Increase Your Self-Confidence
July 13, 2009 by
Filed under Self Improvement
Hi! I’m Celes, life coach to live your best life. You are reading an abridged version of an article I wrote about How To Increase Self-Confidence. For the full article, read here: Increase Self-Confidence at CelestineChua.com, my personal development blog to live your best life. For free, premium articles on how to live your best life, please check out my blog.
How To Increase Self-Confidence
There are 3 main ways you can use to increase self-confidence.
1. Conditioning Yourself
The first is via conditioning to impose the sense of self-belief. It’s an outside->in method, where you adopt actions to make yourself feel confident.
For example, working on
Dressing: Improving your dressing, how you look
Body language: Improve your posture
Mental techniques: Using meditation paraliminal tapes, Anchoring (NLP method)
Others
These actions are efficacious because they give you a self-confidence boost almost immediately after you do them. However, the effects are rarely long-lasting – you need to repeatedly remind yourself to do them, unless you have permanently conditioned yourself to do that
2. Obtain Symbols Of Worth
The second is working within yourself to address the inadequancies that are making you feel low self-confidence. This is the more practical method.
Self-confidence is often tied with having more capabilities or knowledge. Many people lack self-confidence because they feel they are not as competent. For example, if you have low self confidence in your job, it may be because you are lacking the information and know-how to perform well. People who possess a high level of competency in a certain area often develop a high self-confidence in that area.
he key to developing competency is to engage in knowledge acquisition and repeatedly do it till you perfect it. Eventually, you will find yourself so competent in the area that you become very self-confidence.
However, the increase in self-confidence only lasts as long as the symbols of worth are valid. If they were to be removed from you or lose their relevance as a symbol of worth, your self-confidence will decrease accordingly.
Imagine a tennis player who sees his worth based on his victories in his tennis games. He keeps practicing to increase his odds of victories. When he wins, his self-confidence increases; however when he loses a game, his self-confidence increases. This person’s self-confidence changes based on the outcome of the games.
Thus, to work on your self-confidence via a permanent, we have a third method.
3. Working On Your Belief Of What Represents Worth
The third method addresses lack of self-confidence directly rather than working on the symptoms.While the previous two methods definitely help to a certain extent and can be a quick way to boost your mental condition, they are usually short-term. Conditioning is sort of a quick fix method to induce a temporary self confidence, while acquiring symbols of worth only helps to the extent where the symbols are by your side and still relevant. Both of them address symptoms of the problem rather than its root.
The actual root of the problem is your belief that you need to be those things before you can experience self-worth.
The only prerequisite for self confidence is a sense of self belief. Start thinking about a symbol of worth to you. Is it competency? Is it how much money you earn? Is it how good you look? Then, ask yourself: Why must you have to have these before you can feel confident about yourself?
These presumptions of what represents worth are largely due to
social perceptions. All the beliefs that we need to have certain things
to be confident have all been conditioned in the society, rather than
being real truths.
Celestine Chua writes at CelestineChua.com, personal development blog to help you be your best self and live your best life. It covers a lot of content, including how to increase self-confidence, goal achievement, time management and more.
Article Source: Increase Your Self-Confidence



















