O ne of the toughest things is having to act confident when you’re not feeling that way.
Confidence is not about how much money you have, or how great your career or relationship is. You can have absolutely nothing and still have a very strong sense of self. Essentially, confidence is how you feel about yourself. It is a feeling. Luckily, there are many things you can do to elevate how you are feeling about yourself, which will, in turn, amp up your confidence level.
We tend to be most confident when we look good, when we feel accomplished, and when we feel supported. So, in a very simple way—what can you do that would make you look good, feel accomplished, and feel supported?
Here are 15 Tactics on How to Be More Confident:
1. Exercise! This is purposefully at the top of this list. Exercise not only helps you to look great, it helps you internally by releasing positive-feeling endorphins throughout your body, helping you to be in a better mood. Exercise also helps you to have more energy.
2. Always look great. Take the time to put together your outfits so that you always look your best, because when you look your best, you will naturally feel more confident in interacting with others.
3. Do your best to smile at others. This will help elevate your own mood as well as theirs, and it will help to create connections.
4. If you are really shy, practice making connections with people. For example, maybe push yourself to initiate a conversation with at least one new person a day. It can be a simple ‘hello’ to the barista.
5. Set daily goals and accomplish them. This can be as simple as making sure that you have checked and responded to all of your emails each day, or that you have taken a 15-minute walk around the neighborhood. Feeling accomplished will always help with your self confidence.
6. If you are having a hard time accomplishing things, try having an accountability partner. It’s easier to be motivated if someone else is there cheering you on and supporting you in achieving your goals, and you are helping them with theirs.
7. Join a group or organization that is focused on something that you are passionate about. Maybe even a start a group in your own community.
8. Have a daily practice, something that you do every single day, no matter what. This could be something like meditation, alone time, dinner with your family, spending time with a pet, reading, writing, etc. Having a daily practice helps you build trust with yourself, which helps you with your self-confidence.
9. Try new things. Now, this may initially challenge your self-confidence, but the more you do it, the more you will realize that you don’t have to be perfect! You just have to get out there and try. It’s helpful to view trying new things as an experiment. You’re just experimenting with comedy improv. You don’t have to sign up to do it for the rest of your life (although you may find that you love it). It’s just an interesting thing to try.
10. Have a solid support system. Having people that love you and want you to succeed around you is SO helpful! If you don’t already have a supportive family or group of friends, go make your own. There are tons of meetup groups you can join.
11. Celebrate the parts of you that are unique. Very often, people feel like they don’t belong because they are different in some way. I would encourage you to love and honor they ways that you are different. How can you change your perspective to see how that is a positive for you?
12. Recite a positive affirmation on a daily basis. (This could be your daily practice that was listed above.)
13. Instead of focusing on all the things that you didn’t do well or didn’t accomplish, focus on the things that you did do and prize yourself for those! Instead of saying, “Oh, I wasn’t able to do my one-long workout today.” Try saying, “I’m so grateful that I was able to find the time to play softball with my niece for 30-minutes today. She was so happy and that made me feel great.”
14. Speak to yourself with love and kindness. Very often, we are much more critical and mean to ourselves than we would ever be with others. Speak to yourself with the same kindness that you would speak to someone you really care about.
15. Shift your perspective. There is no faster way to be more confident than to change your thoughts! Whatever we believe in will, most likely, come to pass. If you can shift your perspective to one of strength, persistence, perseverance, and positivity, you can conquer any situation.
If you are working on boosting your self-confidence, the most important thing for you to remember is this: the main trick to feeling more confident is to be consistently loving and kind to yourself.
