HOW TO BE CONFIDENT: 12 POWERFUL STRATEGIES TO UNLEASH CONFIDENCE
Imagine life if you faced every challenge with unshakeable confidence. How would you feel? What would you accomplish? How would it transform your relationships? Whether it’s a negotiation, a public speech, or attracting your ideal partner, learning how to be confident has the power to change your entire life.
WHY CONFIDENCE MATTERS
There’s no doubt that our world is ever-changing. And with this flow of change comes a great deal of uncertainty. Knowing how to be confident matters because it creates certainty in uncertain situations. When everyone else is unsure what to do and someone with confidence steps up to speak, people pay attention. Someone with certainty and confidence – even if they’re wrong – will lead others. And the greatest leaders are the ones who use confidence as a force for good.
Confidence is critical whether you want to change your life or influence the world around you. A confident person can create a compelling future for themselves and for others who might feel like giving up. They can handle conflicts effectively and make a convincing case for why something should be done. They move people to action. Their confidence allows them to build rapport quickly and ignites the passion of a rockstar team to achieve the seemingly impossible.
Whether it’s your relationships, your emotions, your finances, your business, or any other area of life, confidence has the power to change your world.
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CORE PRINCIPLES OF BEING CONFIDENT
Confidence isn’t something you get from others, it’s something you earn for yourself. It’s earned by doing what’s hard and developing the self-discipline required to transform your goals into reality. It’s an emotion created within yourself – a feeling of absolute certainty that you can accomplish whatever you set your mind to.
Deeply tied to confidence, certainty is one of our basic psychological human needs. Everyone values some needs more than others, and how you prioritize those needs affects every decision you make in life. If your top need is certainty and that need is unmet, you might feel unsure and lack confidence. If your need for certainty is satisfied, you’ll feel more confident. The Driving Force Quiz is an excellent tool to determine your top human need and see how it’s affecting your confidence.
The most confident people always find a way to meet their need for certainty – even when surrounded by uncertainty. Sometimes it’s by creating an inner drive to find answers or opportunities in the uncertainty. Other times it’s simply by having faith – faith in themselves, faith in a strategy, faith that it’ll all work out for the best. No matter the approach, the similarity is they know how to create an emotional state of confidence.
So, the key to remember about confidence is to believe in yourself and have faith that all you need is within you now – all the courage, all the conviction, all the confidence is already within you. No matter your outcome, you have everything you need to achieve it.
The challenge is knowing how to awaken the confidence that’s already within you. The good news is you can learn how to be confident and change your emotional state in an instant – no matter what’s going on around you. Here are three core principles to use that will awaken your inner confidence.
1. CREATE THE PHYSIOLOGY OF CONFIDENCE
One of the fastest ways to change your emotional state is by radically changing your physiology – or the physical state of your body. Simply model the physiology of the state you want to feel – such as confidence – and you’ll begin to feel it. Think about what a confident person does with their body. Do they stand up straight or slouch over? Is their breathing fast and shallow? Or are they strong, deep, controlled breaths?
Intuitively, we already know the body language of confidence, so all we need to do is consciously model that physiology: Stand tall and open up your chest. Maintain brisk, purposeful strides when you walk. For some, this might even include diet and exercise to physically strengthen the muscles involved in a confident posture, making it easier to create confidence on demand.
Tony Robbins has taught physiology for decades and more recent research on “power poses” supports how effective this approach truly is. In controlled studies, research participants stood with their hands on their hips like Superman or made other confident poses for a few minutes. Not only did results show that participants felt more confident, but these changes were even reflected at the biochemical level.
Building your inner strength does not need to be complex. Sometimes it’s as simple as changing how you feel by changing how you use your body.
2. FOCUS ON CONFIDENCE
Whatever you focus on, you will feel – whether it’s true or not. Changing your focus affects confidence because your emotional state is deeply tied to your habitual patterns. Do you focus more on your progress and current achievements? Or the goals you haven’t reached? Are you imagining all the ways something could go wrong? Or are you focusing on all the ways it could go right?
