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5 Essays on Believe in Yourself | Self Belief, Meaning & Importance

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Self belief is the most important thing in life which helps a person to fight against all odds and achieve success in their lives by leading a happy and contended life. Self belief does not come overnight, it comes with efforts and then only you can achieve your goal easily. Read the following short and long essay for students on self belief.

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Essay on Self Belief | Meaning, Importance of Self Belief For Children and Students

Self belief is defined as a feeling or consciousness of one’s own powers or of reliance on one’s own efforts. In simple words, self-belief is a strong faith and confidence in yourself.

If you have self belief then others will believe that you can achieve anything what ever you want to do. You will feel strong and active within yourself. You will be able to face any difficult situation or circumstances with courage and confidence. You will not lose hope in your abilities and skills even if you face many hurdles on the way.

However, if you lack self-belief others will not have faith in you. You may not be able to make a success of your life because of lack of motivation and strength from within. In other words, this means that the road to success is only for those who do have a strong belief in themselves. Self-confidence without self-belief is of little use.

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Self belief is important for all of us because nobody can succeed without it whereas success is the only thing that can bring self-belief in you which will help you to cope up with any difficult situation.

Importance of Self Belief in Life

Five major reasons why self belief is important in life are:

1) Self Belief is important for a student because he has to work hard and get good grades in order to get a good job. In this competitive world, an average or below average student cannot find a suitable job easily. If you have strong belief in your abilities then you will have confidence in yourself that you can achieve anything what ever you want to. It is the self belief that makes a student responsible for his actions and decisions because, without having trust in oneself no one can be brave enough to take decisions confidently.

2) Similarly, when it comes to choosing a profession or taking any important decision in life, self belief is an important criterion. It will help you to take firm decisions and achieve success in your career by leading a happy and contended life.

3) If you have a strong belief in yourself then it will be easy for others to trust you because they know that whatever promises you make them, whatever tasks assigned to you, you will accomplish them successfully.

4) Self-belief is also helpful in making sound decisions because it gives courage to handle any situation that may come up during the course of your life.

5) Successful people have a strong belief in themselves and others too believe in them so they get success easily. They have the ability to influence and motivate others to work hard and achieve success.

Thus, we can say that having a strong belief in yourself will help you to build strong relationships with your family members , friends and colleagues which will give support to each other and result into achieving greater heights of success.

Self Belief for Students

Successful students are always confident and have a strong belief in themselves. They do not allow their failures to discourage them from achieving their goal or goal. They wait for the right time, gather all resources and then make a plan to achieve success. Successful students learn from their mistakes and never waste an opportunity given by god because they know that opportunities are rare. A person who does not have self-belief always makes excuses for his failures and blames others for his shortcomings.

In an era where competition has become cut throat, it is very important that a student believes in his own potential and abilities to achieve high scores. If he lacks self belief then he will make mistakes which will decrease his percentage. And often this

Conclusion 

To conclude, it can be said that having a strong belief in oneself is very important because if you have a strong conviction about yourself then nobody will be able to discourage you from achieving your goal. If you want to achieve success in any field of life, all you have to do is to believe in yourself and gather all the necessary resources and tools.

What is Self Essay:

Self essay is a form of writing in which an individual shares their personal experiences, opinions, and thoughts. It allows the writer to reflect on their own life and share their unique perspective with others. A self essay can cover a wide range of topics including personal growth, relationships, challenges, accomplishments, and more.

One of the main purposes of writing a self essay is self-discovery. It gives the writer an opportunity to explore their own thoughts and feelings, which can lead to a deeper understanding of oneself. Through self-reflection, one can uncover hidden motivations, values, and beliefs that may have influenced their actions and decisions in life.

Moreover, self essay writing can also be a form of self-expression. It allows individuals to freely express themselves without fear of judgment or criticism. It can be a therapeutic outlet for releasing emotions and processing experiences. Writing about personal struggles, successes, and lessons learned can also inspire and resonate with others who may be going through similar situations.

Self essays are not only beneficial for the writer but also for the readers. By sharing their personal stories, individuals can connect with others on a deeper level and create a sense of empathy and understanding. It can also serve as a source of inspiration and motivation for others who may be facing similar challenges.

In today’s digital age, self essays have become increasingly popular through various platforms such as personal blogs, social media, and online publications. This provides individuals with a platform to freely express themselves and share their stories with a wider audience.

In conclusion, self essay writing is a powerful tool for self-discovery, self-expression, and connecting with others. It allows individuals to reflect on their own experiences and share their unique perspectives with the world.

Essay on Believe in Yourself :

Believing in oneself is often cited as one of the most important factors for achieving success. It is the foundation upon which all other aspects of personal growth and development are built. Yet, many struggle with self-doubt and lack of confidence, hindering their ability to achieve their goals and dreams. In this essay, we will explore the concept of self-belief and its crucial role in achieving success.

What is self-belief?

Self-belief can be defined as having confidence in one’s abilities and worth. It is a deep-seated belief that you are capable of accomplishing your goals and overcoming challenges. It is not about being arrogant or overestimating oneself, but rather having a realistic understanding of your strengths and potential. Self-belief is also closely linked to self-esteem, which refers to how you perceive and value yourself.

The power of self-belief

Believing in oneself has the power to shape our thoughts, actions, and ultimately our destiny. It gives us the motivation and determination to pursue our dreams despite obstacles and setbacks. When we have a strong sense of self-belief, we are more likely to take risks and push ourselves out of our comfort zones. This opens up new opportunities for growth and success.

On the other hand, lacking self-belief can lead to feelings of fear, doubt, and insecurity. This can hold us back from reaching our full potential and living a fulfilling life. Without self-belief, we may settle for less than what we are capable of and miss out on opportunities for growth and achievement.

