By Margi Matters

How to build self confidence is a simple process and quite easy once you understand  the  process and dynamics.

Why is it that a particularly bad hair day, or carrying a few extra pounds, or turning up to a social event in “the wrong outfit”( like being the only person erroneously wearing a wild fancy dress outfit!) can wilt self confidence and have us seeking out the nearest hiding place?
How come one comment from decades ago can still cause us to doubt ourselves, to feel we are stupid, selfish or unworthy of good  things.

What is going on when we have a panic attack about standing in front of a group to speak or are terrified to attend a social event alone .

In one word it is all about judgement.

If you want to learn how to build self confidence one critical area to address is how to become immune to judgement from others and how to stop judging ourselves.

There are two key areas that erode or prevent self confidence:

• Judging yourself
• Fear of others judging you.

Non judgement is the opposite to judgement. We need to learn to stop judging ourselves, stop judging others and to take back the power we give to others to judge us and have it effect us.

Perhaps our greatest and deepest need is to feel loved. In close companionship with love, is acceptance. This is one of our greatest needs. We tend to make acceptance a pre-requisite for love. If we judge ourselves to be unacceptable, we also tend to judge ourselves to be unlovable or unworthy of love. Most of us find it difficult to love someone we do not accept.

In addition to not judging ourselves we also must accept ourselves. Who we are, as we are. The most powerful pathway to becoming immune to the negative judgements of other people and a critical component in any program focused on how to build self confidence is to fully and unconditionally accept ourselves.

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1. Improving Self Confidence and The Role Of Self Esteem

By Margi Matters

Improving self confidence and improving self esteem is a package deal. Improving self confidence is a lot like baking a cake! Although there is much tasty variety in the flavours and texture of cakes, there are certain essential ingredients and a certain method to follow in the way you treat and blend the ingredients if you want to get the best results.  If you are using eggs, leaving the shells on is not an option if you want the best results! It is necessary to do certain things when you are improving self confidence if you want the best results.

Self esteem is like the oven!  The essential piece of equipment that allows your confidence to be formed – to alchemise confidence from raw ingredients to fully formed and stable results. Without the oven, the ingredients are just a mash of ingredients. All that raw potential just waiting for you!

Low self esteem is like rejecting yourself. This is not a viable position for improving self confidence! How can you feel confident or be improving self confidence if you don’t like, accept or value yourself! How can you feel confident if you do not trust yourself, your decisions, your opinions, your path.

Low self esteem is putting a low value on yourself, having a low regard for yourself, holding yourself in low “esteem” – commonly experienced as feeling worthless or inadequate. Feeling “not good enough”. The question to ask yourself is , not good enough for what? Or should that be not good enough for whom?

Low self esteem is characterised by continually judging ourselves negatively. The process of improving confidence requires us stop doing this! Immediately!

Think of all the ways you judge yourself as being  right or wrong, good or bad. You  may be surprised by just how often you do this during the day with what you do, what you don’t do, what you think, what you say to yourself and what you say to other people. Improving confidence and self esteem begins with a focus on becoming more aware of your self and your relationship with yourself.

Recognise that no matter what has happened in the past, you have a choice right now to change your relationship with yourself. To stop negatively judging and rejecting yourself  and instead, decide to start accepting yourself .

Improving self confidence begins with working on self esteem and you can start immediately by increasing self awareness and learning to accept yourself.

Related posts:

1. Building Confidence and Self Esteem – The Foundations of Personal Power
2. Improving Self Confidence and Self Talk
3. Improving Self Confidence and Communication Skills

By Margi Matters

If you want to enjoy success and the best possible relationships with other people, developing your interpersonal skills is essential. As with any skills, the process is to learn each skill and practice it until it becomes virtually automatic and effortless.

Interpersonal skills are like the oil that keeps an engine running smoothly. If there is no oil, the engine seizes up and you won’t be going anywhere no matter how much effort you put into planning your trip or your destination.

Interpersonal skills have several subsets – communication skills are the foundation skills that impact every area of your life. Of these the skills of listening, being able to respond and express yourself accurately and effectively, plus assertiveness skills are top of the list.

Communication skills are about conveying clear, accurate and appropriate messages and ensuring that “the message sent is the message received”. Communication skills are a two way interaction, sending and receiving.  One of the aims is to avoid or minimise misunderstandings ,  inaccuracies and manipulations of various kinds.

