Self Confidence
What is your opinion of yourself?
Can you trust yourself to actually follow through after you make a promise to yourself?
Do you allow yourself to feel all of your emotions? Even the negative, scary ones?
Our answers to these questions is what either creates or destroys our self confidence. Most of us are unwittingly destroying our self confidence and strengthening our self doubt. We don’t trust ourselves, we don’t know how to manage our minds, and we feel out of control with our emotions and behaviors.
That’s because it’s easy for our brain to offer us worry, fear, and anxiety. Human brains are programmed to focus on what could go wrong, and so they are always searching for the negative. These emotions once helped our species evolve and survive; they are still deemed important and useful neurologically speaking.
But we have a reached a point in this day and age where anxiety is no longer serving us, it’s actually beginning to hurt us mentally, physically and emotionally. Consciously building more self confidence is the antidote to these predispositions.
However, self confidence is not so easy to produce. That’s because in order to create self confidence we have to actively work against:
Our brain’s natural inclination toward anxiety.
Our past programming and conditioning from childhood.
Our engrained thinking patterns and long held beliefs.
So how do we flip this script?
Photo by Jonathan Klok
We must begin to slowly rebuild our self trust. We do this by following through on small daily acts and keeping all of the promises we make with ourselves.
We must be willing to feel any emotion, especially the ones we’ve been avoiding most of our lives. We must recognize that our range of emotions are completely harmless. It isn’t the fear that creates self doubt, it’s our unwillingness to process and face the fear.
We must learn the skill of managing our own mind. This is a lifelong process. We will never reach a place or a time where we are finished managing our mind.
This looks like continuously identifying our old, outdated thoughts and replacing them with new thoughts that serve us. It’s choosing our identity and what we want to believe about ourself instead of settling for what we currently have.
Building self confidence is different from becoming arrogant or having false confidence. We aren’t concerned with comparisons or criticizing others in order to build ourselves up. We aren’t projecting our issues onto loved ones or putting others down to make them seem smaller so we can feel bigger.
Self confidence is rooted in a place of abundance— not scarcity. It recognizes we are all capable and worthy humans who have the option to build self confidence.
The sooner we individually begin the process of building self confidence, the sooner we can escape the throes of self doubt and anxiety.
