Understand Confidence and Trust Yourself in All Situations
Building your child’s confidence is one of the enormous tasks we have as we decide to raise our children. But what about your own confidence? It becomes more difficult to assess yourself and make improvements in the area of confidence, especially if you do not see yourself as a confident person already. Understanding your own confidence can be a challenge. Self improvement always appears easier for those individuals who already appear together from the beginning.
Confidence is defined as a feeling of self-assurance arising from one’s appreciation of one’s own abilities or qualities.
What do you do when your confidence is low?
Why is confidence so important
Confidence becomes an important aspect of our personality as we interact with other people and experience a variety of situations. Having high confidence does not cause you look down upon others. But it does allow you to participate in unfamiliar activities and meet new people without hesitation if you have a high confidence.
Confidence allows you to experience life without reservations, which makes living more enjoyable. With confidence, you do not restrict your interaction with individuals even if they are different than you because you are confident in who you are.
Things that shape your confidence
The same factors that help shape your child’s confidence can also shape your confidence level in situations. Your child’s confidence is shaped by the following things: parenting techniques and interaction with parents, personal decisions and outcomes, friends and their influences.
Characteristics of and interaction with spouse
Your spouse is the other person that you travel on your life’s journey. Who you choose to marry could arguably be the most important decision of your life. All other decisions are affected by this one event. Even if you decide to not marry. How you interact with each other can cause you to gain more confidence or may decrease your confidence depending on their responses to your decisions. Also depending on what they seek your help for in their own life.
- How much do they value your interaction in the family?
- Do they speak with you about major decisions to deal with the household?
- Are you able to make individual decisions about events that occur in your life?
Every relationship will have different answers to these questions. Just like the people in them, relationships have their own characteristics. As long as you are respected in your relationship and interact with respect, there are no correct answers to the questions. The correct answers are what works for your relationship.
Personal decisions and outcomes
This is a multifaceted part of your confidence. The simplistic view is that as you make decisions and succeed, your confidence will grow. The more positive outcomes you create for yourself, the more you trust yourself to make decisions.
Even if you experience a failure and you learn from the outcome, you can gain in the area of confidence. As you try new things, you can gain confidence. So your decision to interact in your surroundings has an effect on your confidence.
Friends and their influences
From an early age, we are influenced by our friends. As adults, this does not change. Whether these friends are virtual or in real life, friends have a huge impact on our confidence. In this area, constant evaluation of your friend circle is imperative to maintain positivity and support that you need for continued success.
The friend influence may be one of the harder areas to address, as we are social. We want to be liked and have a friend group. Survival as an individual is based on you establishing your own identity that is not based on who your fiends are. We grow up filtering through cliques in school. And I look around at my environment as I am in my 40s and I realize that not much has changes. As I would have hoped. Cliques still function in work settings, school settings, mom groups, churches. Getting through this as an adult with a lower confidence level is difficult. It is also difficult if you have high confidence.
WHY?
Because we all want friends! And we all want to be seen as a fun person.
Ways to build your confidence
Try something new
Find something you have wanted to learn or go to that new location and participate in an activity you have never done. Will you succeed? Maybe not the first time you do it, but trying it is the first step. You could find a new activity that you enjoy immensely! Once you practice and gain skills in the area, you will have a level of pride that will develop.
I can do this now!
You- after you develop the new skill
Do something you have mastered
We all have that thing we do well. There is that thing that we can teach anybody and talk about for hours. Do that regularly and experience a confidence boost. The reason elite athletes practice is to get better, but practice also highlights what they can do well. It lets them know that they are able to perform that difficult move or complete that play. It is the same for you. So go and do what you are great at!
Incorporate positive affirmations
Having a positive outlook at life benefits you in all areas. Your confidence level is affected greatly by your thought patterns and how you view yourself. Use positive affirmations to support who you are.
- I am who I need to be.
- I am the best at what I do.
- There is no one like me.
- I can change my situation to what I want it to be.
- I am surrounded by people who love and support me.
- I will accomplish my goals.
- I can improve my skills.
How to trust yourself
Be honest with yourself
There are many layers to honesty. Being honest with yourself forms the foundation of honesty you can have with other people. You have to be honest with yourself about who you are and your actions. Self deception does not allow you to address your flaws and make improvements in your behavior. Own your decisions instead of blaming others. Become the one who controls your environment!
Accept who you are in the present
We all can improve ourselves. But accepting who you are right now, allows you to see the positive in who you are today. What do you like about yourself right now?
Accomplish goals
Writing goals and reviewing them helps us with accomplishment of these goals. We then trust who we are becoming through the steps of goal writing. We have to write goals that challenge us. Once you accomplish a goal, your confidence level increases.
I have focused on ways to stop deceiving yourself, so you can gain your own trust in a post previously. Read it here. It gets directly into ways to increase your self love. You can not give to others what you don’t have. Showing forth love to your family means you have given yourself that same love and grace. You are worth it! You deserve it!
Resources about confidence
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/confidence
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/happiness-in-world/200911/the-three-realms-confidence
https://www.cleverism.com/skills-and-tools/self-confidence/
I am passionate about optimal work life balance and I can help women excel in both areas without compromising in either area because I have found systems of planning, organization, and personal development that help achieve goals. I created this blog to discuss topics on our journey of motherhood that we experience daily. Come on this journey with me and Find Your Flourish!
Be you, be focused, be well! Find Your Flourish! |Shanna|
Post that focus directly on your children’s confidence can be read here about building rock solid confidence in your child and read here about securing your child’s confidence.
Check out previous posts from Find Your Flourish! here:
- Functional Fixedness and Its Effects
- 5 Ways to Implement Carlson’s Law to Increase Your Success
- Mastering Midlife: Page 2
- Mastering Midlife: Page 1
- New Quarter; Find out what’s new
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[…] one’s appreciation of one’s own abilities or qualities. Self confidence was addressed on the blog before where it was discussed on an introductory level looking at what shapes it, how to build it, and how to trust yourself. […]
Yess! Confidence really is key in all aspects of life, it comes best when one is authentic. I found more confidence the more I learn about self and live in my unique power. Thanks for the tips Xx always an ongoing process.
I try to work on my confidence so this was a helpful post. I find that trying new things has been helpful for me. Great post! xx
TheQuietGirl | http://www.quietgirlblog.com
Anissa- Thank you so much for reading this post and commenting. I appreciate you! Trying new things can be intimidating at times, but it is a great confidence booster when we step out into the unfamiliar. I am glad that you were able to find something in this post that was helpful to you. |Shanna|
This is an awesome post! As a sport and exercise psychologist, I agree–confidence is life-changing.
Sarah- I appreciate your comment. Having a high level of confidence does allow you to be able to experience new situations that you may have avoided with a lower level of confidence. Confidence does really help us become a better version of ourselves as a person because we seek out what in the past we would have avoided. |Shanna|
I never thought about accepting yourself being tied to trusting yourself, but that makes perfect sense. Great point and excellent post!
Alexa- Thank you for taking the time to read this post. Self acceptance plays such a huge role in trusting ourselves and out self esteem. Being comfortable as who you are opens up the world to you because you no longer restrict yourself from challenging situations. |Shanna|
great post! having confidence in yourself is truly something to really strive for. i think we all need to learn to give ourselves more credit. thanks so much for sharing!