Nerves…Well, I don’t know what kind of perverse delight they get by letting us down at the most inopportune moment! Self-doubt is like the bad patch that many sportsmen suffer from: it deserts them just when they need it the most.

Like most others, you too must have gone through this frame of mind: just when you want to do something significant at your daily life, your family life, or your career, or in just any area of your life, you begin to hesitate. Have you gone through the situation of feeling like backing off just when you needed to take off from the springboard and dive into the pool?

Relax! The good news is that this is not as bad as you think. You will perhaps be relieved to know that even the most accomplished, the most powerful, and the most famous people have had it. The better news is that it can be overcome. The key to overcoming self-doubt and nervousness is to build self-confidence. In this blog, I want to show you how to build self-confidence in the 5 fastest ways.

I will be explaining how to build self-confidence in 5 fastest ways in the following pattern:

• What is Self-Confidence?
• Why Build Self-Confidence?
• How To Gain Self-Confidence Fast?

What is Self-Confidence?

Simple: it is the confidence or trust in one’s own abilities. These abilities could relate to one’s creative strengths, intellectual abilities, or one’s sense of discretion. A person with self confidence is one who has the innate belief that she can tackle a situation using these abilities. Having said this, it is not always a good thing to have over confidence! This can pull down the strongest people at times and make them complacent.

Why Build Self-Confidence?

This question is as basic as asking why one needs to succeed.

These are just some of the reasons why Self-Confidence is important:

• It lets us challenge ourselves to do better in times of crisis
• We develop an aura of self-confidence around ourselves
• We acquire greater panache in doing and handling things
• We are respected
• Our rise to the top is a lot easier.

Sadly, the opposite of all these becomes true when we lack in self-confidence.

How To Gain Self-Confidence Fast?

Well, this is the million-dollar question for most people who believe they want to learn how to gain confidence. Let us straightway get into my list of five fastest ways by which to how to work on self-confidence. I have whittled down the many tips to these 5 simply because I believe they are quite easily implementable, and hence, are more effective than the rest. My belief of course, is based on experience.

Just before getting into these tips, I would like to introduce a wonderfully relevant online course that I am sure will go a long way in helping you implement these tips:

Introspect

Have you noticed that when we point a finger at someone, three of our own fingers point back to us? Own up objectively and honestly where you are going wrong. The first step to gaining self-confidence is to accept that if you are feeling low on confidence, then you are the reason for that and nothing else or nobody else.

So, now that you have zeroed in on the locus of the problem, you should be able to figure out how to come out of it. This leads us to the next tips.

Understand

If the first tip helped you locate the source of your problem, I am offering this next one to help you deal with ways of getting to the specifics of the root of your problems. Start with an understanding of why you are where you are before you start working on building self-confidence. Ask yourself questions such as:

• Why did I land in this situation first of all?
• What factors, circumstances, or experiences have I allowed to control me and led me to the situation I am in?
• What are the causes for this? Is it friends, is it family, is it my bad financial shape, my health, my body shape, my low communication skills, my inappropriate educational qualification… just any of these could be the cause. The way to build self-confidence is to find the reason behind the need for it.

Experience

I am going to be devoting considerable space for this tip. This is because experiences have a huge effect on one’s self-confidence.

Learn to tackle your problem head on. It is only when you learn how to destroy those disturbing or annoying factors that you gain experience, which in turn will help you eliminate, or at least reduce the obstacles.

Try these simple things: if your friends are the problem, stay away from them. If money is the issue, cut down on your expenses. If you are feeling low because your body image is causing you to become self-conscious, work on improving it.

So, now you have understood where the roots of your self-doubt lie. The main thing to do once you have understood the source of your self-doubt is to push yourself into doing something that you had all along believed you could not.

It is all in the mind, we have heard wise people say. If you want to understand how to believe in yourself and your self-confidence, let me take you to this deliciously wonderful, pertinent, and powerful quote from Vincent Van Gogh:

Don’t these words excellently summarize the entire idea of pushing oneself and rising above the obstacles? 

There is a key difference between actually having confidence and just showing you have confidence. One of the best ways to build is by facing the situations and earning the real experience from the situations.

So, how does one build a positive outlook towards experiences? It is said, very rightly and wisely, that 10 percent of life is what happens to us, and 90 percent is how we take it! So, perception is everything. Take every failure as not something that should weigh you down, but as the big lesson that will arm you with the ammunition that will help you face the next challenge.

Look at it this way: Once you have gone through a situation or faced your fear, you will have a solid foundation to build self-confidence. We have all known that bad experiences can affect our self-confidence in a bad way, but have you realized that positive experiences can boost it in unimaginable ways? As you cut down on bad experiences and create more positive experiences, you learn to move from a negative mindset to a positive one.

What we need is the will to push oneself to take that initial step to motivate ourselves or remind us that once we take the first step, we can achieve something or learn to face our fears. The key is to not get bogged down in our past mistakes.

Remember that you may not be able to achieve colossal results overnight. It requires learning, improvisation, and persistence. It is important to persist and not give up if you fail in your initial trials. This will make you habituated to facing a challenging situation, to a point that you will be uncomfortable when you are not facing them!

Believe me, that is what self-confidence is. Were we born with this quality? Definitely not. But can we acquire the experiences and processes to cultivate it consistently? Definitely YES!

Listen

Listening is a powerful tool of not only communication but also in helping you gain self-confidence. Listening to others such as your mentors, close ones, teachers, family, and perhaps most importantly, your own inner self, can help you boost confidence dramatically. It gives you sense of security and comfort that after all, you are not alone.

Build

So, now that you have a clear idea about how to build self-confidence, my next tip is about how you can build on it. Why I say this is because it is not something that you do once and forget. It is a long process. You could think of confidence building as more of a journey than a destination.

These are the ways by which you can build on the plan you have embarked in building your self-confidence:

• Chalk Out A Goal And A Timeline: Obviously, no effort is meaningful if it is not mapped to a set of goals. Figure out what you want to achieve and how you can improve over fixed time periods, such as a month, a quarter, a year or so.
• Share: One of the best things about any learning is that the more you share it, the more you gain. You will realize that as you share your success with people around you, you will not only have helped them achieve success too, but will also see your own joy multiplying. The joy of giving, after all!
• Enjoy: Never forget the most vital element of a long-term plan such as how to build self-confidence. Enjoy the exercise, have fun making the journey, and enjoy every bit of it. Or else, you end up putting unnecessary pressure, which will take away the joy of what you want to do.

Conclusion

As I wind up my two cents on how to build self-confidence in the 5 fastest ways, I would like to ask you your thoughts on this blog. Do you think the tips I have suggested are worthy of implementation? Do you believe that incorporating them into your daily routine will help you enhance your self-confidence, or do you think something needed to be added?

Please let us know. We are very eager to enhance the learning experience of people like you!