Methods For Building Confidence

So, you’re unconfident, maybe a little introverted and want to become one of the people who you see in the street, with the gift of the gab, who can talk to any one fluently and doesn’t even have to think about conversation.

They make you think, “I would love to be confident”, but you accept that this could never be you, so you put your head down and carry on with your day.

Right?

While this does look unattainable, and the idea of socialising is daunting, what you seek is very well within your grasp. Confidence, like any habit, is learned, ‘Not a gift from the Gods’.

I, very much like you, once sought this very power others possessed. It didn’t seem possible at first. Every time I tried to be confident, I felt I made myself look like a fool. So, I’d go back to my old habits of keeping to myself, minimal communication, not socialising unless it was with someone I already knew. However, I didn’t give up. One day something changed significantly when I heard a quote that made me realise I already possess the very skill I seek.

“You’re not that important, everybody else is too busy thinking about themselves”.

At first glance with this quote, you may be a little offended by this because people want to seem important, better than that people want to be important. However, I would argue that this is probably one of the most important sentence you could ever read when it comes to your confidence. The reason this gave me such an epiphany is that it changed my entire perspective around what around how people think.

Let me give you an example: let’s say you mess up and do something embarrassing, who do you who do you think of?

You think of yourself and how much you look like an idiot. Everyone thinks the exact same when they mess up too. Yes, they will notice at the time, however, everybody is too busy thinking about themselves to remember when you embarrassed yourself.

Others may see and talk, but the conversation changes, they go home, and they get on with their lives. By not being THAT important that people don’t talk and think about you 24/7 if freeing. So, freeing in fact that when you accept this and apply this mindset to your life, you can accomplish more due to the fact that you don’t care if you mess up because… you’re not that important.

Just to put this into perspective, take some of the most important people in the world, they aren’t that important. Celebrities aren’t THAT important. Take the President of the U.S.A. While he is important when it comes to his job (he has task to meet and a country to run) as an individual, he is not all that important, time will pass and there will be another president. Someone else for the news to talk about, someone else to take his job.

When something big happens with a celebrity or a president, you and your friends may talk about it. Then you change conversation, go home and get on with your lives. You don’t continuously talk about them and think about them 24/7. This is a good thing, because the same applies to you.

So how does this relate to confidence?

Through perspective.

With new perspective, you can do things you want and not have to worry about how you look or what people think because they are too busy thinking about themselves. Bear this in mind with the methods that follow…

“Fortune Favours The Brave”

DISCLAIMER: Within the paragraphs that follow, I’ll only be recommending methods that I have used, that way I know that they work and I’m not just feeding you rubbish I read on the internet. They are something that can be used to help yourself in social situation or in more intimate settings where you want to feel more comfortable.

Method 1 — Interaction Building

(Effective for communicating with people on a day-to-day basis.)

The method is what I’ll call ‘interaction building’. I think I got it from a YouTube video from ‘Improvement Pill’.

What Interaction building is, is where you go out anywhere where, where you can find people, this could be the shop, the park, catching the bus or waiting at the traffic lights with a stranger and interact with as many people as possible. Say hi, create a conversation, wave, do ANYTHING. No matter how good or bad the reply, it counts.

(And by anything I don’t mean harass and cause trouble, no matter how bad the reply is…)

What you do is you interact with as many people as possible. Talk to anyone and everyone. Whether it’s to someone you pass, with a cashier, paying someone a compliment or asking someone about something. The goal is to talk to as many people as possible, no matter how small the interaction. The other person doesn’t even have to reply.

Try your best to try and keep count of how many interactions you have, keep a tally on your phone, then at the end of the day, see how many you have. Do this for a week and each day, try and top the last. You’ll find yourself creating conversation with people you wouldn’t even imaging you’d be talking too.

What you don’t realise is a lot of people actually love to talk AND meet new people, they are usually just to awkward/ shy or don’t know what to say to a stranger.

Tip: at work all day and can’t find the time to go out and interact? Go and talk to that co-worker you haven’t spoken to before. It’ll make a great start.

Method 2 — Go to the cinema… Alone

(Builds confidence in social settings)

Sounds Daunting right?

Wrong.

