What is self confidence?
Do you often find yourself wondering reluctantly, "can I do this?"
rather than proudly saying, "I can do this!"
in just about everything you have to do? Now ask yourself, has your self confidence brought you an all-time high? Or has it often left you feeling you down and low? So, what is self confidence?
What is self confidence and why it’s important
Believing in yourself, your abilities and power is known as self confidence. It is when you are free of self-doubt and perceive yourself and your abilities as a human being in a positive way, that's when when you can say that you are confident in yourself.
How you see yourself and your life and how much value you put into it determines how confident you are. And now the question is, why ishaving Self confidence so important? The answer is simple. No one else will believe in you if you don’t even believe in yourself.
It is not easy though to master what is self confidence. It can be difficult learning to value yourself, to trust your ability to make plans and choices once again especially after you have repeatedly made decisions that you later on regret, and you seem to think that you are doomed to nothing else but failure.
Having confidence in yourself is not something you simply decide on and acquire overnight. Although I do wish it were as easy as that. Instead, it is a process. And to a lot of people, the road to regaining self confidence can be very long and painful.
Losing Confidence in Yourself
There are so many things in life that happen which can make you doubt if you’re actually good enough for something… for anything. You don’t earn enough money to afford the car that you want, you never get chosen for that promotion at work, the woman/man that you’ve loved since high school has never given you much more than a glance.
And oftentimes, you just start second-guessing yourself, or not even try at all – out of fear of making another mistake. Eventually you resort to depression and self-pity, thus shutting the rest of the world out. Is this how you want to live your whole life? Certainly not.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who do live like this. They would rather just give up, or not even try, just because they are scared. Scared of being wrong, of being humiliated, and most of all, scared of being a failure. So what would it take for you to not live your life under the shadow of your own fears? Start believing in yourself!
The process of regaining your self confidence
First, you have to determine the reason(s) why you are not confident in yourself or why you lost that confidence you had before. It can be because of that presentation at work where you were criticized for incompetence by your boss in front of the whole organization, or those classmates who made fun of you back in high school for being the school’s biggest dork in front of your crush, or even your parents who always compared you to your brother for as long as you can remember, making you feel that you were never as good or will never be good enough for anything.
Recalling these reasons can hurt very badly, but you must go back to these memories and face them once more, now as an adult – as a mature being who can rationally acknowledge that these situations are merely memories from the past and nothing more.
And with that, you can extricate yourself from the emotions that you have felt at that time when it happened, accept that it happened and know that there is nothing you can do to change the past, but there is so much you can do to change your life from now on.
Know that you are not alone
Bear in mind also that no one in this world is perfect, and everyone makes mistakes. Some may seem better than the others, but do not forget that all men are created equal. Everyone is unique in their own ways and is better than others in various aspects. The smartest girl in school may not be the prettiest, the most educated man may not be the most successful, and the richest man in the world may not be at all happy.
At some point in life, each and every person has been laughed at, humiliated, compared to someone better, or not even noticed at all. And you have to know that it’s okay. For it is in accepting and embracing these imperfections that you realize that failure, just like success, is only what you make of it. Instead of fearing it, learn from it and keep going.
In a world where change is the only thing constant, people desire to compete against each other with the hope of being able to stand out. And the more you try, the more room you have in committing errors. In this modern world, taking risks is essential.
Mistakes are inevitable. Does that mean you have to stop trying, to just give up and stay down where it’s safe? Then that would mean you will never get to have a taste of success at all! Failure is actually essential for your development, so embrace this process rather than going against it.
Believe You Can!
Remember that in order for you to be successful, you must first make an attempt to attain your goals. And how would that be if you don’t even believe that you have the ability to achieve what you desire and carry out your plans despite the obstacles that you will encounter?
Being confident means you have enough faith in yourself to keep trying no matter how many times you make a mistake, how you learn from it, and taking full control of yourself, your desires and your decisions, and knowing that despite failure, you have the ability to utilize your talents and skills that are uniquely your own to try once more.
It is only in believing in yourself and understanding this process of "trial-error-learning-achieving", that you have a chance of succeeding.
When all else fails, it’s by understanding what is self confidence that can pull you back up and then help you move forward after you have fallen flat on your face. So start believing in yourself again. Begin by saying, "I can do this"!
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