Emotional intelligence is the buzz word that refers to the interpersonal skills of managing your own emotional life and the emotions of other people. Emotional intelligence is based in self awareness and the ability to respond rather than react. We need to work on expanding our self awareness and understanding, plus our awareness and understanding in relation to what could be going on for other people. We also need to continually expand the response repertoire we have available to us at any time. The greater our awareness, understanding and specific interpersonal skills, the greater choice we then have in how we respond in any situation.

How we relate to and connect with other people can be grouped under social skills, sometimes referred to as social intelligence. Unless you are a hermit, developing this subset of interpersonal skills is going to give you astounding return on investment for the whole of your life. Developing social skills involves learning to be open, respectful, accepting, aware, adaptable and responsive.

Self awareness and understanding underpins all interpersonal skills and journaling is one of the most rewarding ways to begin expanding your self awareness and understanding about “what makes us tick”.

Related posts:

1. Building Confidence and Self Esteem – What Gets in the Way?
2. Improving Self Confidence and Assertiveness Skills
3. Improving Self Confidence and Communication Skills

By Margi Matters

Improving self confidence is a work in progress. It’s not a task you “do” so much as developing an optimum relationship with yourself as a constant background. Overlaid on this background are the learning and honing of skills and various competencies. Feeling and being skilfully resourced supports improving self confidence through regular positive reinforcement. The better your experience is, the more confident you feel the next time. It drops you into the positive expanding spiral. The more confident you feel in yourself and your skills and abilities, the better are your experience and results and you come to live in this expanding cycle of improving self confidence naturally.

It can go the other way of course! The more uncomfortable or inadequate you feel about your interactions, the less confident you are likely to feel next time. The less confident you are, the less likely you are to perform or interact in optimum ways and that downward contracting cycle can entrap us. As our confidence erodes, anxiety can set in which further compromises optimum interaction and management.

We need positive experiences and a sense of self efficacy in order to build and reinforce self confidence.

Becoming knowledgeable and proficient in the core communication skills is a direct ticket to riding the positive expanding spiral and one of the most powerful ways of improving self confidence immediately.

The process for improving communication skills includes:

• Taking inventory of your current skills and targeting areas for improvement
• Getting a clear idea of what makes someone a great communicator so you know exactly what you are aiming for and have a concrete and specific set of targets
• Learning the skill
• Practising the skill
• Learning the techniques and understanding the underlying information about the dynamics of communication excellence
• Identifying and resolving your own blocks and barriers to skilful, effective, and confident communication – in all situations!

Improving self confidence is as close as making the commitment to doing what it takes!

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1. Building Confidence and Self Esteem – The Foundations of Personal Power
2. Improving Self Confidence and Assertiveness Skills
3. Improving Self Confidence and Self Talk

By Margi Matters

Improving self confidence requires you to understand the phenomenal power of self talk. Your self talk is like a running commentary, constantly going on in the background and it will either undermine you and consequently undermine your  confidence or it can be a powerful reinforcer for improving self confidence.

Changing your self talk is one of the easiest strategies for improving self confidence.

Imagine if you had someone sitting on your shoulder, constantly judging and criticising you, constantly putting you down, telling you how useless, stupid, worthless, dumb or inadequate you are. How would you feel? How might you feel after a few days of this? After a few years of this?!! Sounds crazy right? Yet this is what we are doing to ourselves when we have low self esteem.

The big question to ask yourself is why would you do this to yourself? Why choose to continue to do this to yourself when it is as simple as recognising this negative self talk and stopping it the moment you become aware of it. Keep doing this and eventually it will lessen. Be determined to stick to it!

Self talk can be sneaky! Many of us are not really aware of our self talk and can be quite shocked and surprised at what we hear once we really start to listen to ourselves!

Instead of running on automatic, learn to really listen and immediately change negative self talk to something more positive. For instance if you mess up, just acknowledge it without judging yourself. Encourage yourself that you can do differently next time now that you know what you have learned from messing up. Sometimes we have to see what does not work in order to get a better handle on what does work. It is all just learning. Mistakes can be seen as just what doesn’t work!

There is a direct connection between what you think and what you feel. Change your self talk and you can change how you feel. Improving self confidence is learning how to change how you think and feel about yourself.