You’re literally sitting in a dark room by yourself, watching a film. YOU SHOULD’NT BE TALKING ANYWAY.

You’d be surprised to realise that nobody ACTUALLY cares that you’re there alone. You won’t believe it, BUT, they are actually too busy watching the film. That’s right. Everyone is too busy watching the film to care that a stranger they have never met before has come to a cinema to watch something because they want to. The anxiety you feel when going to do activities on your own disappears the more you do it. Don’t be afraid to go and enjoy yourself because nobody else is with you.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been to watch a film on my own. Yes the first time felt a bit awkward, however, once the film started, all that anxiety left because I wasn’t in my head anymore, I was engrossed in the film. If there is something I like, I’ll go alone. I don’t go to boost my confidence anymore; I go because I actually want to go. If my friends want to come, great. And if they cancel, so what?, the plans don’t change.

Maybe you’ve been in that situation, you’ve wanted to go somewhere with your friends, but last minute, they cancelled. Yep. So, what did you do? You decided you weren’t going to go because who wants to go to the cinema or to eat on a Friday night on their own, looking like a loner?

Doing an activity alone does not make you some sort of outcast or freak of nature lingering around in the crowds of society. It makes you a little more like everyone else wishes they were, confident.

Method 3 — Reading aloud

(Help with fluency when talking to others)

This method allows you to build up confidence by speaking fluently. Can you read? Yes (or you wouldn’t be reading this). Can you speak? Most likely. But can you speak fluently?

Fluency is a skill within itself. (I don’t mean language fluency, I mean being more articulate). Part of the reason why people do not feel confident when talking to others is because they forget what they want to say. They stutter, or mumble. They fill gaps in there sentences with “um” and “ahh”.

Part of looking and feeling confident is speaking slowly; in a controlled manner, speaking clearly; so, everyone can hear you and speaking fluently; so, everyone can understand what you’re saying.

Reading out loud, is like hacking confidence. You don’t have to go outside and interreact with people, you can do it alone and it STILL helps you build up fluency with talking.

If possible, I would recommend doing this with someone else because, not only are you reading aloud, but you’re also getting comfortable reading in a more intimate setting with just one person and this supercharge your fluency even further. However, both methods work.

You can pick any book, fiction or non-fiction. Any reading will help. I read regularly aloud with my mum, and it’s boosted my confidence and fluency when speaking drastically.

Tip: When reading, pause slightly at commas and pause a little long at full stop, this with help with fluency even further. Don’t just read it all off in one go without taking a breath. Read how you would speak. This is very important to help build articulation.

To feel confident, you have to do things confidently. The more you read out loud, the more you will feel confident talking.

Method 4 — Go to the gym.

(Builds confidence within yourself)

The more you exercise the less anxiety you feel. This is due to feeling more confident within in your body and the abilities that it is able to perform. Exercise is not punishment for what you’ve eaten, it’s a celebration of what your body can do.

The reason why I would recommend going to the gym instead of just working out at home, is because it gets you out of the house and out of your comfort zone. While being in the house and exercising you still feel more confident. Exercising in the gym feels different. Even if you don’t socialise, you are in a social setting, so you start to feel more confident, and that social anxiety starts to peel away.

The amount of confidence that I seemed to have also correlates with amount of consistent exercise I do. If I ever get to a stage where I miss the gym for a week or so, my confidence seems slightly off.

There have been countless article and studies that have shown how exercise improved confidence (I will link some below). If science can prove it makes a difference, it can be applied to your life to do the same.

So, I say to you, don’t worry about what others think of you, they’re too busy thinking about themselves.

A last recommendation — The last thing that I would recommended is to read a book I read a while ago called ‘on confidence’ by The School of Life. This book gives you a more in-depth insight into confidence and the phycology behind it so you can feel more confident.

conclusion comment:

So, I say to you, don’t worry about what others think of you, they’re too busy thinking about themselves.

“go forth and conquer…”

Thank you for taking the time to read my article. If you found it helpful and think someone else could too, please share it.

I write mainly on self-development. I occasionally write on personal experiences, interest and other topics too. If you are interested in self-development, then please read some of my other articles on the medium at https://medium.com/@louiejsolo

Enjoy.