Are you someone who doesn’t have a lot of faith in yourself? Are you always second guessing your decisions and wondering if you are doing the right thing in life?
If that’s you. Allow me to change your mindset to a more accepting and loving mindset that will set you up for a lifetime of self-belief!
This blog post will have 4 tips that have helped me greatly in my search for self-belief and my hope is that they will also help you to find some of that belief in yourself.
First of all, what is self-belief?
Self-belief can be described as the confidence or trust that one has in one’s own abilities, judgements, or values. This trust and confidence are often associated with positive outcomes such as motivation, performance, and well-being. Having self-belief is so important because it allows us to take risks, embrace our challenges and try new things without fear of what others think of you.
Without self-belief a person will often downplay their abilities, settle for less than what they deserve and will cultivate a failure dependent mindset for themselves. If you are consistently searching for what you did wrong how are you expecting to ever do things right? When a person’s mindset is trained mostly on the negatives of themselves and their abilities, there can be no room to grow and develop.
Now that we all understand the importance of self-belief; lets get on with the tips!
1 – Self-belief begins with your head
The very first tip and arguably the most important is to control where your thoughts take you. If you’ve ever read the Roald Dahl book, “The Twits” you’ll remember that the main premise of the book was to warn children that their thoughts can influence their lives. In the book The Twits are so terrible as people and have such nasty and deprecating thoughts that they become ugly on the outside and are doomed to a life of stupidity and frustration with each other and within themselves.
That book has always stuck with me as I really do believe that what we think and how we think about ourselves is so important and it can be really detrimental to our wellbeing and self-belief.
In order to foster and grow your self-belief you have to… believe in yourself (shocker). The best way to start believing in yourself is to start controlling your thoughts, more specifically your negative thoughts. If you’ve done something wrong or you’ve made a silly mistake etc this is typically when your negative thoughts come out of the woodwork and their only job is to keep you in a depressive state. I say, when those thoughts come the simplest way to stop them is to give yourself grace. Why don’t you think to yourself, “I don’t think I’m the only person in the world who made that mistake” and move on. There doesn’t need to be anything more on it. The best way to view mistakes is to see them as stepping stones which will take you to your final destination.
2 – Start trusting yourself.
The second tip for growing your self-belief is to trust in yourself. The biggest problem we have as a society today (in my opinion) is that no one has any trust in themselves. We all search for someone else to tell us what is in fashion at the time, what are the right things to do etc… We have all lost trust within ourselves. I can’t tell you when we all gave up our trust, but I will say that we can get it back!
The most interesting thing is that self-belief, trusting yourself and having confidence are all so interlinked which is so great because if you work on just one of those things you will gain the others and they will all work together in tandem!
The best way to grow your self-trust is to remember to be yourself. You can’t have trust in yourself if you’re trying to be someone else. Maybe take a minute to think about what kind of person you want to be and write those qualities down and then spend another minute slotting yourself into those categories. They might not all fit you yet but don’t forget you hold so much potential within you. We are all capable of whatever we put our minds to. Now that you can see that you are already the kind of person you want to become or you’re closer than you thought, start living it!
As humans, our brains are pretty much an unknown territory but what I do know is that you have to practice something for your brain to get the message. For example, if you want to be more confident in your outfits, start off with a more vibrant outfit and strut your stuff! Once you realise that you have nothing to lose by doing what you want and aligning yourself with your own wants then your brain will understand that too and you will be on your way to trusting yourself!
3 – Focus on Your Strengths
The third tip for gaining more self-belief is to always keep in mind your strengths and your potential. There’s really no point in focusing on your weaknesses because you already know them and that’s not going to serve you. Once we let go of the belief that “weaknesses” are necessary, we can finally be free! Focusing on our strengths allows us to work on them and innovate within ourselves. I don’t know about you, but I enjoy being good at things and that allows me to experiment with what I enjoy doing which in turn, helps me to get better in my abilities. And once you are confident in your abilities you get more self-belief! Can you see why this is so important?
If you are the introspecting type, then it may be hard for you to stop focusing on what you’ve ever done wrong in your life, or you might keep a list of all of your weaknesses and you bring them out whenever you fumble. This way of living will get you no where fast. Keep in mind that our reason for being is to develop as much of ourselves as we can and for humans, we are unable to grow when we are kept in a cage of our own weaknesses and failings. That to me is like living life walking backwards.
Let’s live life walking forwards; with our strengths as a propeller and our self-belief as our guide we can never go wrong!
4 – Change your Mind-set for Good.
The fourth and final tip for growing your self-belief is to change your mindset for the better. Cultivating a growth mindset is so important to your growth as a person and it will help to guide you in all aspects of your life whether you’re a teenager going to school, or you’ve just retired and don’t know what to do with yourself anymore.
To gain a growth mindset, you need to recognise that the obstacles in your life should be seen as stepping stones. I am a firm believer that everything happens for a purpose, maybe we need to learn something and that is why we are still where we are?
Another really important way to cultivate your growth mindset is to never underestimate the importance of the process. If you’re anything like me and love to get to the end result and then be done with it, it’s important that we learn that our process for getting to the result is way more important. Once we can understand our processes for doing things, we can innovate and begin to do things in a better way which will in turn generates even better results!
Another really important factor is to embrace “failure”. In my opinion you can only fail when you’ve given up. Anything other than giving up is just the journey. And everyone is on their own journey in life so we shouldn’t and couldn’t compare ourselves to anyone else. Mistakes happen and if they don’t you have to be some kind of a cyborg because we are all going to have good days and bad days but it’s the way we treat ourselves on those bad days that really defines how much self-belief we can have.
If I can leave you with any last words, it would be this:
Accept yourself, flaws and all. That’s what makes you uniquely yourself and once you can accept that, the rest will fall into place.