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1. Improving Self Confidence and Assertiveness Skills
2. Improving Self Confidence and Managing Internal Conflict
3. Improving Self Confidence and Communication Skills

By Margi Matters

Learning how to manage and respond to internal conflict is one of the great powers inherent in improving self confidence and self esteem. One thing we can be sure about is that conflict is a natural part of life, a continual ebb and flow!

Remaining in a state of internal conflict is not good for your health and  well being, neither is it good for your confidence or self esteem! So learning how to resolve conflict earlier rather than allowing it to intensify and grow is one of the most helpful things you can do to improve your life, and maintain a sense of personal power which underpins self esteem and self confidence!

Internal conflict  reflects some sort of dilemma you find yourself in and usually relates to one of the following areas:

• making an important decision (sometimes even just making trivial decisions!)
• competing needs
• competing fears
• guilt and what you are or are not doing and what you know you “should “ be doing or not doing ( exercise, stop smoking, spend quality time with your children, stop putting things off).
• feeling torn between what you want and what you believe you ‘have’ to do – many people feel this way about their work or relationships, unhappy but feeling locked in and powerless to change it.
• being true to yourself versus pleasing others
• conflict between needs and wants

Decision making is one of the ultimate personal power skills and in many ways is the one key process which can resolve internal conflict and dilemmas.

The critical skill within decision making is the skill of asking questions! I just love the power of questions!  Sometimes just asking the right question can resolve the dilemma instantly!  No matter what the conflict or decision may be, the decision  tends to make itself once you have sufficient information. This means gathering sufficient information about the issue and sufficient information about yourself. Self awareness is one of the foundations of personal power, and of course self esteem and self confidence.

The first step to resolving internal conflict and dilemmas is to gather information.

Begin by clarifying  all the aspects on paper. Thoroughly explore the following points.

1. Look at what is most important to you (your values)
2. Clarify exactly what you do want
3. Prioritise what you most want (what is most important, most valued)
4. Clarify and be specific about all your possible choices in the situation
5. Identify any possible regrets that may follow any choice made in the situation
6. Identify what is stopping you or what is in the way from having what you want
7. Identify what is stopping you or what is in the way of making a decision.
8. What beliefs and assumptions are you holding about this issue?
9. What are your fears and concerns in the situation and what effect do these have on you?

Answering the question “what would it take?” – for example “what would it take to make this decision?” or “what would it take to resolve this dilemma?” –  allows you to focus on clearing the way.
This question sets you on the path of creating the right and necessary conditions for resolving the dilemma or confidently making the decision.

Asking “what would it take” can open up territory to explore in the mind, the heart or in your environment. For instance, do you need to trust yourself to make the right decision? What might you need to believe or stop believing? What fears are having an influence? In what ways do these fears influence you? What emotional states are you seeking to experience or avoid! What information do you need, where can you get it, who can help?

If you want to learn the art of improving self confidence then learning how to lessen and resolve internal conflict is one of the best things you can do for yourself!

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1. Improving Self Confidence and Assertiveness Skills
2. Improving Self Confidence and Self Talk
3. Improving Self Confidence and Communication Skills

By Margi Matters

The set of skills that come under the banner of assertiveness skills are a way of both expressing yourself confidently and, in learning and using the skills, they also assist in   improving self confidence.

You feel differently about yourself when you feel you have handled a person or a situation in a confident or masterful manner. Think of a time when you did this and remember how it felt. When you speak up, or make a clear request, or when you are able to take good care of your rights and needs it is a natural boost to your self esteem and the more you use assertiveness skills, the more you enter the positive spiral of improving self confidence.

Like any skill, assertiveness skills are learned and practiced. At first it can feel strange or awkward communicating in these ways, however the skills themselves are straightforward and simple methods or formulae for communicating in a clear, direct, accurate, respectful and honest way. The greater challenge for most people is not in learning the skill but the anxiety about being assertive – how others may react to the more empowered version of ourselves! Chances are if you have low self esteem and a history of not being confident, there are some significant  people around you who have a vested interest in keeping you powerless . And you have probably learned some fears around “hurting” others by not agreeing with them or not pleasing them. Or some guilt about being judged as “selfish”.