Building self-belief

The good news is that self-belief is not a fixed trait. It can be nurtured and developed with conscious effort. Here are some ways to cultivate a strong sense of self-belief:

  • Recognize your strengths and achievements: Take time to reflect on your past successes and the qualities that helped you achieve them. This will remind you of your capabilities and boost your confidence.
  • Surround yourself with positive influences: The people we surround ourselves with can greatly impact our self-belief. Choose to spend time with those who support and uplift you, rather than those who bring you down.
  • Challenge negative thoughts: We all have an inner critic that can undermine our confidence. When you notice negative self-talk, challenge it and replace it with positive affirmations.
  • Set achievable goals: Setting and achieving realistic goals is a great way to build self-belief. Start small and gradually work towards bigger goals as you gain more confidence in yourself.
  • Celebrate your progress: Acknowledge and celebrate your progress, no matter how small. This will help you stay motivated and reinforce your belief in your abilities.

The role of self-belief in success

Self-belief is often considered the key to achieving success because it provides the necessary foundation for taking action towards our goals. Without a strong sense of belief in ourselves, we may lack the courage and determination to pursue our dreams. In contrast, when we truly believe in ourselves and our abilities, we are more likely to take the necessary steps towards success.

Moreover, self-belief also helps us bounce back from failures and setbacks. It allows us to learn from our mistakes and use them as stepping stones towards future success. As famous basketball player Michael Jordan once said, “I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”

In conclusion, self-belief is a vital ingredient for achieving success in any aspect of life. It gives us the courage, motivation, and resilience to pursue our dreams and overcome challenges. While it may not come naturally to everyone, self-belief can be developed through conscious effort and practice. So, believe in yourself and your abilities, and you will be amazed by what you can achieve. As the saying goes, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” So, choose to believe in yourself and see how it transforms your life for the better.

Short Speech on Believe in Yourself:

As we go through our daily lives, we encounter various challenges that may seem impossible to overcome. In such situations, it is important to have self-belief and confidence in ourselves. Believe in yourself is more than just a phrase, it is a mindset that can help us achieve great things.

When we believe in ourselves, we are able to push through obstacles and setbacks, and work towards our goals with determination. It allows us to stay focused on the positive aspects of our lives and not get discouraged by failures.

Moreover, when we have faith in ourselves, it inspires others around us to believe in themselves as well. As leaders, it is important for us to instill this belief in those around us, especially in times of uncertainty.

Believe in yourself also means acknowledging our strengths and weaknesses, and constantly working on improving ourselves. It is about having a growth mindset and not being afraid to take risks.

In conclusion, having self-belief is essential for personal growth and success. Let us remember to always believe in ourselves, no matter what challenges come our way. As Henry Ford once said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.” So let us choose to believe in ourselves and strive towards achieving our dreams. The possibilities are endless when we have faith in ourselves.

If you Believe in Yourself anything is Possible Essay:

As human beings, we all have dreams and aspirations that we want to achieve in life. These goals may vary from person to person, but they are ultimately what motivate us to strive for excellence. However, the path towards achieving our dreams is not always smooth. There will be obstacles and challenges along the way that can make us doubt ourselves and our abilities.

In such moments, it is important to remind ourselves that if we believe in ourselves, anything is possible.

Believing in oneself means having confidence and faith in our own abilities. It means acknowledging our strengths and weaknesses and trusting that we have what it takes to overcome any difficulties that come our way. When we truly believe in ourselves, we are able to turn our dreams into reality because we have the determination and perseverance to keep pushing forward, even when things get tough.

One of the main reasons why believing in ourselves is so crucial is because it allows us to take risks and step out of our comfort zones. Without self-belief, we may hesitate to pursue opportunities or try new things because we are afraid of failure. However, if we have faith in ourselves, we are more willing to take chances and explore different paths. And even if we do fail, we are able to bounce back stronger because our self-belief gives us the courage to keep going.

Moreover, when we believe in ourselves, we are not easily swayed by the opinions or judgments of others. We trust our own judgment and decisions, which allows us to stay true to ourselves and our goals. This is essential in a world where there will always be people who doubt us or try to bring us down. By believing in ourselves, we are able to rise above these negative influences and stay focused on what truly matters.

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In conclusion, if we believe in ourselves, anything is possible. Our self-belief gives us the strength and resilience to overcome obstacles, take risks, and stay true to ourselves. So let us hold onto our dreams and have faith in ourselves, for it is through self-belief that we can achieve great things and make our wildest aspirations a reality.

Q: Why is it important to believe in yourself?

A: Believing in yourself is important because it boosts self-confidence, motivation, and resilience, helping you overcome challenges and achieve your goals.

Q: What makes you believe in yourself?

A: Believing in yourself often comes from self-awareness, setting achievable goals, receiving support, and learning from both successes and failures.

Q: What is believing in yourself summary?

A: Believing in yourself is having confidence in your abilities and worth, which empowers you to pursue your ambitions and face life’s obstacles with determination.

Q: What does it mean to believe in yourself?

A: Believing in yourself means having faith in your capabilities, judgment, and value as an individual. It involves self-assurance and a positive self-image, which drives personal growth and success

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Growing Self: Counseling and Coaching

The Power of Believing in Yourself

The love, happiness & success podcast with dr. lisa marie bobby.

It’s the stuff of motivational bumper stickers, but it also happens to be true: Believing in yourself is a prerequisite to reaching your goals and making positive changes in your life. 

But if believing in yourself was as easy as making the choice to trust in your own goodness, resilience, and competence in the face of all life’s challenges, you wouldn’t be interested in this podcast episode, would you?

No. Fundamentally changing your self-concept is a little more complicated than thinking happy thoughts. It involves seeking out new experiences that help you connect with your own incredible power to make good things happen, and then using those experiences to propel yourself forward. This article will show you how.

I’ve also created an episode of the Love, Happiness and Success podcast on this topic. My guest is Elise R., M.Ed., NCC, CCC, LPCC. Elise is a therapist , a life coach , and an expert in holistic life design . She’s helped countless people develop their self-confidence and self-esteem, and then construct their pathway forward with optimism and intention. Now, Elise is sharing her wisdom with you. You can tune in on this page, Apple podcasts , Spotify , or wherever you listen. 