The truth is, what’s wrong is always available but so is what’s right. If you have a presentation, focus on how you will nail it by rehearsing and visualizing how proud you’ll feel for doing it. Questions are another power tool for directing focus. For example, instead of asking “Why do I keep failing?”, ask better questions like “How can I learn and grow from this experience?” When you ask better questions, you get better answers.
Whatever you focus on becomes your reality. By changing your focus, you’re changing your state. And by changing your state, you will change your life.
12 POWERFUL STRATEGIES FOR HOW TO BE CONFIDENT
The principles above are incredibly useful for mastering your emotions and learning how to be confident. With practice, you’ll get better at creating a sense of certainty and cultivating a confident mindset. For the most impact, it starts with making a real decision to become more confident, right now. Tony Robbins often reminds us to never leave the scene of a decision without taking action toward its realization. To get started, here are some specific actions you can take that utilize at least one of the core principles of confidence.
1. CONQUER YOUR LIMITING BELIEFS
Beliefs are a habitual feeling of certainty about something. While some beliefs are useful, people often form limiting beliefs about what they are capable of. This can happen when they form a belief that was useful in one situation but is now outdated in their current life. This can lead to self-sabotage and hold you back from your true potential. Overcoming these limiting beliefs is the first step to total confidence. Ask yourself: Which beliefs are creating a lack of confidence? Negative emotions like self-doubt are deeply connected to our beliefs about emotions, such as when it’s appropriate to feel them and what these emotions mean. But the truth is, feelings of self-doubt are often a helpful signal – a signal to let go of limiting beliefs and replace them with empowering ones.
2. PRACTICE SELF-LOVE
Learning how to be confident also means you need to love yourself first. Determine your values, and be proud of them. Embrace your strengths and overcome fears by coaching yourself through them or learning to let go. It’s about appreciating who you are and what makes you unique from everyone else on the planet. When you start questioning your self-belief, remember to love yourself first.
3. CONNECT PURPOSE TO YOUR GOALS
Why is learning how to gain confidence important to you? Do you present at conventions where you interact with a large number of people? Do you run a company or a team and need to level up your leadership skills? Maybe you’ve started dating and want to make a good impression when you meet a potential partner. Whatever it is, be sure it’s something that moves you at an emotional level. Knowing your purpose for achieving a goal creates an empowering meaning that makes you feel confident and driven.
4. CREATE A GROWTH MINDSET
What thoughts do you focus on when feeling confident? Are those thoughts limited to prior successes only – that you can only be confident after becoming wildly successful? While there’s some truth to this, core beliefs like this can limit you. Confidence doesn’t come from outward achievements but our perception of those external events. Being confident means that if you do fail, you can pick yourself back up, learn something valuable, and view it as an opportunity for growth. When you adopt a growth mindset, every action is a success because the “failures” are perceived as lessons that move you closer to your goal, boosting your confidence in reaching it.
5. CELEBRATE YOUR ACHIEVEMENTS
No matter how small they may seem, celebrating your wins is critical for building confidence because it helps sustain momentum over the long run. The external world does not always reward you for your progress, which is why it’s so important to reward yourself. This could be as simple as taking a moment to feel proud and grateful, treating yourself to a favorite meal, or sharing your achievement with loved ones. When you acknowledge your accomplishments, it strengthens your confidence and inspires you to take on new challenges.
6. SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE
If you’re feeling discouraged, sometimes all you need to do is reframe your life conditions and change your perspective on failure. Tony has said, “I’ve come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy.” One of his best tips for how to be confident is this: see failures as opportunities, not obstacles. Focus on the positive meaning, instead of the negative. Embrace all of the gifts of life – and live fearlessly.
7. PRACTICE GRATITUDE
Practicing gratitude is essential for mastering your emotions because you cannot feel fearful and grateful simultaneously. Gratitude moves you away from a scarcity mindset and brings your attention to the fact that you are already enough and have everything you need within you. Gratitude allows you to look around and see all the blessings in your life. And when you already have enough, it gets easier to take action with confidence. In this state, you view life through a lens of curiosity where you seek to learn something rather than fixate on achieving your goal immediately. As a result, every new thing you learn becomes a success that you can savor and feel grateful for, which inevitably builds your confidence.
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