Have you ever considered the fact that you can actually boost your self confidence? Well actually you can. Nobody is born with a limitless supply of self-confidence. Those who seem to have incredible confidence have worked extremely hard for years to build it. Self-confidence is something that you and you should learn how to build up because life tends to deflate it. Along with the outside influences that can affect our self-esteem, we also have to deal with the inner critic that is continually telling us we aren’t good enough, pretty enough, thin enough, thick enough, smart enough, witty enough…blah blah blah..

Here are five things that you can do to help boost your self-confidence.

Silence Your Inner Critic

Some of the harshest comments that we hear come from ourselves, come from the still small voice of our inner critic. When your inner critic becomes overactive and inaccurate, you may start to suffer from low self-esteem. To help combat your inner critic, look for evidence to support or deny the things that that nagging voice is saying to you. Instead focusing on the negativity, look for unique opportunities to compliment, congratulate, and reward yourself, even for your smallest accomplishments. That’s a great way to actively silence the inner critic.

Do Something Every Day That Scares You

Do you want to become fearless and thereby boost your self confidence? Do something scary that moves you closer to your goals. Fear and lack of action plummets our self confidence.  The best way for you to overcome fear and boost your self confidence is to face it head-on. That’s right, do it afraid. Getting out of your comfort zone and facing your fears will help you to gain more confidence in ways that you never thought possible. By doing something that scares you every day, you’ll start to gain confidence from those experiences and will quickly experience a boost in your self-confidence.

Visualize Yourself as You Want to Be

Visualization is a powerful technique that requires you to see a picture of yourself that you are proud of, in your mind. When struggling with low self-esteem, we often have a poor perception of ourselves that tends to be inaccurate. Practice visualizing a beautiful version of yourself achieving your goals, to help you boost your confidence.

Set Realistic Goals

Setting unrealistic goals that are difficult to achieve will only cause you to become discouraged about your abilities. Start by setting small goals for yourself that you can reach quickly. Never despise small beginnings. Baby steps have a way of moving us forward and boosting our confidence in the process. Once you’ve achieved some success, you can move on to more challenging goals.

Affirm Yourself

The trick to making lasting changes it to shift the way you view yourself. We tend to believe the stories we tell ourselves, so repeating positive affirmations daily will help to boost your self-confidence by creating a different story. To get your mind to accept the positive affirmations quickly, phrase them as a question. Our brains are wired to seek answers to a question, without analyzing if the question is valid.

Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit. – E.E. Cummings

In order to follow your heart, pursue your dreams and operate in your purpose, you have to constantly overcome obstacles. Let’s face it, curating your life, going in the opposite direction of the status quo takes guts! I mean real guts! It’s easy to pretend that you have courage and you don’t care what others are saying about you and what you’re doing but usually the fact that you talk about it almost constantly is a real clue that you might not actually have the self confidence that you conning yourself into believing that you have….whew…run on sentence..I know..but you get the point.

Every day we are bombarded with numerous things that can threaten our self-confidence and undermine our self esteem, with these tips you can start to take charge of building yourself up and boosting your self-confidence. For real!

And by the way, you are AWESOME!

All the best,

Elaine