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Admittedly, believing in yourself can be easier said than done. Our self-esteem , self-confidence, and feelings of personal empowerment are the result of deeply ingrained mental habits that start forming in early childhood. After decades of reinforcement, you can’t dramatically shift those habits in an instant simply by thinking positive thoughts. 

But you can intentionally form new mental habits that help you believe in yourself, and that will support you in making positive, lasting change . Here’s how. 

Where Is Your Locus of Control? 

Everybody “believes in themselves” to some degree. In psychologist speak, this is called your level of “self-efficacy,” or your internal belief in your own power to create the outcomes you desire. Having a higher level of self-efficacy helps you set ambitious goals (because you believe you can accomplish them), approach challenges with optimism (because you expect you’ll be able to figure them out), and persevere through setbacks (because you believe success is waiting for you on the other side). 

When your self-efficacy is low, you don’t set your goals high enough — in fact, you might not set goals at all. You expect tasks to be harder than they are, and you often don’t expect your efforts to pay off. When setbacks arise, you’re quick to give up. 

Your self-efficacy will be shaped by where your personal “locus of control” lies. People with an internal locus of control believe they’re in control of their own lives, and that their actions will shape their outcomes. People with an external locus of control believe that outside factors have a greater impact on their lives than their own efforts do. 

Shifting to an Internal Locus of Control

Luckily, having an internal locus of control is something you can practice. Taking responsibility is one powerful trick. When something doesn’t go your way, it’s human to look to outside factors to explain it — it’s easier on the ego, and it doesn’t require us to do the hard work of changing our behavior. 

But it also strips you of all your power. If everything is happening to you because of other people or circumstances beyond your control, you have no ability to create positive change. But if you can find one or two things that you could do differently to create a better outcome? Now you have something to work with. 

Taking responsibility is not about beating yourself up . It’s about taking advantage of the opportunities you have to create the life you want. 

Raising Kids that Believe in Themselves

Our attitudes about ourselves usually stem from experiences in our family of origin. For parents , that means that, if your goal is to raise happy, resilient, confident adults , you need to help your children begin to experience a sense of their personal power now. 

There are so many ways you can do this. Letting your kids make age-appropriate choices, and then experience the natural benefits (or consequences) of those choices, is one way to help them learn about responsibility and self-efficacy. You could also look for ways to let your kids have more influence in your family, which will teach them that their thoughts, feelings, and desires are important and that they can create real change. 

When well-meaning parents raise their children in strict environments where being obedient is the most important value, kids learn that how they feel and what they want is irrelevant. They may become disconnected from their own feelings and desires, and develop a sense of helplessness that they’ll carry into adulthood. 

Many of the people reading this article are here to unlearn that sense of helplessness. If you’re a parent who would like to save your child from that task in the future, you can do so by helping them become empowered now. 

Mastery Experiences and Believing in Yourself

Think about someone who you don’t think highly of. Maybe it’s an incompetent coworker, who’s always making careless mistakes that set the whole team back. Or maybe it’s a former friend who proved to not be such a great friend after all. 

What would it take to change your mind about that person? Could your coworker tell you “I’m going to do better from now on, so you can put me in charge of that big, important project?” Could the “friend” simply promise not to put you down anymore? 

No. Your opinion would only change if you could actually experience the other person behaving differently over a period of time. Your coworker would need to consistently deliver good work, probably for quite awhile, before your views started to shift. You would need to see your friend reliably follow through on their promise to treat you better. 

Changing your narratives about yourself works in exactly the same way. You need to have experiences that show you that you are capable of doing hard things and creating successful outcomes in order to form positive beliefs about yourself and your abilities. 

These are called “mastery experiences,” and they’re a powerful tool for building self-efficacy. The concept is simple: To become a confident baker, you need to make a few cakes. To become a confident public speaker, you need to do some public speaking. 

When you take action, see the results, and feel the results, you can no longer tell yourself the same story about not being capable. Instead, the story might become about the steps you could take to do even better next time. Your “locus of control” moves a little bit closer to your center.

Building an Empowered Career

Your level of self-efficacy has a big impact on every corner of your life, but it has a huge influence over your career in particular. 

When career coaching or counseling clients tell the “story of their careers,” and explain where they are now mostly by pointing to external factors (like messages they received from their parents, or the state of the economy, or the actions of a particularly bad manager), that’s a tip-off that they’re not in touch with their true power to build the career they want . 

It’s not that your family, or the economy, or the people you work for have zero influence over the way your career unfolds. But if you believe that your entire working life can be explained by external factors, there isn’t much that even the world’s best career coach can do for you — until you shake that disempowered belief system loose and replace it with something more useful, and more realistic.  

If you’ve had some disempowering experiences in the past, a good career coach can help you reconnect with your ability to strategically forge your career path and design the life you want , regardless of outside obstacles. 

Habits and Self-Efficacy

Habits are one of the most powerful tools in your toolbox for self-development, and having a higher level of self-efficacy can help you tap into them. These little choices don’t amount to much on their own — like brushing your teeth, or putting aside a hundred bucks in your savings account — but when you make these choices a keystone habit , you can exert a major positive influence over your life. 

Without a healthy level of self-efficacy, keeping up your positive habits is a challenge. It’s hard to cultivate the grit or “stick-to-it-iveness” that good habits require if you don’t believe on a deep level that you have the power to shape your outcomes through your actions. 

But even if your self-efficacy is low, you can “fake it until you make it” with your habits. Once you form a healthy habit, the benefits that begin to flow to you make it easier to maintain. You begin to see yourself as the kind of person who’s capable of creating a healthy habit and sticking to it. Your self-efficacy rises, creating a positive feedback loop that makes you more likely to hold onto your healthy habit, and more confident in your power to form new ones. 

