Building Confidence

Building Confidence

Summary of main points.

Confidence helps you to feel comfortable with who you are; you have skills and knowledge and you?ve developed habits that will help you to do what you want to do.

It?s said that life is a journey. To feel comfortable with yourself you need to be contented with where you are on that journey. Along the way you learn lots of things, you change many of your priorities, and you develop different passions and aspirations. In fact if these things don?t change - you stand still. If you don?t focus on the journey - only the destination - then you?re introducing tension into your life and that?s a negative.

Whatever you choose to do that?s important to you will require a degree of knowledge, plus skills and habits. When you have them you can do these important things. When you don’t have them you struggle to achieve what you want, or worse, won’t even attempt to do the things that are important to you.

Confidence is a natural state so when you lack confidence it?s important to work on it to build it up. When you?re truly confident you don’t think about it and you don’t feel anything, you just get on with doing what you want to do. The only time it becomes an issue is when you lack confidence ? your natural state of being.

The difference in your mind between where you think you are right now and where you think you should be is what I refer to as ?The Gap?. Both your perceived current position and your desired position are constructed by you, but the bigger the gap between them the more stressed you?ll feel. Both tension and stress will undermine your confidence.

If you want to you can change both where you want to go and how you perceive things. We all have a false idea of where we are right now. However, learning to be mindful about our daily lives gets us more rooted in the here and now. Rather than slowing us down, what this allows us to do is to remove distractions, thus allowing us to focus more of our energy on living the life we have. And guess what? That boosts our confidence!

If you?re interested in learning more about the issues in this brief summary you can read about how to build confidence by going to the Confidence Coaching Blog.