretty confident that you’ll make it eventually. Self belief and confidence walk together hand in hand. The good news? Even if your belief in yourself has taken a few hard knocks, Bandura’s research shows that we can build self belief by using these simple techniques (that gets a big ‘Hooray’ from us).
1. Building Confidence & Mastery
The only way to build self belief is to dive in with your goals. Successfully mastering new skills and accomplishing your goals will increase your belief in your own capabilities – yay! (what Bandura calls self-efficacy). This means it is important to spend time acknowledging your successes. Each time you have a win, however small, luxuriate in it. Take time to savour your fabulousness. Your self-belief will be strengthened by every experience you master.
Setting goals is key to provide mastery opportunities so start small and build from there, working up to the big, hairy challenges that have been on the back burner.
Remember, your goals should be SMART:
· Specific
· Measurable
· Achievable
· Relevant
· Time-framed
2. Building Self Confidence & Self Esteem: Modelling develops self-belief
Modelling or patterning (Bandura calls this vicarious experience) is another great technique for developing your self-belief. Look for people who are successfully doing what you want to achieve. Look for the similarities between them and you, your age, maybe you’re from the same area, perhaps your experiences are similar. Notice those similarities and model your behaviour on theirs. Believe that if they have achieved this goal then you can too. Now you’re modelling.
Practising this modelling technique is essential for increasing your self belief. The more often you practise modelling the quicker you will develop stronger self belief. Think of it as your shortcut to success.
3. Building Self Confidence & Self Esteem: Feedback from others develops self belief
Choose your feedback carefully. Look for someone that you trust, someone whose opinion you value. Don’t take any old feedback when you seek out constructive feedback from others. You’ll need to create a no emotional vampire/mood hoover free zone for this one. When it comes to feedback, ditch those naysayers. A wealth of research suggests that encouragement from others develops self belief so create your very own cheerleading team. Feedback we give ourselves is just as important.
Ever told yourself ‘I just can’t get the hang of doing well at interviews’? or ‘That’s not for people like me’? This type of inner dialogue or self-talk will keep you stuck in a rut and drain you dry. Hold your tongue, no one needs that. If you’ve had a lifetime of putting yourself down with negative inner dialogue, put on those gloves and do some hard hitting with your positive self talk.
Confident self-talk is crucial. Remember, we move towards what we focus our on. Tell yourself ‘this is easy for me’ and you will act accordingly. Recognise that there will be bumps in the road, take setbacks in your stride. Create a list of confidence quotes and self esteem mantras to keep you going when things get tough.
Take away techniques to develop positive self-talk:
Try not to make negative statements about your goal either to yourself or others. Train yourself like a pro, if you catch yourself making a negative statement, immediately correct it with a positive comment. Your on team ‘You’ now. Believe in yourself and others will start to take their cue from you.
Make positive statements to yourself about your abilities and skills. Learn to appreciate your strengths. That’s right, you’re learning to love and appreciate yourself. Enjoy it.
Replace negative thoughts with positive alternatives. Recall the vivid picture created by your visualisation of success.
Practice until positive self-talk is one of your daily habits. Positive self-talk is essential for increasing your self belief and taking your confidence to the next level.
4. Building Self Confidence & Self Esteem: Managing emotions develops self belief.
The ability to effectively manage anxiety, stress levels and emotions is key to building self belief. Knowing your triggers and how to manage them is key.
Visualisation overcomes unhelpful emotions and develops self belief in a way that you can’t quite fathom until you start doing them. Trust us, we’ve worked with hundreds of clients and this technique really does work.
Visualising success is a scientifically proven technique which is often used in the field of sports psychology. You can use exactly the same principles to overcome performance anxiety and develop your self belief.
A useful technique is to focus on your success and visualise it happening in real time. Make those colours really bright and the images as large as you can. Imagine you are looking through a camera lens watching your confidence and self belief soar as you reach your goals.
What you vividly visualise influences and shapes the future. Unfortunately, this includes visualising previous negative experiences. Visualising negative past events encourages negative thoughts about similar scenarios in the future. It sounds obvious but if your visualisation starts to go in a direction that you don’t want it to, get out of your own way – stop and start again.
Keep your thoughts positive!
Visualise your success.
Effective visualisation should use the following methods:
Imagine your successful scenario as a movie.
Visualise the brightest possible colours.
Choose a soundtrack to accompany your success and play it whilst visualising yourself achieving success.
If it feels good to have a loud soundtrack, increase the volume.
Take time to experience how success feels in your visualisation. Practise your visualisation regularly. Practice focuses all your senses on your future success and gives you a physiological framework to work towards.
If you’ve enjoyed this blog and achieved some (or all) of your goals using these techniques let us know. We’d love to hear from you.