Believing in Yourself When You Don’t Feel Like It

We all cycle through moods on a daily basis, and some mood states are more conducive to believing in yourself than others. Being just a little bit tired, or hungry, or stressed out can majorly affect how optimistic and confident you feel about yourself and your ability to make good things happen in your life. 

All this mood variation can feel like a barrier to building self-efficacy. But, since your confidence fluctuates so much depending on your mood, obviously your self-doubt-y or pessimistic feelings are not an objective source of information about your true abilities. You are no less capable and competent a person when you’re a bit sleepy than you are when you’re feeling great. 

And you don’t have to wait until a better mood comes along to begin taking positive action toward your goals . Just taking a small step in the right direction can reconnect you with your feelings of personal empowerment, and a better emotional state will often follow. 

How to Believe in Yourself: It’s Not About Perfection

You don’t have to believe that you’re perfect to believe in yourself. You are a resourceful, effective person who is well-equipped to respond to a wide range of challenges as they arise, and if you look at your life history I’m sure you can think of countless instances when you did just that. 

Believing in yourself is about trusting yourself to figure things out as you go, make mistakes and learn from them, and course correct until you reach your destination. 

I believe you can do that. Do you?

Music in this episode is by Kutandara with their song “Nyungwe.” You can support them and their work by visiting kutandara.org. Under the circumstance of use of music, each portion of used music within this current episode fits under Section 107 of the Copyright Act, i.e., Fair Use. Please refer to copyright.gov if further questions are prompted.

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Lisa Marie Bobby : This is Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby, and you’re listening to the Love, Happiness and Success podcast. On today’s show, we’re talking about the power of believing in yourself and why this is so vital to everything else. Believing in yourself and that ‘yes, you can’ is actually the foundation to being able to do most things. On today’s show, we’re gonna talk about why that is and how you can develop this belief in yourself.

If you can’t stop smiling right now and aren’t sure why there is actually a reason, it is because you are currently basking in the energy of Kutandara. Kutandara is a nonprofit musical education program that is based in my hometown of Boulder County, Colorado, and they are teaching, generally, children and adolescents the art and craft of Zimbabwean music from Southern Africa. 

I had the great pleasure of encountering this collective while out and about one day. They were performing in public. If you can imagine a bunch of 12 to, probably, 17 year old kids, just like 12 of them, like banging away on these xylophones and drums and having the best time, they’re all smiling and dancing and just playing this gorgeous music, and just bathed in their own personal joy and beaming this energy out to everyone in their radius. 

It was the most glorious thing I have felt in a while. Everybody was having the best time. The energy was contagious, and I walked away thinking what a cool experience for these kids to have. They are experiencing themselves doing something amazing and feeling great about it, and that’s the message of today’s show. They believe they can because they’re actually doing it, and you can too with the right mindset, and the right support. 

Also, as an aside, if you would like to learn more about Kutandara and what they do, you can check out kutandara.org , their music, their programs. Also, just a little reminder that you probably have one or more nonprofit music education programs, art education programs, all kinds of other cool stuff in your community that is supporting this kind of development and self actualization in the kids near you, and anything, I think, we can all do to support these programs. Lifts everybody’s boat, so consider it. All right, now, on with the show.

Lisa Marie Bobby : On today’s episode, we’re covering a topic that’s really key to changing anything and everything in your life, and that key is believing in yourself. I know that that sounds super corny, and you may already be starting to tune me out. But, I want you to know that when I’m talking about believing in yourself, this is not going to be like some pep talk where like, love yourself, believe in yourself, we’re gonna stencil that on your wall, and then everything will be great, right? 

Now, we’re actually talking about something that is much deeper, and something that is within your power to create and change. There is no shortage of this power of positivity stuff happening out there. I think that some of that can honestly be a little bit toxic and demoralizing for us if we’re being admonished to believe in yourself and love yourself and all the things and so we’re not doing this.

What we are going to be doing is talking about what believing in yourself really refers to, like in the psychological context and that is something called locus of control. People who have a high locus of control also have something called self efficacy. I know that these are technical, kind of psychological terms, but what they are referring to is the self concept around how much power you feel that you have to have control over and create change in your own life circumstances. 

People who have a low locus of control and a low internalized self efficacy, they feel somewhat helpless in their lives. They feel like they are at the mercy of outside circumstances. Even if they wanted to, they don’t really have the power or the ability to change their circumstances. As a result, they really don’t, because they don’t believe that they can on a very fundamental level. 

So these ideas are elementally important to being able to change anything, from your health to your relationship to your self concept to your career. They’re incredibly important to be able to do when you believe in yourself and your own ability to have power and control over your own life. You can get things done. You’re better at coping with stress burnout. You have more positive relationships, and you also feel happier, not to mention, more resilient. 

That’s what we’re going to be talking about on today’s episode is really like digging into, Okay, all sounds good, but how specifically do I accomplish these things. To do this with me, I have invited my colleague, Elise, to talk with us today on this episode. Elise is an amazing member of our team here at Growing Self. She is a therapist who specializes in career counseling, career coaching, and also I think of it as like life design. 

So personal and professional development, coaching and really, her specialty is helping people come in with this big jumble of who am I and what do I want out of my life, getting it all straightened out and set in a direction to achieve it. She’s here today to share her knowledge with you. So thank you, Elise, so much for being here.

Elise : Yes, I’m so excited. This topic is everything, and so I’m really excited to talk more about it with you.

Lisa : Well, I’m so glad. First, I think, I don’t know, do you feel like we talked sufficiently about how this is really different from the ideas that get conveyed in that toxic positivity realm of like, love yourself, believe in yourself. It’s like, I feel like we hear that so much. They stop being meaningful at all. Have you experienced that?

Elise : Yes. Honestly, it’s this thought that okay, if I’m not positive, then I’m not going to get anywhere. It’s hard to find that positivity sometimes within yourself, and this is coming from me where my top strength from the Gallup StrengthsFinder is positivity. 