When you are not assertive, when you allow other people to “walk all over you”, treat you with disrespect or in abusive ways, take advantage of you or exploit you or  when you do not have the confidence to assert what you really want for yourself or to take up opportunities, you pay a price with your self esteem. You may get angry with yourself or lay awake at night running the situation or the conversation or the decision over and over in your mind “wishing’ you had handled it differently. Regret is a potent source of disempowerment, characterised  with thoughts about “I wish I had” or “I should have” or “I ought to have” or “if only I hadn’t…” Ruminating and depression are not far behind once we build some of these kinds of regrets.

Self talk either boosts self esteem and confidence, or erodes it. When you feel bad about how you handled some person, situation or decision, when you feel you missed a great opportunity it gives your negative self talk a lot of ammunition and can set you up to feel even less confident the next time something similar arises. You can lose confidence in your ability to make good decisions for instance.  This is turn can further decrease your confidence.

If you want to work on improving self confidence, it is essential to learn the skills of assertiveness.

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1. Building Confidence and Self Esteem – the Key Skill of Assertiveness
2. Improving Self Confidence and Self Talk
3. Improving Self Confidence and Communication Skills

By Margi Matters

The sense of mastery and self efficacy that comes with achieving goals is a potent reinforcer for building confidence and self esteem.

There are many threads that need to be woven together to create the tapestry of self confidence. One of the central threads for building confidence and self esteem is to have confidence in your ability to set and achieve the goals that will bring your Self and your life to where you want it to be.

People who are disempowered, lack confidence and are limited with low self esteem tend to have a poor track record in achieving goals, or achieving the kinds of goals that fit their deepest desires and dreams for their lives.

Success breeds success. It is true! The more goals we achieve, the more confident we are to extend ourselves to go for bigger and better goals. We get clearer about what we want, can be more decisive and are more confident to commit to the chosen goal and take some risks.
Conversely, the path to lower confidence and self esteem is often one that is littered with lost dreams, lost opportunities and a sense of missing out and “failure”. The more confidence and self esteem is eroded, the less decisive we are, the less willing to put ourselves on the line for what we really want. We can become stuck, unhappy and spiral into even less confidence and feel worse and worse about ourselves. Setting clear goals and achieving them becomes harder and harder.

Learning the skills of goal setting is essential for building confidence and self esteem.

Setting and achieving goals is a set of skills that can be learned and honed.

Developing self awareness and understanding is a vital foundation for building confidence and self esteem. Self awareness and understanding  is also essential for becoming effective and confident in setting and achieving goals.

Begin with examining what gets in the way of achieving your goals.

The key areas to explore and work on include:

Becoming clear about what you really want for yourself.

Recognising and dealing with the fears (including fear of failure or fear of success)

Recognising and resolving deeper needs that over ride or conflict with the goal (like staying safe, or avoiding negative judgements from others)

Recognising and replacing limiting beliefs, expectations and self talk (for example it’s too hard, I’m not worthy).

Recognising and changing old habits and patterns? (lazy! Not organised, procrastination)

Being clear about where to start

Being willing and able to commit to having the goal – doing what it takes

Knowing how to proceed – having a clear, specific plan to follow

Understanding your motivation and creating the “right” motivation

Developing sufficient desire and determination

Being able to maintain the focus until the goal is achieved

Being able to effectively manage your resources, including time and prioritising

Spending the time and effort to address each of these areas is a fabulous investment that will serve you brilliantly for the rest of your life. Do some regular journaling and focus on one topic at a time.

Building confidence and self esteem is a process and the sooner you begin the faster you can enjoy the goals you would love to achieve, that will in turn build your confidence and self esteem.

Related posts:

1. Building Confidence and Self Esteem – The Foundations of Personal Power
2. Building Confidence and Self Esteem – The Initial Assessment
3. Building Confidence and Self Esteem – What Gets in the Way?

By Margi Matters

What gets in the way of building confidence and self esteem?

There are a few core areas and the initial focus when you are building confidence and self esteem must include the following:

Block: Not having sufficient self awareness or knowledge and understanding of yourself.

The solution: Building confidence and self esteem begins with getting to know yourself, increasing your self awareness and connecting some of the dots about why you behave the way you do, and understanding the underlying “programming” and filters.

Block: Fears.

Solution: An essential focus for self awareness is identifying and understanding your fears and all the ways these play out in your life then learning empowered ways to manage or remove these fears.

