How to Be Positive | 6 Steps to Gaining Self-Confidence

You ask how to be confident of myself in front of others, whether in school ,university or work, you have to know that if you do not trust yourself, how do you want others to trust you? With this article, I will teach you how to gain self-confidence through 7 simple steps, but first, here is some important information about self-confidence.

Information about self-confidence

In all difficult and dangerous jobs, companies build self-confidence among their employees before sending them to complete their tasks. In such circumstances, it is not success that builds their self-confidence, but on the contrary, self-confidence is what drives them to success. You do not need self-confidence only when your profession is difficult and dangerous, but even if you are running a small project, you need it in order to grow your activity and succeed in your field, because you will have to break into areas with which you need self-confidence.

We need self-confidence when we get out of our comfort zone, which are the areas in which we feel safe and that often keep us in our place, and in order to advance and develop we have to penetrate this zone and access areas that make us feel fear and anxiety because our mind is not comfortable with these areas and is programmed to keep us safe and we wouldn’t do it without self-confidence. Here are a few mental techniques that will help you become confident in yourself and build self-esteem.

Self-Confidence Steps:

1- Get Out of Your Comfort Zone

When we were kids, we thought we could do anything, but sometime between childhood and adulthood, our enthusiasm waned and we no longer dreamed of those big dreams. Society imposed on us its convictions about what we could and couldn’t do. But the question is, how do we know what we can do and what we cannot without trying? Staying in our comfort zone is what prevents us from trying, we are content with what is safe and do not want to take risks, we are content with a modest job with limited income and do not seek to set up our business, for the sole purpose of fear, of failure and losing our job.

If you have ambition in life, you should always break through the comfort zone by knowing its limits and transcending them, and you will be amazed by what you can do and that will increase your confidence in yourself automatically. When you penetrate your comfort zone, you expand it little by little, so after a time, the areas you feared become within your comfort zone, and the more you do that, the more you trust yourself and expand your comfort zone further and so on.

2- Don’t Confuse Memories with Facts

Our memory does not store information as they are in reality, instead it takes a summary of our experience and then stores it in the way that is most understandable to us, so we see some people giving different testimonies to the same event. Your brain has an internal biased system, which means that it stores information based on your stored convictions, values, and self-image. This selective system helps your brain not to be overwhelmed with too much information.

You have to pay attention that your memory does not always give you accurate information. For example, if you do not value yourself, your brain tends to store information that confirms this conviction (not valuing yourself) and this is all you will remember of the events. In order to overcome this problem, rethink your memories that confirm your conviction of lack of self-confidence and try to get a more accurate point of view or talk to others who may have different perspectives.

This may sound crazy, but it is useful. Talking to yourself makes you smarter, strengthens your memory, and helps you focus. Some* studies indicate that we speak to ourselves between 300 to 1000 words per minute. Talking to yourself should be in positive terms because this affects the response of the brain to you, for example, you can say “I know what I will do in this case” or convince yourself to see things as challenges rather than problems, you turn your reaction into positive actions.

3- Think Positively

To overcome your negative thoughts, you simply have to use positive thinking. We as humans are always afraid of the new and the unknown. It is a protection system that helped humans to survive when life was still primitive, but not everything new or different is a threat to our lives. This negative thinking can reflect on our self-confidence because it makes us focus on everything we did wrong. To overcome negative and frustrating thoughts:

• Think of 5 positive thoughts whenever a negative thought comes to you.

• Study each positive thought for 20 seconds (or so) before moving on to the next.

• Accept negative and positive feelings together.

• Do not try to suppress negative feelings.

• Determine the feelings as they are, and do not start an internal dialogue about negative feelings, because that strengthens them.

4- Be More Curious

Curiosity is an important characteristic for anyone who wants to be successful and self-confident. Curiosity is the basis on which progress and development are built. If you are always curious, you are constantly learning and your level is constantly improving. Retrain yourself to be constantly curious by going through new experiences and learning new things. Ask questions and be curious because this will:

• Makes your mind active instead of idle.

• Encourages you to notice new ideas.

• It opens up new horizons and opportunities for you.

• It develops your adventurous spirit and leads you to new destinations.

5- Overcome Doubt Regarding Your Abilities

Doubting your abilities always makes you at the mercy of other people. You wear the victim’s dress and the victim, as we know, does not own its fate. Instead, take off the victim’s dress and take responsibility, and be sure that you are the cause of everything that happens to you, whether good or evil, and since it was you who got yourself involved, you also can get yourself out of it. Since you could remove that ugly victim dress you can manage getting out of every problem you might face.

6- Overcome Your Fears

When we are in control, we are not afraid, when we are comfortable in something it is not scary anymore, when we lose control we do not think clearly because our feelings are driving us, so fear seems random and irrational, feelings are controlling us. That is why you must always challenge your fear and not ignore it. Ask yourself what you are afraid of and imagine the worst that could happen and how you would act then, when you give yourself the choices that you can do, fear loses its power because then you have regained control and as I said at the beginning: When we control the situation, we are not afraid anymore.

I hope this helps some of you who are lacking self-confidence as I used to be. I am still working on my self-confidence so why not share it with all of you and help each other out by sharing useful information,

Share your opinions down below as I am very interested in reading your comments.