Lisa : Really? Is that why you’re so cheerful? Okay, well, we need to talk about this.

Elise : But, I see positivity as something that’s more internal, and that’s why I love that you’re connecting it more to self efficacy today with the power of believing in yourself. Because without that, we’re not going to have that true internal positivity and mindset to allow us to get to where we want to go. So, we have to talk about that.

Lisa : Totally. You do not have to be a positive person to have a strong internal locus of control. You could be a highly negative person. It’s okay, and you could still get things done.

Elise : Yes, and as I think about this topic, too, I always think about how there are so many words that are similar, so we’ve got positivity. We’ve got things like motivation and confidence and self esteem. As I think about addressing just the listeners out there, I want them to know that it’s all of those things that combined to help you have that higher self efficacy. 

But I also wanted to find out a little bit more specifically, because I’ll be using some of those definitions as I go forward. When I think about motivation, it’s this desire to achieve some sort of goal, so think about what is your why, what’s that motivation. That’s still not self efficacy fully, it’s part of it.

Lisa : You can want to do something and still not believe in yourself or that you can, check.

Elise : Exactly, and then there’s your confidence, which a lot of clients come in, and they’re like, I feel confident, like, I feel like I can do this. It’s their belief in themselves, but often, that’s not the full part of the puzzle that gets them to where they want to go, so they still feel stuck. And then with self esteem, that’s more, in my mind, related to where you get your self worth from, and you define it in a unique way for yourself. 

So, that’s going to look different from one person to the next. It’s also where you find that value in yourself, but still is not what self efficacy is. If you’re feeling like you’re kind of in that spot, where you’ve got the motivation, you feel like you know you’re good enough. You’re doing great. You have the confidence, but you’re still getting stuck. That’s where the belief comes from in self efficacy. 

Because it’s really this combination of believing that you’re capable of producing an outcome and accomplishing your goals, and you can’t forget about it, you have to have both sides.

Lisa : Yeah, yeah. Like there’s almost this like, a will component to it, just like believing that it is fundamentally possible, like my actions have an impact on the world. It’s so crazy to think about, but I wonder if we could just talk about this other dimension of it for just a second is because there are a lot of people who arrive into adulthood for a variety of reasons, who fundamentally do not believe that they have power or control over their circumstances and over the way their life trajectory unfolds. 

It’s very much determined by others. Why is that? In your experience, where does this learned helplessness come from?

Elise : Yes, there can be so many things that contribute to that for folks. One of the important aspects that I think needs to be mentioned is that, sometimes, we don’t have a choice of where we come from, or what our background is, or the things that we have experienced in life. We didn’t ask for some of the hardships. We didn’t ask for the location that we grew up, in the family that we were born into. 

Some of those things can absolutely make it feel like we don’t have control over where we’re going. I’m reminded of the quote here. I think it was Teddy Roosevelt. He said, “Believe you can and you’re halfway there.” I think the belief part relates to what you’re asking about, it’s kind of that internal narrative about I failed in these aspects, or I can’t quite get past this barrier, and that’s only half of the story. 

The other half is what you’re doing to kind of take more of that control back. Is it practicing a skill? Is it developing some social capital? Is it fill in the blank? Goals can be so, so broad and so general. But belief, I think, is where it has to start and understanding your story, and what that story means and really what you’re saying to yourself and believing about yourself to get you to the halfway part before you start working on what you can control.

Lisa : Actually, I have to tell you something as we’re talking in this. Well, I hope it’s okay for me to share on the air. You are about to be a parent for the first time and I know we have many listeners of this podcast who are also parents. This whole conversation is actually making me think about an experience that I had just yesterday. I was in the grocery store with my soon to be four year old daughter, and I actually had this, because I think about this lot, like people’s feelings of power and control. 

I actually — not saying that I’m like the best parent in the universe. I’m sure many things could be improved upon. But, one of the things that I’ve been very conscious of doing is helping my children feel powerful. They have influence and so it means the silliest example, we were walking past the display, and of course, there was a thing of gummy worms. My daughter was like, “Gummy worms!” And I, originally, had this mom thing, where it was like, “You do not need gummy worms, gummy worms are not on the list.” 

I can sort of feel myself like launching into, like steering that the cart back towards the vegetables, right? But then, I actually had this moment. I was like, gummy worms, yeah. We steered the cart back over and let her pick the little box of gummy worms off the shelf. It was a very deliberate like parenting choice, because sugar and nutritional value aside, like, I want her to internalize this feeling that she can have efficacy. She can have control. 

She’s a powerful human, and she can make things happen, like she just made that happen. I worry sometimes that people arrive in adulthood, particularly in either very harsh or even sometimes neglectful parenting environments, and they did not have that experience. So I mean, do you have any thoughts or advice for people who have really had a lot of life experiences from an early age where, what I wanted, didn’t really matter that much. 

And I tried to make things happen, and it didn’t work. I didn’t have influence. I mean, that’s like foundational stuff, and that’s hard to like will yourself into believing if you have a lifetime of experience where it hasn’t been true. I mean, where would you begin?

Elise : Yes, I’d say it takes a lot of practice. That is absolutely a huge tenant of self efficacy is that we want what’s called mastery experiences, which I hope we get to talk about a little bit more later, but that your mastery experiences absolutely are impacted by past experiences. When you feel masterful, you’re probably going to have a little bit higher self efficacy, because you see success. You’re seeing results. You’re feeling good. 

If you’re not having those mastery experiences, or you’ve been in situations that have led to lower efficacy beliefs, it’s really hard to take that power back because you haven’t had the mastery experience in a way that you could have. And so even experiencing, it sometimes feels like incredibly foreign and different than like, Wait, what is this I’m experiencing right now, when it’s going well. 

I go back to the story aspect. I always go back to what are you believing, and what are you experiencing? Another quote comes to mind, I love metaphors, and it’s related to how you don’t remember what someone says, you remember how they made you feel. I think with self efficacy related experiences, it’s relatively similar that we might not remember all the ins and outs of his situations, but we know how we interpret it in our minds. 

