Confidence is vital in almost every aspect of our lives yet a lot of people struggle to find the confidence that lies within. Confidence shows in a person's behaviour and language (see NLP). However if you have difficulties with your level of confidence, the good news that confidence is something that can be learned and built upon.
What is Confidence?
Confidence goes hand in hand with self esteem. If you believe in yourself, you will naturally become confident. Believing in yourself means that you will do what you think is right, you will take risks, you will admit your mistakes and learn from them, and you will be able to take praise or compliments graciously. Confidence is important in your relationships, work, parenting, life skills, self expression, self improvement, your openness to change, and the ability to take on new challenges. It comes from within yourself, from others, and from your achievements.
How to Improve your Confidence
One way that you can improve your confidence is by taking control of the way you feel. You can do this by remembering a time that you felt truly self confident or happy. You will also need to control your self-consciousness. If you feel self-conscious, take the focus off yourself by focusing on something in your environment. Something as simple as admiring a piece of furniture will help you to forget the way that you are feeling.
If you feel self-conscious in a social environment, it can help to focus on the reason that you are there in the first place. Are you there to make friends, relax other people, find out information, or make contacts? By finding out your goal, you will be able to connect with people that have the same goal as you. Being in an environment where the other people are there for the same reasons that you are will help you to feel more relaxed and confident.
Also watch out for criticism, both from other people and yourself. While constructive criticism is helpful, some criticism is unneeded and unwanted. Examples of this include "I'm not funny, why am I here?" or "you could do this so much bette" If you find yourself thinking or saying such things, turn it around by saying "that joke didn't go down so well but there's always another", or "I like the way you did this but next time it might be easier if you."
Hypnotherapy to Improve Confidence
Hypnotherapy is a tool that you can use to turn around your negative ways of thinking in order to create more confidence within yourself. People are born with confidence. This confidence may lessen over time due to the experiences that we have. Hypnotherapy helps by helping you to remove negative thinking and behaviours so that you can start to focus on yourself and what you really want. By developing new, more positive ways of thinking and behaving, your confidence will increase as a result.
Other Ways to Improve Confidence
Some ways that you can help yourself to become more confident include:
- Find a person that you admire and learn from them
- Focus on your achievements – even if you didn't succeed, find out what went wrong and vow to improve it next time
- Act confident
- Ensure that you are prepared for a task
- Gain some new skills – you can never been over-prepared
- Learn how to relax – deep breathing or meditation can be invaluable when you are feeling stressed
- Smile
- Set goals for yourself that you know that you can achieve
- Reward yourself when you succeed
- Learn how to handle rejection – tell yourself that it's not because you're not good enough, it could be any number of factors such as a bad mood, incompatibility, bad timing, a misunderstanding, etc
- Take the feedback that you get and use it to help you succeed the next time around
- Learn how to manage your emotions
- Find the humour in a situation
- Don't let yourself think negatively
- Persevere
