How to gain confidence and achieve your goals?
You need to change the way you think about yourself, then you have to find a way to stick with that change. If you think you are confident, you will be, the same way as if you think you aren’t confident enough, then you won’t be. If you want different results, you need to think about yourself as a confident person.
But what is confidence exactly, and why do you lack it in the first place?
Confidence is an interesting aspect of your personality that could help you achieve success, or it could stop your progress completely. If you have too much of it, you become arrogant, but if you have too less, you become shy. Either way, you are not following your life’s path that’s designed just for you. If you don’t have a balanced amount of confidence, your life will feel off-balanced, too.
If you are overly confident, you will go after your dreams, but you will think you already achieved them, and you might miss a step along the way, preventing you from achieving them. And if you lack confidence? Well, you might not even go after them in the first place.
How confident we are depends on many aspects of our lives, from our childhood to the way strangers were treating us. We might start out with plenty of confidence, only to lose it along the way when someone says something bad against us. How many times do we hear ‘you can’t do this’, or ‘you can’t achieve that’? Plenty. But what matters most isn’t what others say or do. We can change our confidence level by changing our perspective.
So, what are the steps you can take to get more (or less) confident?
1. It’s all about the way you see yourself
Do you feel confident? We both know the answer to that question, because you wouldn’t be here otherwise, right? Well, the first thing that needs to change is the way you think about yourself. Remember, whether you think you can, or whether you think you can’t, you are always right. Your thoughts form your reality and who you are.
Want more confidence? Then think about yourself as a confident person. Sit down, close your eyes, clear your mind and imagine a new you. A confident you. What would he/she do or say? How would they react in certain situations? Good.
But if this exercise was hard and you couldn’t see a confident you, then try drawing a bottle. Decide on a colour that represents courage and confidence to you, then colour the bottle in, as if filling it with confidence itself. Once the bottle is full, pretend to drink it, consuming all that confidence and courage. Now go back to the previous exercise. Sometimes it would be nice to have a magic potion that we can drink, and it will give us all the confidence we need, right?
Well, did it work? You can try drawing another bottle for tomorrow, or just imagine one. It will get easier in time.
Now move on to the next step.
2. Write it down.
You stepped into the shoes of this new you for a while. How did it make you feel? Did you feel inspired and motivated to do more and achieve more? What were the key points you did that felt right? What were the things you achieved while you had enough confidence? Was there still something missing?
Were you successful in love, in your career, or you had a lot of friends? What was it all like?
Write it all down. This helps in visualizing, while also keeping a track record of what worked and what didn’t. Eventually, you will find out exactly what you need to do to have enough confidence. And the stress is on ‘enough’.
3. Rinse and Repeat
Keep repeating the first and second steps and do them once a day for 2-3 weeks. Because that’s all it takes to take on a new habit. And, just like anything else you train yourself to do and be, being confident can be easily achieved as well and made into a habit you want to keep. Success will follow in due course.