That’s how we create what I like to call our private logic about our life and our own story. Oftentimes, those stories we tell ourselves, even though they’re based in evidence, potentially, and things that have happened to us. They don’t have to define us. They don’t have to be the final thing that allows us to stay where we’re at, maybe not allows us but like, almost forces us or makes us think we have to stay where we’re at. 

But, this is all about taking that power back, and how practicing understanding what your beliefs are about yourself and about your own story can start unlocking those things that are not serving you in this current season of life, and start paving a pathway forward that is a little bit more honoring of who you are now, and also who you want to become.

Lisa : Well, that’s really good advice and so hopeful, because like, I think I’m hearing you say that, yeah, maybe you’re right. Maybe you have had life experiences where you haven’t been empowered, and so you don’t feel empowered, and like that can be so subconscious in some ways. Like, we don’t even know sometimes what those narratives are. But if you can realize that you have that deep internal belief of I don’t have any control, nothing I do matters, if you figure that out, then what you can do is begin practicing doing that things and feeling the results and seeing the results.

It’s almost like retraining yourself so that even if you don’t feel or believe in yourself or that you have power and control when you start, the act of practicing and behaving in this way, will kind of reset your clock and put you on the path towards the experience of mastery. Is that it?

Elise : Yeah, yeah. Like how you talked about it in the way of kind of almost reframing. I guess that’s another word I would use to describe that process that, yeah, these things have happened potentially in your past or are currently happening, and what are you subconsciously believing about that, and how can you reframe it with new data and evidence that allows you to take your power back and recognize your internal locus of control, rather than the external ones, which maybe is where some of those beliefs are coming from. 

I always say that we are the masters of our own beliefs, and it can also make us feel not very masterful, because our subconscious can be kind of tricky. Because we’re human beings, we’re wired to survive, but we want to wire folks to thrive. So that’s where the reframing process can be really, really helpful and powerful.

Lisa : Yeah.

Elise : And challenging. 

Lisa : But also, though, just what a compassionate statement and I think that’s so important for us to be talking about explicitly is just what you were saying about survival, right? So I think, like, there are a lot of adults running around out there and not, oh, I don’t believe in myself. I don’t really love myself, like, that’s just another thing to beat yourself up about, right? If you’d like, don’t have that. 

But, can we just like pause and honor what you just said for a second, because like, if you are a child growing up in a family, that is very aggressive. It’s controlling, it abusive, even, if you did assert yourself in that situation, there would have been very severe consequences, right? You couldn’t do that at an earlier stage of life. Or if you grew up in a family where there was a lot of neglect, and there wasn’t anybody there to hear you to try to make that be different would have created an enormous amount of pain. 

So, I just want to honor and like, give a shout out to all those people listening to this, who did exactly what they needed to do. It was the right thing in order to survive those circumstances. Now, in this adult space, you get to decide how much power you have, and that’s different. Thank you for bringing that up.

Elise : Yeah, you get to decide what serves you and what is not serving you any longer, because you still can’t change what happened, but you can change how you think about it. If it’s not serving you anymore, where do you put that? Do I take it with you every day? Hopefully not. That’s what the process of coaching and counseling can really help with is, let’s set some goals. Let’s understand that backstory, and let’s help you build a toolbox that’s full of mastery that allows you to thrive and not just survive anymore.

Lisa : Now, I know that in your career, you’re a career development specialist. So, you’re really working a lot with people who are understanding themselves in that intersection of personal growth and professional development. Can you say a little bit about what you have noticed in your clients when it comes to their career domain between people who have that high self efficacy and internal locus of control compared to people who have low self efficacy or an external locus of control? What does that tend to look like with career?

Elise : Yes, that’s such a great question. Oftentimes, it is very evident when we first start working together where a client might be at in experiencing their own self efficacy. Generally, how I like to start off working with folks is, in a very first session, we do what’s called your career story. Again, that’s a very big theme today with me. I love the narrative aspect, because I want to understand your career beliefs specifically, and where you’re coming from. 

So with that career story, with folks with higher self efficacy, regardless of the ups and downs, the ins and outs of their career, they’re generally feeling excited and hopeful and ready to look for what’s next. That’s generally why folks will kind of come and work with me as a career counselor is hey, I’m ready for what could be next. What do we do? How do we do that? 

So, noticing their beliefs about, yes, okay, I’ve got some hunches about what I might want to do. I just need a little bit more clarity or a little bit of support in this area. Those often lead to higher self efficacy beliefs, and then we get to do some really great work to help them do that in whatever way makes the most sense. In that career story session with folks who might have a little lower self efficacy in career things specifically, I noticed a lot of just pain. 

Honestly, with my backstory is this. I’m only doing this job because it’s what I found. I was job searching during the recession back in the early 2000s, and I couldn’t find something, so I just landed here. Even folks with a pandemic, I haven’t found anything and it’s been months. Isn’t the great resignation a good sign? Why am I still not finding something? So, there’s a lot of that questioning. 

If I’m noticing a lot of that, my spidey senses internally are thinking, we might have some, some negative self thoughts that are impacting this career story, which is a sign of that lower self efficacy.

Lisa : But unlike kind of looking outwards, looking at external circumstances, and so here are all these reasons why I had to do what I did, as opposed to.

Elise : Yes, or oh, I don’t have the right skills on the job posting, so I can’t apply for this job, or I’ve never worked in this industry before, so I don’t think I’m going to be able to find a job. Fill in the blank. There’s lots of different reasons, especially career, which is a huge part of life.

Lisa : Yeah. Oh, yeah. Totally. So would you say that those are, because that was another question, I mean, like, for people listening to this, how do you know where you kind of are on that spectrum of efficacy. Like, if you’re on the low end, is that one of the ways you would kind of be able to tell is almost like listening to yourself talk? Like, is it let me tell you about these 87 reasons why I can’t do something?

