Increase Your Self Confidence- Easy and Practical Tips

If you're looking for a few quick and easy tips to increase your self-confidence, here they are!

Have some things that make you feel good

Keep some precious and valued memories in your mind, and think about them whenever you need to increase your confidence. The idea is to associate these memories with positive thoughts and feelings, so it's a great idea to choose things which increased your self-confidence at the time, events where you were at your best.

Feeling self-conscious saps your energy and does not increase your self-confidence

Being too aware of yourself, focusing on yourself, is the enemy of self-confidence. So if you want to increase your confidence, focus anywhere but on yourself! And how do you do that? Well.....when you begin to feel and increase in your self-consciousness  (which you will notice because your anxiety begins to increase), find something outside yourself to focus on. For example, look at a flower, a wall, the pattern on the drapes, or something else on which you can focus your attention. You can let your thought processes travel wherever they will - for example, who made it, how they made it, what it's made from: all of those things will keep your thoughts off yourself and on something external to you. That will reduce your self-consciousness and hence increase your self-confidence.

Next, suppose you are in a social situation and you suddenly start to feel anxious or lacking in confidence. The remedy here is to do something! Whatever the purpose of the gathering, be it business, pleasure, having fun, there's something you can do: increase your energy levels, turn to your neighbor and talk to them. Even if you don't make serious conversation, there's always something to talk about - even if it's what you've just been doing. Alternatively, talk about why you're there, or what you hope to get out of the meeting.

The point is this - if you are doing something, your attention is occupied, and you won't have the mental space to feel so self-conscious.

This is something we all experience when we're working with other people towards a common goal; the same increased energy we feel in a shared experience lies behind the reduction in self-consciousness and the increase in self-confidence that comes from occupying your mind with a positive, rewarding task.

Use positive self-talk to increase your self-confidence

The ultimate enemy of your confidence is the negative beliefs you repeat to yourself. So don't let those confidence busting thought processes go unchallenged. For example:

"He's more confident than me." People who look confident may not be as confident as you think - in fact they will have moments just as bad as yours...the difference might be that they have the self-confidence to pick themselves up, remind themselves that setbacks happen, and continue on towards their goal without being disheartened.

"I just lack confidence." If you act confident, no-one need ever know how you are feeling. And the great thing is that acting confident actually increases your confidence!

Self-talk like "I'm no good at anything" or "You're no good at anything" is simply wrong. Those are false beliefs which someone else gave to you: parents, teachers, siblings, "friends"....now you can stop that kind of self-criticism and make your own adult judgments about what is and is not a reality for you. To increase your self-esteem, you have to think positively about what you can do and you have to stop the negative thoughts as well!

"But I feel so bad about myself." But what happened in the past is no guide to the future. So if you start to build your confidence using techniques that actually work - and make the increase in confidence stick - then things will change.

There's nothing better than developing an increased level of self-confidence, and it's easier than you might think. There's plenty of material on this website to help you, and its increasing all the time.

There's also the option of an online counseling service for you - and this one is free.