Building Confidence and Self-Esteem

When we look at the topics of confidence and self-esteem, both of these concepts are two essential building blocks of the experiences of life. Confidence means that you are certain and trust yourself to initiate, and complete a task, or react to something that occurs. Self-esteem is much easier to define, and think of, simply as how you feel about yourself as a person or human being.

In the collective, confidence and self-esteem, will lead to and enhance the courage to take actions that reach out for opportunity, try to challenge you, and connect to people. When our confidence and self-esteem are high, our growth is occurring, and our decision making ability is enhanced, and we have a sustainable level happiness. In the end, and in this experience of you gaining your confidence, and eventually comfort in your skin is not about becoming somebody else, specific things, places, situations, or ideas, it is about finding a greater sense of security in yourself, who you actually are, and having the confidence to be it.

1. Know your self

Before you determine to confidently decide, you must understand your process. To engage in basic personal honest reflection will create a pathway to begin, and begin taking action, ultimately building confidence. Take the time to think of what your strengths are, what your challenges are, and what the scripts you tell yourself, or ask yourself. Once you can identify what your ‘limited’ thoughts are you can begin the road of rewriting your thoughts. Additionally, you will create, enhance your insight and awareness of your pattern of personality, rules, habits, and values to support and sustain confidence, or confidence in your experiences. When you reflect about yourself with insight and awareness you feel more confident about making some level of decision making, and not give a thought to what others will say, or fear of failing.

2. Plan for Action / Set Goals

When we have opportunities presented to us; often quite literally, we wait until we feel confident enough to make a move; when in fact, it is taking action that creates confidence! Start with small-simple-stretch-goals that challenge the outer edge of discomfort, while honouring a sense of safety.

Make sure that you make the goals manageable, (stretch you but not ram you over-the edge of comfort and safety). The more that you can take action, and demonstrate to yourself you can master, and/or commit to your goal and follow-through on your small achievements; you will change your focus, from questioning whether you can achieve to believing you can try and achieve your goal, or task!.

3. Say ‘yes’ and welcome your development.

It is easy to overlook the amount of time you have invested in your task and your process when you can so easily compare your imagined performance to your actual performance. If we can take even a moment to stop and heed your own thinking about what you have accomplished that moment could be enough investment to help inspire your motivation and energy to continue on, or if you can even see the evidence that you have moved forwards, that is a pretty good indication that we are going to move forwards.

And actually celebrating your accomplishments, no matter how small will affirm your sense of competence. Perhaps you finished some work, or contributed (you raised your hand) in a meeting, or you just arrived today because in so many years in order to get out of bed has been a task, and it was a task under orders to stay put. All of these are legitimate moments and actions, and they all assist with how we develop a feeling of legitimate self-esteem.

4. Challenge your self-talk.

There is no shortage of research to indicate that our thinking has a significant impact on our sensation, and ultimately- our actions.If you think things like, I am catastrophically failing at my job, or I will never be able to move the mountain of competence, or any of the other reassuring things you tell yourself in your self-hating movie, you are on a sure glide path to self-annihilation. We need to challenge any self talk and ask ourselves:

When you observe that you have replace self-reflective thoughts with self-compassion, make a note of how well you internal dialogue has shifted and that you are beginning to feel better about making that shift to a more positive and empowered, strong mindset. You absolutely have the right to be fair and show self compassion; just as you are deserving of caring, constructive, supportive self-talk in support of your own positive growth journey for improving your competency – just as you should have some self-respect in the context of actually resisting yourself and pushing yourself forward.You need the self-respect to happen in the first place in order for it to even be possible.

5.Notice your connections with people

These relationships you have in your life can shape the relationship your experiences have – they can help you to rise up and provide you energy support and hope in regard to your competency or they can create massive energy drains and destruction in your competency and put you in an awful space. I would encourage you to make time to be with positively uplifting people who create a positivity around you, who provide you appreciation and allow you to feel you are of importance in their lives, not waste or spend time with negatively destroying people, who provide nothing of the constructive back into your lives as part of their being.When you feel good about your connections with people, you have a perceived real and/or honest input in your competency and value in this world.