Elise : That can be part of it. Yeah, and one of the questions I love to ask folks to reflect on more as we begin career specific work, is what are some of your most prized accomplishments in your career? Oftentimes, again, if you have a hard time coming up with those, or even if you say, like, oh, I lead this really amazing training at some point, but then you have 12 reasons why it didn’t go well that follow your story of accomplishment. That can be an indicator of like, there’s something else going on beneath the surface here.

Lisa : Yeah. So you’re saying like, just cracking into that, like that mental filter, that inner narrative, and I’m glad that we’re talking about this too, because it can be very difficult to like know what that is. Like, we’re all kind of simmering in our own broth, and we aren’t like consciously aware of the things that we just sort of automatically tell ourselves. So, it can take some effort, but that’s one of the ways that you can understand how empowered you really believe yourself to be.

Elise : Yes, exactly. I think the other really important aspect to career specific self efficacy is also knowing yourself. If I ask clients, what are your skills or what are your strengths? Tell me about your dreams for your career. If those are really hard questions, then we often need to start in the self clarity phase of career work to understand who you are, and what those most amazing aspects are of yourself that you’re taking with you. 

Because as you get to know yourself, you’re taking your power back. You’re understanding, oh, I really love public speaking. No wonder I love doing presentations in my last job. Whereas before, they might have thought, oh, I didn’t like anything about my last job. So, we’re kind of picking the best pieces, and putting together that new story, while also developing clarity, which will naturally build efficacy and help folks move closer and closer to where they’re meant to be, and get out of their own way, too.

Lisa : I hear you and in that exploration, I’m just curious if this ever comes up. Do you ever find that there’s like a necessary balance sort of between that like self efficacy, believing in yourself, but also having a, I don’t want to use the word self doubt, but like the ability to I mean, because overconfidence is not necessarily good for people either. But, I guess if you had to choose, I’d go with overconfident like you can always back up, right? But how can somebody, I guess, assess between like what they’re thinking about like? Is this a reasonable caution? Is this an obstacle that I need to think about to overcome? Are these doubts that I’m having something that I should listen to? Or am I having self doubts because I feel somewhat helpless on the inside? How can you tell if it’s a reasonable obstacle or one that you’re kind of creating because you expect it won’t work anyway?

Elise : Right. Oh, I think that’s where it’s so tricky, because there might even be both happening. 

Lisa : Yeah. Oh, yeah. That’s also true. Spoken like a true therapist. Both is the correct answer to most things.

Elise : Always in the end, right? I would say, honestly, if it’s more of this internal helplessness, that’s gonna show up pretty consistently as you’re thinking about career or about other aspects of your life. If it’s other types of obstacles, you might be thinking about it pretty consistently, but you might have ideas on what to do about it, or ways to learn about it. I guess to give a little bit more background on career specific self efficacy, this might help a little bit. 

There’s four different aspects that I’m usually assessing for and thinking about and whether it’s kind of that like deeper hopelessness, or like, oh, we just have some obstacles to overcome . Those four things are those mastery experiences that we’ve mentioned a couple of times, obviously, successful build it, and failure, or perceived failure will diminish it. If you’re having experiences of mastery, like you write a really awesome resume and you feel good about it, that’s going to help you build a little bit more to go over that obstacle of your resume was an obstacle. 

Another aspect is vicarious learning, which is where we actually form judgments about our own ability to do something based on watching others do it. So if someone has witnessed a parent, a family member or a friend, anyone go through a job search and have certain experiences, you might be taking that on and thinking, well, if they couldn’t find a job, then I’m not going to be able to find a job. 

If they didn’t get a good offer at the end of the interview, then I absolutely will not get a good offer. Or the positive could also be true. If someone has a really great experience and finds this awesome company, another person might say, “Yeah, I can do that. I can find a company like that, too, that fits me.” So, we’re always learning. The next one is social persuasion, which is about receiving feedback from others. 

Again, this can be both positive and negative. You can receive negative feedback that goes more into that helplessness feeling where you were told once that you don’t communicate well, and you feel like well, how am I supposed to interview if I’ve been told that I don’t indicate well, and that can really persuade you from doing what you need to do. Or if you receive great feedback about your communication to stay with the same example, you’re gonna feel like, yeah, this might be an obstacle right now, because I’m nervous going into my interview, but I can do this. 

I know, I can do this. And then, the last one is thinking about your physiological and affective states. So how are you literally feeling? How is your body responding in all of these situations? Sometimes, our body can totally work against us leading to some of that helplessness feeling. Maybe, you have some anxiety surrounding your performance or about your ability to make change, or maybe, you feel very energized by the process of change, but the way that you’re thinking about how you’re responding will also, I think, impact that helplessness versus, okay, that’s just an obstacle.

Lisa : So it sounds like there’s a change process that can happen through these different components of mastery over time. I think I also heard that sometimes the difference between this internalized helplessness versus an actual problem is how global it is. Do you know what I mean? Like, is it coming up in specific circumstances? Or is this what you usually do? Right? 

Like, cause, I mean, just, I was a biology major in college and for a little while, thought about going to medical school like to be a real doctor, which, of course, I didn’t because I do have tend to have like a high self efficacy, like, “Yes, I can.” I also had this realization over the course of obtaining a biology degree that I really probably couldn’t do or be successful, like organic chemistry, like some of the math. 

Like I’m not good at that, I’m good at other things, but it was like, pretty specific to that circumstance as opposed to a global, like, I can’t pursue higher education and go on to help people in a professional role. It was like that kind of difference. But you’re saying too, that the experiences that you have along the way through that mastery process can kind of shape that one way or the other.

Like the experiences that you have learning from other people, which kind of makes me think that you could use those points that you raised to kind of develop your sense of empowerment. Is that another piece of it? Like if you if you’re pretty sure, like, No, I think I probably can, but I’m talking myself out of it. The key would be to try to find that affirming feedback, try to find positive role models, try to find new evidence. Is that what you’re saying?

