The 10 Most Effective Ways to Boost Your Self-Confidence
Maintaining a positive mindset can be quite a hassle these days with so many disasters happening on a daily basis. It almost feels like the world is against you at times, specifically targeting you and whatever made you happy that day. A single moment can ruin our whole lives, leaving scars that will never go away. In order to actually get past these without allowing them to hold power over us we need to make sure that our self-confidence is strong enough to block out any negative thoughts.
Sounds pretty easy right? Well, the answer to that question is both yes and no. Sure, it can be easy if you know how to deal with the negative thoughts and perceptions of yourself, but if you don’t know how to actually approach this you won’t be able to do anything about it anytime soon, which is where this article comes in. In this short article we’ve decided to showcase the ten easiest methods to maintain your self-confidence and live your life with a smile on your face. So, without further ado, let’s start this journey into your psyche’s health and see exactly what we can do to make it all better for yourself.
1. Visualize Yourself As You Want To Be
Instead of worrying about what people think about you, how about you start looking at yourself the way you want to be looked at? Don’t visualize yourself as manifestations of your fears and self-consciousness; picture yourself as you would want people to picture you. Forget about your shortcomings and losses and just look at yourself as a winner. You’re there; you’re alive and healthy, so why sell yourself short? Just look in the mirror for a good 10 seconds and repeat to yourself the following: “I am beautiful; I am the best version of me, I am who I am and that’s perfect”. This process will take some time, but the more you say it the more you start believing it yourself. You might think this is pretty useless at the time, but we can assure you that it’s not. The more highly you think of yourself the more confident you’ll become and being confident can completely change everyone’s opinion on you as a person. Although technically nothing changes physically, people will immediately start noticing the difference and commend you for it.
2. Try “100 Days Of Rejection Challenge”
Now this is a very interesting concept because it implies sabotaging yourself to the point where you can’t feel the pain of rejection anymore. Jia Jiang has become world famous for creating this interesting social experiment. His idea was as follows: Make incredibly unreasonable requests to people all around you for 100 days straight. After you’ve gotten rejected that many times you should be able to handle rejection pretty easily. Being able to take rejection without actually getting hurt actually empowers you and your self-confidence greatly.
Although it does sound silly at first, this social experiment has proven to be quite effective on the long run. Jia Jiang’s experience for example has showed him that without the fear of being rejected he can do so much more now. This is definitely one of the most effective ways to get out of your protective shell, but it is also one of the most extreme ones. A lot of people will not be able to do this for so long, but even only doing this for a couple of days has shown to make a difference. Just remember that although this is extremely hard to accomplish, it also does have a very high rate of success. So, if you’re lacking in the self-confidence category then this is a must for you.
3. Leave Your Comfort Zone
Getting out of your comfort zone is especially important since you’re basically forcing yourself to pull through uncomfortable moments just for the sake of learning how to deal with new surroundings. This is quite a hard step to take, but it is worth the hassle. So, for this step we suggest that you do something different today, something that you’ve never done before. Have you ever woken up at 6 AM and just went for a jogging session? No? Maybe it’s time you start. Have you ever tried going to a nightclub and just dancing all night long? Why not start now?
Regardless of what it is, you need to make sure that you start bursting out of your bubble and interact with more strangers. Put yourself in awkward situations and force yourself to break through. This, as previously mentioned, is quite difficult since you have to make sure that you do it regardless of how unsettling and scary it may be. Even if it’s something as silly as saying hello to your neighbor in the morning, make sure that you do that with a smile on your face because you’ve earned it. The more awkward the situation is the better because you’re eventually going to evolve and become a better version of yourself in no time.
4. Be Helpful
Helping someone is definitely a way to forget about your own problems because it forces you to ignore your problems at the moment and concentrate more on what’s happening around you. If you’re good at something why not share the knowledge and help someone out? It’s a great confidence boost and it puts things into a whole new perspective. It can even help you become more appreciative of what you currently have. Now, we’re not saying that you should just seek out people in need to think of yourself as their superior. What we’re saying is that you should purposely teach, mentor and train those around you to the point where you no longer think about your shortcomings but instead think of how much progress those people have made thanks to you. Think less about yourself and more about the impact you’ve made so far on everyone else.