I would say to you that I know my competence and success is positively motivated and self corrected largely because I know I am connected to people who feel neutral in their intentions to me, keeping them at as ardent of arms length as I can, and have totally useless interation. If they are furious of spontaneous energy infectious, ineffective, and useless unplanned interactions as other people then you might feel disgusted, unfunctional, and even the worthiness of your being is ruined! Staying away from these folks will not help you keep a sense of worth in this world, there are always going to people around this world doing their best to criticize you, make you feel bad, or ruin your worthiness as a competent functional self in this world. If possible I think you should leave your comfort zone and want to be enlightened by people who allow you to be fully open and allow you the space to be the very best of who you can be, in your maximum self, and most authentically and honestly.

6. Care for your body, and your mind

We cannot lose sight of our physical health, and we can overlook out mental health. Don’t forget to eat healthy food, exercise, and sleep; any of those can create the action effect of getting you to think a bit clearer and quite possibly generate a bit more positivity to the pity you have about yourself.

By taking care of your body, you show affirmation for the worthiness of your being.We can take care of our mental health by so many pursuits ranging from; journaling, meditating, or simply taking the time to get some relaxation in! I think if you can find some habits to notice your emotional health, you should start to notice your mental health equilibrium rise. This should mean that you have mental or emotional excesses to effectively encounter this world, with less and less inhibitive self doubt.

7. Keep Practicing New Skills.

If you practice new skills, learn new ways of doing things it will really shift what you believe is possible for you. You can and should not be good at it – that is not the point – it is simply learning, doing, and experiencing. And it’s just an experience you are allowing yourself, not mastery.

You can use your ability to allow yourself to take part in certain kinds of situation – where you are going to try something you have never done before or attempt a new challenge, and slowly become more aware and accepting of the fact that uncertainty is part of the experience, even if it doesn’t feel good for you. Practicing new things, and learning new skills, it is only going to show you, you are much more creative and resourceful than you thought you were!.

8. Really try and practice self-compassion at least once a day.

I personally think self-compassion is the most important practice in developing authentic self-esteem. We all have struggles, we all make mistakes, and the last thing we need is to feel worse.

So, attempt to feel and practice the same self-compassion, and/or patience you would to a good friend, or someone you You need to make time for some self-care – for example, going for a walk, having some alone time to read a book, or even just taking a minute or two to breathe if you feel like you just COULD EXPLODE! We are all too hard on ourselves (maybe for good reason–this is not to excuse some of the behaviors we’ve had in our lives) but regardless of how successful you feel on the outside, we ALL should love and care for ourselves based on our lives.

Short Story: Leah’s Transition

Leah had never dated an extrovert before. Leah was someone to fill the quiet one in almost all situations, even with her friends, showing what little she could from fears of saying the “wrong” thing. Leah was a good worker, with passions and subject matter expertise, and work ethic, but never really used “real life” objectivity to leverage her ideas in her life and let other people do it for her. One day Leah’s supervisor told her to prepare to do the staff update about the current project she had been working on. Leah was scared to do this which in Leah defined the expectations of a staff update and prepared her materials and to be comfortable with herself, Leah sat with the self and spoke outloud in her own voice. Leah was shaking on the day of the update, trying to maintain a steady voice. After Leah made the update, her coworkers clapped and her manager said to her “that was a really clear update”. Leah at this point felt the feeling of success and feeling mastery, she was ready and able to create momentum around her own ideas. Leah’s process is a dance of moving forward and backwards, bravery is creating something learned, and being brave will be one choice, one try at trying, discomfort and all.

Building confidence and self esteem is a process.

You can build confidence by building self esteem. You are not going to have one experience and then say to yourself “I have arrived to myself”. It is the number of small behaviours you are choosing to try over a period of time and those small behaviours will build into small change for you. You are going to have positive moments and you are going to have moments of uncertainity. And both are totally normal.

As you cycle forward and towards, it is important to make a full committment to your development, so that you can own your thoughts and beliefs and be kind to yourself. You are not your anger and you are not your mistakes. When focussing on your mistakes, your focus should not be to move beyond your mistakes, your focus should be to learn from your mistakes and respond to yourself.

To Conclude

you do not need to be perfect to feel good about yourself. You are building your confidence through doing; you are building your self esteem through doing; you are showing yourself care and compassion. Start from the lens, what do I have the control to do. What is my pivot to make progress not perfection. As you continue to do nice things for yourself, as you are setting boundaries moving forward and maintaining those boundaries and are not measuring those as outcomes, as you are living your the dream, you feel more confidence and capable. You are write your life story and you should be very proud of who you are becoming.