How to Have Unlimited Self-Confidence

Confidence is a feeling or belief that you have in yourself, someone else, or some thing. Confidence is a powerful motivator. It can motivate you to take action or not take action based on the perceived pain or pleasure that is imminent. Confidence is a significant factor in a persons level of success and life satisfaction. 

Confidence is situation specific. You can be highly confident in one situation, but have a complete lack of confidence in another situation. For example, a lecturer might be confident addressing twenty-five students, but be much less confident addressing twenty-five colleagues. 

Your level of confidence is related to your experience. Generally, the more experience you have, the more confidence you have at doing it. For example, when you first started driving, you were probably really nervous, thinking about pushing in the clutch, moving the gear stick, letting the clutch out, being mindful about the cars around you, paying attention to the red light ahead, and so on. However, as you gained more experience, it became more like second nature. Your anxieties lowered, you felt more comfortable, and you became more autonomous. 

Confidence can be boosted by gaining experience. The best way to develop confidence is to simply do. The more you do, the more confident you become at doing. The more situations you gain experience in, the more your overall self-confidence grows. 

The word confidence comes from the Latin word ‘fidere’, which means ‘to trust’. Trust in your ability to be successful in any situation by adopting these five strategies. 

How to Have Unlimited Self-Confidence

• Tell yourself what you want to hear. The process goes: thinking, feeling, behaving. Therefore, negative thoughts lead to negative feelings, which lead to negative behaviours. Change your behaviours by changing your thoughts. Thoughts can be very quick and at times, subconscious. Start recognising your thought patterns by recording what thoughts enter your mind. Do this by scheduling two minutes at 10am for example, and writing down every thought that enters your mind during this time. The more you record your thoughts, the more you will recognise them. 

• Meditate. During meditation, your mind and body relax. Your mind will still wander during meditation, but as you practice, you will enhance your mental strength to bring your thoughts back. This is known as mindfulness. As you practice mindfulness through meditation, you become more mindful throughout other times of the day too; even when you’re not meditating. This will help you respond to situations with calm and clarity. 

• Use affirmations. Affirmations are statements about yourself that are positive and reflect who you want to be. This strategy is very similar to strategy one, the difference being that you select specific statements and repeat them religiously. I recommend choosing up to five, with the suggestion that less in the beginning is better. Schedule time each day; for example, two minutes in the morning and two minutes in the evening to repeat your affirmations to yourself. You can also repeat them to yourself whenever you have a spare two minutes - think toilet breaks. Ideas of affirmations include:
  
  Success always flows into my life.
  
  I let happiness manifest in my life. 
  
  My body is infused with energy. 
  
  I am a money making machine. 
  
  I look for lessons from every situation. 

• Act the part. One of the most effective confidence building hacks is to fake it. Pretend you’re an actor and ‘act’ as if you are confident. Picture what a confident person looks like and emulate that. How do they dress, walk, stand and communicate? How does a confident person talk and what sort of things would they say to themselves? Take notice of the feelings that arise within you when you ‘act’ like a confident person. Acknowledge those feelings and enjoy them.

• Make the choice. Choose to be confident. At the end of the day, YOU are in control of your life. No one else. Don’t make excuses for where you are in your life right now. Accept the events that have brought you to reading this blog today. Make a pact with yourself that you are in control and from this day forth, you will live with confidence. 

Confidence is a belief you have about yourself, someone else, or some thing. Confidence comes from the latin word meaning ‘to trust’. It is the trust you have that a particular outcome will ensue. Your level of confidence is specific to each situation and your experience with that situation. 

What similar situations bring out varying levels of confidence?

Leave your answer to that question in the comments section below.