Ask yourself this question: What would I do if I weren’t afraid?
For the past 10 years I’ve received through my website thousands of letters from young girls, women and even men. The most common question over the years still remains the same, “How can I build my own self-confidence so I feel beautiful when connecting with others?”
What does it really mean to be confident? And what are ways that anybody can have a strong sense of confidence, the same type a model has to increase her own self-confidence?
There are three steps to being confident:
Know yourself
Ask yourself: Who am I? What traits do I truly like about myself? What do other people love about me? What even bugs people about me? To find out the answers to these questions, you need to be brutally honest with yourself.
Write down five qualities you like about yourself. For example, being determined, kind, adventurous, loyal or creative. Then write down one quality you want to improve. Maybe you want to be a better listener, be more easy-going or gain more patience. Make the qualities unique to you.
Know what you want
How do you figure out what you really want? It seems sometimes there are so many options to choose from, so where do you start to get clear? To know what you want, you must first get very, very specific.
Ask yourself these three questions (in this order): What would I do if I weren’t afraid? What would I do with my life if money were no object? What would be better than what I am doing or have now?
These three questions will help you connect to your inner self to free you on an emotional level so you can see your real desires. Once you get clear and know exactly what you want, you can then go after it!
Take inspired action
As easy as this last step seems, for most people it’s the hardest. People will get ‘analysis paralysis’ by letting fear sneak in, analyze all the reasons why they shouldn’t do what they need to do and make excuses to not take action.
As confident as I believe myself to be, this once happened to me. I was asked to walk a runway show for a red carpet event in Los Angeles. Since my background in modeling was limited to print work, this was a stretch. But I told myself I could do it.
When it came time for the actual live event, I literally froze at the foot of the runway. “What if I stumble and fall?”, “What if I look ridiculous?”, “What if my clothes fall off?!”, “What if…?” Since I already felt comfortable with who I am, I had to focus on step #2. I asked myself, “Why am I doing this? What do I want to get out of this, anyway?” The reason quickly came to me. I was helping raise awareness, in a positive way, to help increase the self-esteem of teens and women nationwide. Then I was able to shift out of my fears. I stood up straight, took a deep breath, put a smile on my face, strutted my stuff on that runway…and it was over before I even knew it!
Best of all, none of those fears came true. Overcoming them by just doing it increased my overall confidence by leaps and bounds in all areas of my life. The key to being confident is to believe with all your heart and soul who you are, what you want and then do it! Becoming a confident woman will make you will feel happier, more secure and extra attractive. The greatest reward though is you will soon find everything begins to flow easily and effortlessly into your life.