Break The Chain - Become Self Confident
February 11, 2008
Self confidence is a vicious circle. The more you lack self confidence the more difficult it is to succeed. A low success rate will further lower your self confidence… That’s what makes gaining self confidence a very difficult task, since you have to push yourself to break the low self confidence habit.
I want to be realistic… It’s very hard to increase your self confidence. It is not something that you will get overnight. You have to try hard and more than once. Gaining self confidence is a challenging exercise for everyone at first. But if you put enough effort, you will manage to increase your self confidence.
Several tips are suggested to gain self confidence all of which help you in different ways to break the chains of the low self confidence vicious circle. But the tip I find most useful is the following.
Identify something that you feel you are good at. It can be playing an instrument, practicing a sport or maybe you have excellent writing skills. After you find what you are good at, start a conversation with a close friend of yours or maybe a family member (someone you feel very comfortable with) about what you are good at and mention your abilities. Make sure that you explicitly mention that you are good at doing that particular thing, giving evidence by showing a sample of your work, for example.
The fact that you managed to discuss something about you, something that you are good at is a very positive achievement. After doing the above exercise you will feel more confident of your abilities, since you feel the backup of those who have agreed with you (in this case, family members or close friends).
The next step is to get out of the comfort zone of your family members or close friends and go out and talk about your abilities with someone else, maybe a colleague or a friend. Use the experience that you have obtained from previous similar discussions by focusing on the statements that were the most convincing. It will work for sure as it has worked when you have addressed your close friends and family members.
As you can see, gaining self confidence is an exercise that you should repeat frequently. Each time you should push yourself further. The more you talk with other people, the more people will appreciate your skills and value your knowledge.
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by a friend from FruitfulTime - a software company behind the todo list software “FruitfulTime TaskManager”.
FruitfulTime has a blog focusing on personal productivity, you may like to visit FruitfulTime Blog or subscribe to feed.
(Photo by floato)
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Thank you Lawrence for accepting our guest blog post. I am very happy that FruitfulTime has a post at your great blog
Something else that you can do is ask someone else to describe what qualities that they like about you. Then take their words to heart and make them yours until you truly believe them.
Interesting post. Confidence is one of those emotions that seems to come and go. I have been putting SU aside lately and concentrating on blog building. SU can be a distraction. But I feel more confident now that I have done this.
Confidence is important for getting where you want to be in life. As you said it is important to regularly reinforce your confidence.
Yes, a balanced sense of self-confidence is very important for success. I very much agree with your statements in this article.
I agree with most of the points. But, for me, it is opposite. I would do or learn something that either I don’t know or not good at. If I succeed, it will build up my confidence. If it failed, I will try harder, and that in fact strengthen my desire to succeed.