The #1 Quality All Good Teachers Have

From my coaching perspective, self confidence is knowing you can trust yourself to do what you say you’ll do. It’s increasing your integrity with yourself. Self confidence is also being kind and feeling compassion for yourself. It’s seeing your strengths and your weaknesses, your successes and failures and trusting that it’s all ok and choosing to believe in yourself anyway.

Self confidence is also a willingness to feel any emotion that comes from trying something new or scary (failure, embarrassment, loss, anxiety, humiliation, rejection) and trusting you won’t be harmed by it. When you are willing to feel any negative emotion, knowing that you’ll be ok no matter what happens, that gives you incredible self confidence to take action. You can move towards a goal or do something new, knowing you might fail or struggle and feel uncomfortable, trusting that it’s ok and you’ll be ok. That’s self confidence.

How to increase self confidence

No surprise here - increased self confidence comes from changing your thoughts about yourself. It comes by considering the possibility of what you can create in the future.

If you are afraid of failure and afraid of disappointment, that’s normal. Instead, try imagining what your life would be like if you were willing to experience failure without it meaning anything had gone wrong or that there’s anything wrong with you. 

Fear doesn’t prevent self confidence. An unwillingness to feel the fear does. You have to be willing to experience discomfort in order to be self confident: Be willing to feel humiliation, rejection, embarrassment and isolation. Once you know how to process those emotions, they really aren’t so awful.

Beliefs that create self confidence

The good news about self confidence destroying thoughts is that you have the power to change them. In fact, your mind has the power to change everything about your world, but it will take a little work. 

You’ll have to intentionally train your brain to think confident thoughts. These examples will help:

What others think about me is 100% about them.I was made for this.Fear is no big deal.I am capable.The worst that can happen is a feeling.I have my own back.My potential is limitless.Failure earns success.The better I fail, the more confident I amWorry only pretends to be necessary.So what??What I make it mean is the worst that can happen. It’s just a thought.I can do hard things.I’ll figure it out.I can’t fail unless I stop trying.Add your own! Make them believable and feel good.