Block: Not being clear about, understanding or satisfactorily meeting your needs.

Solution: Identifying and understanding your needs and the best or most effective and healthy ways to get these needs met is central to building confidence and self esteem.

Block: Not having clear goals.

Solution: It is essential to set some clear goals about exactly how you want it to be. Just saying you want greater self confidence or higher self esteem is like saying you want to go travelling. It is too general and vague. You first need to pick an exact location or destination. “I want to feel…….”for example “I want to feel confident when I go to a social event” Or “I want to be able to……..” for example “I want to be able to say no when I want to without feeling guilty” or “I want to believe…..”.For example “I want to believe in myself.”

To start with goals  can be fairly broad – like choosing Italy. Within that broader goal you can then get more specific. Sometimes you are not sure about the specifics until you arrive at the first goal and gather more information. The more you know – the greater your self awareness – the more accurate and specific your goals can be. The more you know, the better you can match your goals with what you actually want to experience. If you want to see Venice you don’t buy tickets for Pompeii!  If you have a particular area of desire – for instance to see great sculpture –  you find out the best locations  like Florence or Rome and that becomes your specific destination. Then within that goal there will be even more specific goals like exactly what galleries and museums to go to.

Building confidence and self esteem is a similar process of identifying more and more specific goals and targets for change in your thoughts, feelings, skills and behaviours.

Related posts:

1. Building Confidence and Self Esteem – the Key Skill of Assertiveness
2. Building Confidence and Self Esteem – The Initial Assessment
3. Building Confidence and Self Esteem – Blocks and Barriers

Building confidence and self esteem requires several interlinked processes. Both confidence and strong sustainable self esteem are essential ingredients for personal power.

Improving self confidence is one of the delightful gifts of strengthening self esteem. Building self confidence and self esteem is all about working on the nature of the relationship you have with yourself.

Key aspects include examining, understanding and making changes where necessary in the following areas:

• Whether or not you have a positive regard for yourself – the “esteem” in which you hold yourself

• Whether or not you support yourself or treat yourself with harsh judgement and criticism

• Whether or not you believe in yourself

• Whether or not you trust yourself

• Whether or not you are trapped in the past and the effects of earlier negative or traumatic experiences

• Whether or not you love and accept yourself

• Whether or not you “honour” yourself

Positive affirmations alone won’t build confidence and self esteem. Having other people tell us we are wonderful, capable or worthy won’t do it either, although it can help once our underlying beliefs allow us to be receptive to compliments and positive feedback. If self esteem is low we won’t believe the positive things others tell us about ourselves!

How to build self confidence? The two core areas are 1) changing belief systems and 2) having positive experiences.

Improving self confidence begins with recognising and changing limiting and negative beliefs. We need to be aware of what we believe before we can change it!

Positive experiences that reinforce belief in ourselves, our abilities and our sense of worth are an essential part of building confidence and self esteem. We need to not only believe we are okay, we need to feel it. We need to have a direct experience of it. Personal power and the confidence it brings, is something that keeps expanding as you experience, feel and live it.

Confidence is not fixed and static. We can feel confident in some areas (like a work role) but not confident in others (like personal relationships.)

Self confidence is fluid, often rising and falling during a lifetime, changing for better or worse according to

• what is going on in your life and the nature of experiences

• the people you encounter and the key relationships in your life and how these effect you

• how well your various needs are (or are not!) being met

• your belief systems

• your social support systems

• access to resources and opportunities

• how you feel about yourself, your appearance and level of personal power

The more our confidence is shaken or eroded, the more impact people and situations can have on us. What we once could lightly toss off or not even notice, now has the power to keep us in a state of anxiety, or avoiding situations in which we once felt comfortable. We can get caught in a downward spiral.

Similarly, as we work on building self confidence and self esteem, our personal power increases to be able to further improve confidence and self esteem. Like an upward expanding positive spiral, it just gets better and better!

Take action now to build confidence and self esteem – it is an investment in time and effort that will give massive and wonderful returns every day.

Related posts:

1. Building Confidence and Self Esteem – the Key Skill of Assertiveness
2. Building Confidence and Self Esteem – The Initial Assessment
3. Building Confidence and Self Esteem – How Fast Can Change Happen?