Secrets of Self-Confidence

How to maintain a good self-confidence level in day to day life?

The word ‘confidence’ is derived from Latin word ‘fidere’, i.e. to trust. Self-confidence means to trust and have faith in oneself and all of us essentially need to trust ourselves first to do any act effectively, be it a job interview, giving a presentation, proposing the person you love etc. However in today’s competitive, material driven and achievement-oriented society, maintaining a healthy self-worth all the time is becoming more and more difficult, the tendency to be affected by low self-esteem is becoming more chronic and widespread. Today Psychologist Shivani Misri Sadhoo shares how to maintain a good self-confidence level in the day to day life.  

1. Avoid Tagging

People generally understand that person can either have high self-confidence or low self-confidence, but that is not the truth. Most of us are in the middle spectrum of high and low confidence level, for certain aspects of life we are very confident and for some we are not. So stop tagging yourself or any of your loved ones as “low self-confident” personality. Only when one stops identifying themselves with any identity, the possibility to learn, understand and to improve opens.

2.  Notice Your Negative Thought from a Distance

A good confidence level is directly related to our positive mood, so observe when you are getting negative thoughts or if you have been thinking negatively for a long time even without realising it. For example, some of us might be telling ourselves in the mirror that we are not attractive, whereas we have never thought enough as to how we are defining beauty or if that definition is really worthy?

Similarly, notice all of your negative thoughts without judgment. Simply notice, with curiosity as if you’re watching yourself in an experiment, and even with compassion and humour.

3. Confront your Negative Thoughts and Replace Them

Once you distance yourself from your negative thoughts, you would shift your position from being slaves of your thoughts to a better controller of your own thoughts.

Use this opportunity to replace your negative thoughts with positive analysis, empowering views and learning attitude. Slowly try practice this to more and more incidences, till it becomes a habit in you. Here is how to do it, if you feel angry and get hurt about someone’s behaviour, avoid jumping to a negative conclusion right away. Instead, come up with multiple ways of viewing the situation before reacting.