Performance Affirmations for Increasing Confidence

If you often feel shy, small or as though you want to hide away from the world, you may be looking at a confidence issue. Confidence is a feeling or a state of mind and it is developed on a mental level. But confidence can also be seen physically, in the way that you hold yourself in the world. You can tell how confident is by the way they are hunched over hiding away or standing with an open chest and chin high, inviting conversation. To more deeply understand the complex layers of confidence, we will take a look through what confidence is, why you might be lacking it, and how to boost it back up!

• What is Confidence?

Confidence is the feeling or belief that one can have faith or rely upon someone or something. In the case of enhancing performance, that thing is often yourself. You need to be able to trust yourself and believe in yourself if you want to reach your goals because you may be the only one who does believe in your dream, but one is still enough to make it come true!

Confidence is also a state of certainty or a feeling of self-assurance that arises from appreciating one’s own skills and abilities. To build confidence, you need to look at what you have successfully achieved in the past and remind yourself that these skills are still within you. This allows you to look at future challenges with confidence, for there is a strong inner knowing that you can do the same again, or perhaps, you can do even better.

This requires a realistic perspective of your current performance and a thorough investigation of how and where you can enhance your future performances.

• The Difference between Overconfidence and Under Confidence

Now, confidence doesn’t cater for lack of skills, but it can take you half way there. Of course, you still need to be able to know the statistics you are talking about, or show that you can shoot goals, but the confidence part will gain you the first bit of trust.

The key word on the journey to confidence is ‘realistic’. If you brag about your abilities and then fail to follow through with the said results, you are not going to gain any trust from people. This is overconfidence, the state of thinking you are better than you actually are. Overconfidence often comes off as arrogance or narcissism.

Alternatively, if you have a lack of confidence, also referred to as under confidence, this may inhibit your chances of going for new opportunities. Under confidence feels like a sense of embarrassment or a fear of failure when a big decision or bold move needs to be made. If you lack confidence, you may be limiting your chances for growing your career, taking the next step in your relationship, or being on the next sporting team.

To combat under confidence, it is important to reflect upon the opportunities that you have, the viable outcomes and what is holding you back. This will help you to find a realistic projection of the situation and a suitable way to move forward.

• Why am I lacking confidence?

The first thing to remember when looking at low confidence is that it is not your fault. Personality traits, such as lack of confidence, develop from a combination of internal and external factors. These factors look different for everyone, so there are no one-trick fixes all, but there is the art of reflection that can help you to gain more clarity. Contributing factors to low confidence include:

• Cultural Background and Childhood Experience

From a cultural perspective, a lot about your childhood shapes how you view the world today. If you grew up in a place where you had to stay small and quiet to stay safe, then chances are you still have these patterns playing out in your life. In opposite ways, if you were the youngest sibling and you had to stand up for yourself against your older brothers and sisters, you may have developed more natural confidence in early years.

Your parents also have an effect on how confident you are. If a parent was constantly putting you down or telling you that you’re not good enough, there is a good chance you would have believed it. In childhood, this can slowly break down one’s confidence until they are too afraid to speak up or show up in the world.

• Striving for Perfectionism

Many people mistake confidence for perfectionism. You do not have to do something perfectly for you to do it confidently. Let me repeat that. You do not have to do something perfectly or you to do it confidently.

If you wait until you have the perfect technique to perform or the perfect presentation, you will spend most of your life preparing for nothing. You will miss the moment. Sometimes perfect is not the answer. You can choose authenticity, you can choose the messy truth, you can choose to make an action plan and to begin with confidence even if you have no idea what the outcome will be.

• Anxiety, Depression and Low Self-Esteem

Mental health concerns such as anxiety, depression and low self-esteem are on the rise. Similar to the points above, contributing factors to a decline in mental health are social media, mainstream media and a hormonal imbalance. Unexpected events such as trauma, accidents, loss of a loved one or injury can also have a strong effect on mental health and lower your level of confidence.

In the case that a mental health issue is stopping you from being your confident self, it is important to get your condition diagnosed by a health professional and then to work on building up your mental health as a priority. With a correct diagnosis, you will more easily have access to the tools you need to start the path to a healthy mind. With this healthy mind, you will find the confidence you need to take on the world.

Tips for Boosting Confidence:

• Know your Positive Traits

And get to know them well! Really allow yourself to embody the positive traits that you have. What are some of the things you are good at? What are some positive ways that you relate to others? What skills can you share to help others? What skills do you have that you can use to help yourself?

Write down a list of your positive traits and keep the list in a place that you can be reminded of this often, perhaps in your workspace. Positive traits may look like this:

Resilience, empathy, kindness, strong friendships, ability to ask for what I need, a good listener etc…

• Learn your Worth

To understand your worth, you must be able to see where you add value to the world. This doesn’t mean being a celebrity or being spoken about often. No, worth can come in small pockets of goodness, for example, maybe in your job as a barista, you make people smile when they receive their morning coffee. Maybe you add worth by saying hi to your colleagues in the office. Maybe your worth is in the way you listen and solve problems for others.

• Practice Self-love and Compassion

Boosting confidence should come with both a sense of humility and a sense of appreciation for yourself. By inviting self-love and compassion onto your path to confidence, you will learn how to feel okay when a bad day arises, and you will learn how to build more resilience for the challenges ahead of you.

Self-love, as mentioned in the previous chapter, is about looking after your mental well-being in ways that are productive and nourishing for the body. Rather than numbing out with a television binge or a ‘treat meal’, try to proactively move your body, eat healthily and use your self-love tool kit to bring you back on track.

Practicing compassion toward yourself will help you to bounce back from a knock on to your confidence. It will remind you that no matter what situation arises, you are worthy of being seen and heard.

You can also increase your self-esteem and discover why dreams do not come true; you can decide on sessions with a psychologist. If you have problems with self-esteem or with anything, I invite you to a meeting-acquaintance with me; you can choose a convenient place and time here.

The idea for this article was information from the book «Powerful Performance Affirmations» D.Greer

Photocredit: lifecoach; freepik