How to Build Self Confidence?

Do you ever feel shitty about yourself? It happens all the time to most of us.

It seems like everyone is building billion-dollar businesses, becoming YouTube stars, or making it big on Instagram.

Deep down, most of us also know that it’s 99% bullshit. But at the same time, we see all these people living awesome lives, and we don’t care if it’s real or not.

Whether you want money, fame, travel, or none of that stuff, it doesn’t matter because it always comes down to this: How confident are you?

• Are you confident enough to ignore the naysayers and pursue you dreams?
• Are you confident enough to resist outside pressure and stay grounded?

You see? Self-confidence is important if you want to live life on your terms — no matter what you’re after, a lack of confidence will always hold you back.

Research even shows that a lack of self-confidence is associated with:

• Depression
• loneliness and feeling left out
• Lower academic achievement
• Lower life satisfaction

Building Your Self-Confidence

You become more self-confident if you become better at what you do. That’s the system, and it’s backed by research.

How can you use this information? The following process is easy — but completing the steps takes hard work.

It goes like this:

1. Improve your competencies
2. Put them into practice
3. See results
4. Grow more confident
5. Repeat

That’s the process. The relationship between confidence and competence often looks something like this:

In the beginning, you often see quick results from small improvements in competence. But as you get better at something and the more difficult it gets to improve, it takes longer to build up your confidence.

All of us hit a plateau with learning skills. And it’s very difficult to break through that. Once you‘re close to mastery, you often see another boost in confidence.

That’s great and all, but what if I don’t see results? Plus, I don’t have the time to practice.

If you want to make excuses, that’s fine. It’s your life. But this method of building self-confidence is based on real, tangible steps, and not intangible stuff like affirmations. Confidence doesn’t appear magically by itself.

You can tell yourself every day that you’re confident, lucky to be alive, or whatever — but if you lack the skills to get shit done, you’ll never truly believe in yourself.

Yes, affirmations, positive thinking, goal setting, is all great, but it’s NOTHING without execution.

How can you expect to build confidence if you never do anything? It’s impossible.

“Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.” — Thomas Carlyle

What competencies should I improve?

That depends on what you’re after. But there are also some universal skills that I believe every person can benefit from. Here 3 ideas for you:

• Emotional intelligence — Research shows that humans are inherently social. Without good relationships, we die. And if you want good relationships, you need emotional intelligence: Understanding other people’s emotions and how to respond to them. This is something you can learn.

• Self-awareness — You can practice self-awareness by continuous self-reflection. Write down your thoughts; try to understand why you do what you do, what you can do better, and what you’re doing well. Know yourself.

• Problem-solving — our current school system dates from the industrial revolution. We’re trained to become cogs in a wheel. We’re not trained to solve problems in complex situations — instead, we do what we are told. But the world has changed and in the current state, the person that is better at problem-solving will win.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that your life will be better as long as you wish for it.

When you put in work and see the results — like a stronger body, more energy, more money, or whatever you’re after — you start believing in your ability to get shit done.

Now go out there, do things, get better at them, see results, repeat that process and grow more confident.