How To Have Greater Confidence In Yourself

What if I told you every major obstacle in your life can be solved with greater confidence than what you have right now? It’s hard to imagine that the advice of “be confident” is the solution to all manner of things in life. However over the years as both an entrepreneur and an human being, I feel that one of the greatest contributing factors to problem solving is confidence.

I mean, we live in a world where a misogynistic, racist, and xenophobic president runs America currently. You might not stand the guy, but he at least had confidence he could become president.

Politics aside, greater confidence can work wonders for people. In most scenarios, it feeds into good qualities for people to develop. Things like persistence, a growth mindset, realistic optimism, amongst other things.

Mind you confidence alone can get you so far, but it can be enough to enhance your personality as well. Speaking from my own experiences, confidence has given me the opportunity to raise my voice, formulate stronger opinions about things. It’s a big deal coming from someone who spent a lot of life taking the opinions of others and never formulating my own.

While this advice may not lead you to become the next president, here is an outline for greater confidence. Apply this in your own life and I believe you’ll have a better outlook on tackling problems and growing from them.

Start With Yourself

To have greater confidence, you must first have a grasp of who you are. This goes beyond personal identification and preferences. Rather, getting to know yourself is understanding your answer to one big question:

Why?

Ask yourself why do you have these opinions?

Why do you affiliate yourself with them?

Why this opinion or belief over other beliefs/opinions?

The key here is to understand why you feel some kind of connection. Why you act a certain way or think a certain way. It is crucial since we are living in this body and we must learn to be okay with that.

Along the way, we develop ourselves, create personalities, and traits. All of this is connected to how we identify and view ourselves to the core.

But how is this connected to greater confidence?

How we view ourselves in turn determines how we view our reality. For example, the political comment I made earlier has people agreeing with me and confirming my own bias. On the other hand, others may be angry about it and call me a liar. That or stop reading beyond that point.

This has great impact on peoples lives as some will miss out on potential advice that could boost their confidence while others will receive that knowledge. What’s even better is some of those people will apply this knowledge in their own lives.

What I’m getting is that our own opinions and beliefs do have an influence on our own actions. If you are someone who feels stuck and wants greater confidence, you’ll be more inclined to read through this article and maybe apply some of this tactics and strategies.

But in order to do all that, it’s important to know how you are wired and how you are wiring yourself. So take some time to chat with yourself and understand where various emotions stem from. Take up meditating if you have to as it can provide a good understanding of yourself.

Then, Work On The Outside

In order to make any changes in life that’ll stick, there needs to be a focus on what’s going inside of you. You won’t be committed to greater confidence if your mindset is poor or you give up too easily.

Another reason to work internally is that you can begin to see issues in your external circle. If you are perceptive enough, you’ll find specific aspects that’ll influence your decisions and actions.

For example, I had a severe lack of confidence due to my figure. I wasn’t comfortable with my weight and used that to beat myself up back in the day. There wasn’t anyone remarking that of me, but my inner circle of friends and environment didn’t exactly promote a healthy lifestyle.

It is these two aspects that you want to be focusing on when looking externally: your environment, and the connections you have.

Your Environment

Your environment is what is influenced by what’s going on in your life. It’s only natural that our environment will make us feel comfortable. As such we will gravitate towards an environment that fits our own views and reinforces those views.

Our environment though is a double edged sword. While it’s nice to have people to confirm our views, it’s important that an environment changes and challenges us. Setting that aside, the main focus when it comes to greater confidence is how this environment influences you.

To better understand that, you want to be able to weigh the pros and the cons. Now, you won’t be able to see into the future, however you can piece together some semblance of a path. For example, if you spend a lot of time around smokers, chances are you’ll become an addict. If you spend a lot of time around people who are active, you’ll become healthier too.

Another way to look at this is the power of association. While people use this mainly for people, people too influence our environment and our environment influences us too. Material possession steer our behaviour to some degree.

A fine example is lottery winners. Many people blow all of that money rather than doing something sensible like invest it or put it in a savings account. Those decisions are influenced by what they’ve seen and interpreted. Game shows where people win big or seeing social media posts of people showing off expensive cars or massive houses.

You want to be able to control your environment and it all comes down to habits. That said, another aspect to not forget is the people within your environment too.

Your Inner Circle

Your environment can be best described as the foundation. It is the platform that shapes your reality. It’s important, however the daily interactions you have with those around you play a more crucial role to the formation of your environment.

This all comes back to what I mentioned about the power of association. If you spend a lot of time with people who are not conscious of their health or are severely addicted to something, that will have an impact on you. There is a desire to fit in and be with that group. As such, you’ll pick up the same sort of habits soon enough.

The thing is, getting into a group is fairly easy. Whether the group is good for you or bad for you doesn’t matter. However in most circumstances, getting out of a group can be difficult and often emotionally painful.

When people want to be making a change, those around you will resist that change. I know for myself the road to becoming a writer was difficult. Not many people had faith in me. Especially since I spent a large chunk of my life pursuing a different career.

But I had greater confidence when I started to associate myself with other writers. I got involved in some programs and have met people who encouraged me to push through.

Eventually, people put more faith into my writing. People don’t question my decision when I tell them I’m a writer.

The key is if you don’t like where you are going, change your inner circle. Once you begin removing and replacing with people you do want to be around, your behaviour will change. How you see the world around you will change along with it.

Greater Confidence Comes In The Process

As easy as it seems, the reality is far from that. Building up confidence takes time and isn’t something that happens overnight. Part of the process is wrestling with your own thoughts and focusing on taking action.

In so many cases people give up just before they go reaching the best part and changing their life around. And it is a shame.

I believe in order to have greater confidence, you need to bounce between internal changes and external changes. Change what’s around you and then check yourself and take further action to make more changes.

When we are making progress, our sense of confidence rises. As such, it’s important that that we believe in the path that’s laid out for us. The plan that we put together.

This is on top of the belief that we can make it and succeed.

One method that I like that helps in building trust is to have fun with it and not harp on the negatives. For example, there are few major things in my life where I’ve flopped back and forth on. Those are my own health and my Youtube channel.

I keep coming back to those things however for various reasons, but one such reason is that it can be a lot of fun. I find editing and filming to be a blast and I’ve been adopting that mindset with my working out too.

Though with working out I find it better when working out with someone else.

When you are having fun, you’re not worried so much about other aspects. You’re more focused on doing what you came here to do. Get results and have fun.

Have Greater Confidence

Greater confidence stems heavily on our own mindset. Once you have an understanding of it and have confidence in your skills and abilities, you will be able to push yourself further than ever before.

Confidence is something that we all need in various parts of our lives. Whether that’s building a business, being a better partner or friend, and especially in being a good communicator. If we lack confidence in our lives, we will continue to use that crutch for a very long time.

I know this all to well as there have been some barriers in my life and it mostly stems from my confidence. But what this tells me is that there is more to work on and there are still greater challenges.

So do yourself a favour and build your confidence and keep building it from this day forward.

To your growth!

Eric S Burdon

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