Gaining Confidence In Yourself, Your Choices And Decisions

The topic of confidence is always a fascinating one and I think it's something that we all probably lack at some point in our lives. Throughout my teenage years I never had much confidence, then throughout university it was at rock bottom and as I've navigated my way through my twenties I've definitely become more and more confident so I thought it would make for an interesting post as I know that I always want to know how other people have boosted their confidence as well as having faith in themselves and their decisions.

FAKING IT

Out of everything that is discussed when it comes to confidence I'm a huge believer in faking it until you truly feel confident. And no-one has to know that you're making it up as you go along, infact I think most of us are making it up as we go along. The more and more that you convince yourself that you're super confident and fearless the more than your brain starts to believe it. Years and years ago it was something that I always read about and I always rolled my eyes like whatever that will never work. And then I got put in situations where I had to be a little more confident even though I felt like I wanted the world to swallow me. And the more I was in situations like that the more I believed in myself.

THERE IS NO RIGHT WAY TO DO LIFE

Half of the battle of having confidence in myself I find is that I always feel like I'm doing something wrong. And it's still something that creeps into my thoughts now and I constantly have to remind myself that there is no right way to do the majority of things in life. No-one has it all figured out and there is no manual of how to do life the right way. Because there is no right way, what works for one doesn't ever work for all of us. And the majority of us constantly beat ourselves up about it and weirdly seem to have more faith in the choices of complete strangers than we do ourselves.

A LITTLE BIT OF SELF DOUBT IS COMPLETELY NORMAL

Whilst I think that having confidence in yourself is incredibly important I also think that a little bit of self-doubt is completely ok and totally normal. Some people can just rush into decisions and not give them much thought and whilst that can work sometimes more often than not it's good to ask questions that come from doubt. Of course, when self-doubt is holding you back and not allowing you to do anything then that is when it becomes a problem but if it's just making you ask a few questions and think about things for longer than 30 seconds then it's ok. And aside from that, it's completely normal, even the most confident people in the world I'm sure experience a little smidgen of self-doubt at some point.

THE FEAR OF FAILURE

Something that constantly chips away at my self-confidence levels is the fear of failure or actually failing at something. And failure, as much as it sucks is just part of life and it happens to everyone, it just happens to be the thing that we don't share online so it makes everyone else think that failure never happens to anybody else but them which obviously isn't the case. Just because something might not have worked out the way that you might have hoped it doesn't mean you are a failure, it just means something hasn't worked out. It's so easy to think that your failures are what define you and they don't. So often the fear of failure is what can hold us back so often from doing what we want, of course, it's a huge bruise to the ego when something doesn't work out but it's never the end of the world.

DON'T MAKE THE CHOICE THAT YOUR FRIENDS ARE MAKING

Maybe this is something that stems from school but I think it's so easy to make the choices that everyone else is making and just follow the crowd. And it's so scary to stand out by yourself and make choices that might go against the grain in fear of other people making comments and judging you. It's all too easy to believe that if you make the choices that all your friends are then everything will be ok and they will obviously work out for you because everybody else is doing it. But it's rarely the case and even if they do work that doesn't mean you're going to be happy doing things that way. It's something that I think about so much but the amount of faith we hold in other people compared to ourselves and our own choices is crazy. We are the ones who know ourselves the best and know what is truly right for us, nobody else.

WE ALL MAKE THE DECISION THAT FEELS RIGHT AT THE TIME

Having confidence in your decisions is something that I find incredibly hard. We're faced with things on a daily basis that forces us to make decisions quickly and so often you don't have the time in the world to mull it over and naturally we all do what we think is right and have to roll with it. And sometimes it's not the best choice in the long run and there are things that we could have done differently. Which is when things are hard because we constantly beat ourselves up thinking about how we could have done things differently and made a better choice. It's much easier said than done but we all make the best choice at that moment and we have to stand by them and have a little bit of faith in ourselves.