5. Fix Your Flaws
This is definitely a rough step to take, but the evidence is clear, it helps a lot. First of all you need to identify your flaws, but instead of letting them dwell and hurt you all you need to do is try to find ways to fix them and make yourself better. This is pretty hard at first, but once you get the gist of it you should have no problem with becoming the best version of yourself. Maintain your hygiene, eat healthier food, and make sure that you don’t waste a lot of time doing nothing. It may sound silly and redundant at first but the best way to fix your problems is to face them head on and unless you want to have them ruin your self-confidence you need to make sure that you no longer give them the power to hurt you. It’s a simple equation at that point.
You – Flaws = Confident.
6. Everyone is Equal
One of the main problems that most people with low self-confidence have is the fact that they consider everyone around them as their superiors. They think of themselves as inferior which really shows in their behavior. In order to fix this problem all that you need to do is see everyone as equal around you. Nobody’s better than anyone else, regardless of their flaws. The moment you start to see everyone as the best version of themselves you’ll start seeing yourself that way too. You don’t need to waste all that time thinking that life just sort of handed everyone a magical superiority potion and realize the fact that at the end of the day everyone has flaws. The main reason as to why these people don’t have the low self-esteem you do is because they tackle it the way we’ve been telling you to tackle it. So, remove the idea from your head that people around you are better than you are. They are not. You just see them as such.
7. Fight The Inner Voice
We all get moments during which our inner critics start getting the better of us. After we do something embarrassing or make an awkward situation even worse we tend to end up getting criticized nonstop by ourselves. It is actually funny how no person in this world criticizes us more than ourselves, but the result is no laughing matter. This is a serious issue that we need to handle head on to make sure that we don’t let that inner voice mandate our view on ourselves. So, instead of letting yourself get controlled by the voice how about you silence it with good thoughts about yourself for once?
It might sound silly at first, but it is worth a try. Every time you hear that voice saying “You’re not good enough” or “Why would you do that?” just repeat to yourself that you did all that you could and that that’s good enough for now. Nobody is perfect, and you won’t get the final word in every conversation so don’t let it affect your mindset afterwards. You did well. Even if the conversation was a literal mess, at least you tried. So give yourself a pat on the back for that.
8. Use Your Talent As Your Advantage
Everybody has a secret talent waiting to be discovered. Some people have already found what they’re good at, while others have yet to discover them. Some people are good at painting, some at writing; some have an incredible memory while others can sing or dance. Whatever it is, you need to find that special something about yourself and use it as an anchor to boost your self-confidence. Not everybody’s talents are as flashy as flashy as we’d want them to be, for example some people are amazing at acting while others are just really good at video games, but at the end of the day a talent’s a talent and that’s something to be proud about. So, seek out new hobbies, look into what you can experiment with and find your talent today. The journey might take a while but it will be worth it by the end of the day.
9. Compliment Yourself More
We all have a thing that we dislike about ourselves and that’s a fact. Because of this a lot of people end up choosing to never look in the mirror anymore, avoiding the pressure of giving the inner voice we’ve talked about previously more ammunition to hurt them with. But alas, this is not the way to do it. In order to allow us to heal and get better we need to wrestle our demons and the best way to do that is by facing our problems head on. So, pick up that mirror and instead of looking for every single imperfection you see how about you try something different, like complimenting your hair. Compliment your eyes, compliment your face shape, compliment your smile, and compliment everything that you can. Do this at least once a day and before you know it your self-confidence levels will be higher than ever.
10. Spruce Up Your Style
This might sound weird but sometimes a change in clothing can actually affect you in more ways than you might think. Instead of doing the same thing you’ve been doing for years now how about you try to imitate the person you look up to the most in life? Grow a beard, try a Mohawk, get baggy clothes then complete the look by also purchasing a suit. Experiment with your style and you’ll see yourself in a whole new light before you know it. Sometimes we tend to attach certain negative stigmas to our looks, which is why a change in style is so important. The more we change about ourselves the more we differentiate ourselves from the person that our inner critic would constantly belittle. Do everything that we’ve mentioned in this short article and before you know it you’ll have your self-confidence soaring the sky.