How Can I Increase My Self-Confidence?

Have you ever known what it’s like to experience low self-confidence? On extreme levels, it can severely affect your sleep, eating habits, and cause major anxiety. Professionally, low self-confidence can cause you to withdraw and disengage from colleagues and can affect your ability to perform menial job tasks. Personally, it can affect your relationships, friendships, and ability or willingness to interact socially.

Many people live daily with some form of low self-confidence. In fact, it’s the most sought after professional or personal development topic that people want to work on. Low self-confidence can play a huge role in people’s day-to-day life, and even the most successful people lack self-confidence at different times in their lives.

Low Self-Confidence Affects Even the Highest Achievers.

If you’re someone who takes big risks, or is curious by nature, it’s normal to lack self-confidence in a new area of study or investment.  Perhaps you’re a successful business executive launching a new business. Maybe you’re a recently promoted manager, or a recent university graduate. In these cases, you may be lacking self-confidence because you lack the experience, or the skills required for the job. Maybe you experienced a poor sales quarter at work, or maybe you were passed over for a job promotion. This can create self-doubt in your ability to perform at work.

Where Does Self-Confidence Come From?

Before we discuss some effective ways to increase your self-confidence, it’s important to understand what self-confidence is and where it comes from. Self-confidence is a state of mind where an individual has belief and self-assurance in themselves to perform a task, role, or manage a particular situation. While some people appear to be born with self-confidence, it really isn’t the case. Self-confidence originates from our experiences and what we’ve been taught.

Many people have lost self-confidence quickly because they’ve suffered through a difficult experience, traumatic event, or received negative feedback in their personal or professional life.

You Can Increase Your Self-Confidence.

The good news is that if you are lacking confidence there are ways to regain it, and in some cases, become even more confident than you were before. Preparation and planning are keys to developing and improving your self-confidence. If you’re in a a situation you’re uncomfortable with or have never experienced, try to envision how it may unfold and proactively plan for how you manage it. Document, prepare, and practice it to remove any potential anxiety. Preparation and repetition creates a comfort and understanding of how to handle any situation.

Here are three additional steps you can take to increase your self-confidence:

1.   Do What You Love – Creating time and space in your life to enjoy the things you love to do will bring you joy and self-care. Happiness strengthens your mindset and enables you to bring clarity and focus to building your self-confidence.

2.   Exercise - Exercise releases hormones that can reduce stress, increase happiness, and stimulate brain cell growth. It can also make you feel better about yourself mentally, spiritually, and physically.

3.   Work with a Professional Coach – Working with a coach can be extremely effective towards helping you increase your self-confidence. They can help you create a vision of self-confidence and create actionable steps to achieve it.  A professional coach is a trusted guide who will support you, keep you focused, and can monitor your progress.

What Are The Benefits Of Having Self-Confidence?

There are many benefits to having self-confidence. When you’re self-confident, you perform at your best when it matters the most. You can influence others more readily. Self-confidence can increase your personal and professional drive. Self-confidence can increase your happiness and reduce social anxiety.

When you invest time and work into your professional and personal development, you can become the most self-confident version of you.

To learn more about how professional coaching can increase your confidence or schedule a free 20-minute consultation, click here.  

Why Are Some People More Driven To Succeed?

Have you ever been to a gym or fitness centre during the first week of January? I like to compare the atmosphere to organized chaos as people scramble to access workout space and equipment. Gym members are energized and focused on getting their workout in no matter how challenging the gym experience may be.

January is easily the busiest month of the year for gyms memberships. Many people feel dissatisfied with their health habits after the holiday season. Some people want to adopt a healthier lifestyle at the start of the new year. And some people just want to increase their confidence.

These are great reasons to join a gym. What’s interesting is that the gyms start to slow down about four to eight weeks into the new year. Fitness industry statistics show that 18% of new gym members quit going to the gym by the end of February. What’s even more alarming, is that 80% of gym members who join in January, quit within five months.

Why do people quit going to the gym or quit anything at all for that matter?

Whenever you create a new change in your life, there are going to be times when that change is challenged by some form of resistance. Whether it’s adding a healthy habit, starting a new business plan, or creating a new revenue stream, you may start out strong and feel fully committed, but your personal drive may fade over time.  This resistance can come in the form of stress, anxiety, frustration, or emotional fatigue. It challenges your desire or personal drive and threatens to stop you from persevering.

What Is Personal Drive?

Personal drive or desire is closely related to your inherent motivation. It’s aligned with your core values, identity, and capabilities. Inherent motivation offers personal satisfaction or fulfillment when achieving goals in life. In other words, it has a deeper meaning for you.

When something you want to change has a deeper meaning to you, you are more likely to withstand the resistance to change, and achieve what you want. When you have the personal drive within you, it’s easier to set and achieve external motivating factors such as goals and targets you want to reach.

How Can I Increase My Personal Drive?

Working with an experienced coach is a great option to help you increase your commitment to achieve what you want. They are trained to help you explore new possibilities and how they align with your core values, identity, and capabilities.

Here are some key questions a coach may use to strengthen your personal drive:

• By achieving this, what does it give you that’s even more important?

• What else becomes possible for you?

• Who else benefits when you achieve this?

• How might you commit to this?

• What might prevent you from achieving it?

In addition to helping strengthen your personal drive, your coach will also support you to stay focused when the resistance to change becomes hard to overcome. They’ll monitor your progress and ensure you’re staying focused and on track. Your coach is motivated to help you move beyond what you thought you could achieve.

When you combine a strong personal drive with actionable steps, you can achieve incredible results that can last a lifetime.

To learn more about professional coaching or schedule a free 20-minute consultation, click here.