Without confidence, negativity gets the best of you. It influences your perspective, and you wind up drawing conclusions that don’t jive with the truth. You start second-guessing yourself and your decisions, allowing anxiety and even despair to sink in.
Robby
Robby was getting ready to go out and meet his friends. He felt good about the way he had dressed and was looking forward to hanging out with everyone. Robby got into his friend’s car and the friend started giving him a hard time about his shirt. Robby started to worry that he made a bad choice and that other people would say or think the same thing. That’s when Robby noticed he was feeling uncomfortably nervous.
Confidence means that you look at each situation in your life objectively, so you see the big picture rather than getting stuck in a specific moment in time. When you lack confidence, you get stuck in specific moments, taking any criticism to mean that you’re not okay as a person.
If friends say they liked your hair better before you cut it, without confidence you might think:
With confidence, you might think:
Imagine you are giving a speech in class and you mispronounce a word. Without confidence, you might think:
With confidence, you might think:
Practice the confidence advantage. Pick a specific situation this week that you are apprehensive about facing and use your confidence to go for your desired outcome. Write out the specific situation and your confident thoughts. Afterward, write about what you gained by pushing yourself to take action.
Specific situation:
Example: I want to try yoga.
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Your confident thoughts:
Example: Yoga is something I really want to try, so I should go for it. I don’t have to be good at it when I’m starting out. It’s a class, which means someone is going to be teaching me what to do.
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What you gained by pushing yourself to go for it:
Example: I could have let my old way of thinking, which is self-defeating rather than confident, talk me out of doing something I really want to try. Now I know that by pushing myself I won’t miss out on future opportunities. I feel good about myself because I went for it and tried yoga.
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Pick two situations you will need to face this week that you are apprehensive about and use your confidence to go for it. Write out the specific situation and the confident thoughts. Afterward, write what you gained by pushing yourself to take action.
Situation 1: __________________
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Write down your “with confidence” thoughts here:
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Write down what you gained by pushing yourself to go for it:
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Write down your confident thoughts here:
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Write down what you gained by pushing yourself to go for it:
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The Bottom Line: Use the advantage of confidence to go for it.