Elise : Yes, definitely. As I think about the process of self efficacy, especially with helplessness versus obstacles, I absolutely view it as you can be in either one of those books.

Lisa: Elise, where’d you go? Oh. So you guys, going to invite you behind the curtain of podcast production, the good, the bad and ugly. Elise and I were having the most wonderful conversation and continued to have a wonderful conversation without either of us realizing that her audio had stopped recording somewhere along the way, and so this presented an interesting conundrum when we found this out after the fact, because immediately it was like what to do. 

Since we first talked, I’m pleased to report that Elise has had her baby and is currently on maternity leave. So of course, I’m not going to pester her to re-record this with me. Then, I think I had a parallel process. I’m sure many of you are familiar with this experience. So, what do we do? Do we pretend like that was intentional and just roll out a 30 minute podcast, as opposed to our usual longer ones?

Pretend like it was on purpose. But then I thought, you know what, this is such a nice opportunity to really illustrate authenticity, which I know is something that we talk about a lot on the show. Also, I think it really relates to the topic that we were talking about, with Elise around the power of believing in yourself, and the power of being able to have something kind of go wrong. 

Have weird curveballs thrown at you, and really take it in stride. Use it as a learning opportunity. I still don’t know why Elise’s audio stopped working, when I’m going to figure it out. Also, though, that’s this idea, like, the main point of the entire conversation is that it’s gonna be okay. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t know exactly what you are going to be doing all the time. 

Things don’t go the way that you planned , and you can just try things and see how it goes. Just have this general expectation that it’s going to be okay, and that doing something, typically, is better than doing nothing at all. Certainly not trying to hide or avoid, or pretend to be perfect and infallible, rather than rolling with it. So, I trust you guys that you understand and appreciate this show, and everything that we’re doing here and are not going to judge me for not being perfect. 

So, I really appreciate that about our relationship, thank you. But, I also really wanted to communicate to you guys the rest of what Elise and I talked about. Elise had a number of really amazing points after the audio stopped rolling, and so went back through and thought about what we discussed and wanted to share the rest of it with you so that this episode is complete for you. Ideally, the way we do these is for them to be genuinely helpful for you. So, using my own imperfection as a model here.

The next thing that we talked about, interestingly, is that self efficacy is not about needing to be perfect, or believing that being good enough is actually about being perfect, right? True self efficacy and believing in yourself is believing that you have the ability to figure things out as you go. You do not have to have everything all planned out in advance. You don’t need to know exactly what is going to happen before you start taking steps forward. 

It’s like driving a car. You can only see a certain distance in front of you. You can’t see the whole route ahead. But, you trust that there’s a road ahead and if you encounter an obstacle or need to course correct, you can when you need to. You don’t need to spend a ton of time or energy thinking about what exactly is going to happen or how you’re going to handle it ahead of time. When you trust yourself of, “You know what, I am generally competent person.” 

When circumstances present themselves, I trust myself to be able to handle whatever those are in an appropriate way , so I’m okay. I could just stay in the present, because to get too future focused creates a lot of paralysis, right? When we are trying to close loops, when we are trying to make decisions about things that we legitimately don’t have enough information about yet, when we’re trying to solve possible problems far in the future, we cannot and it creates paralysis and a lot of self doubt and anxiety in the present. 

So, today’s podcast is a great example. I had no idea that was going to happen and it doesn’t matter. This can still be a nice episode for everybody anyway, right? The goal here with believing in yourself is really believing in and intentionally cultivating the ability to be flexible, to not fall apart when weird things happen, and to adapt to changing circumstances. So, that’s something that Elise and I talked about and I think is something worth reflecting on further as you’re listening to this today is, how do you feel, typically, when things don’t go as planned?

Do you feel like that creates a huge obstacle? Do you kind of fall apart and stop? Does it create paralysis? Or are you able to be like, alright, well, that didn’t work, what else are we gonna do, and kind of create an alternate route to the same destination. So, just thinking about how you typically handle those things will give you some insight into your current level of self efficacy, right? 

People who believe in themselves find another way when the door is locked, and therefore we will go through the window. That kind of mindset, which is worth cultivating. Really, I think spending time maybe thinking about moments in the past when you have been resourceful, when you have encountered an obstacle and figured it out. Maybe, it wasn’t the perfect outcome and it was still okay and that is meaningful. 

Thinking about resilience, I think is an important part of believing in yourself, how it’s not about avoiding problems or preventing weird or non ideal things from happening. That really personal power is being resilient in the face of them. Everybody experiences failure, rejection, disappointment, things not working out the way they hoped, and it is about managing that and being okay, anyway, that of certainly we can have feelings about those things. 

I will not lie. I had a surge of “Oh!” I found out the audio was broken, but, we recover. We move on. These are all ideas that you can really intentionally practice and cultivate. What is really neat is if you get in the habit of doing this, that every obstacle, setback, disappointment becomes an opportunity to increase your skills and competence and comfort and capacity in these really important areas. 

So, we are reframing this as a positive thing as Elise so insightfully shared in our conversation. Another really important thing that Elise and I went on to talk about, is around the power of habit, believe it or not, habits meaning the things that we do routinely, on purpose, sometimes not on purpose, the things we do routinely, and how they contribute to our feelings of either empowerment, or disempowerment. 

We talked about the fact that our habits are made up of these tiny daily choices that seem inconsequential on their own, right? Do you spend three minutes thinking about what you’re doing before you sit down for the work day? Do you put your clothes in the hamper or leave them on the floor of your closet? I mean, like, what do you do, tiny little things, and the extent to which they impact not just our life circumstances, and not just the way we feel, but really, over time, aggregate and accumulate into situations that have the power to shape our future and to shape our reality. 

Stay with me. But if you have low self efficacy, if you sort of believe that nothing matters anyway, and it doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do, then it is difficult to have motivation to maintain very small healthy habits. Because if they feel genuinely irrelevant or inconsequential. You don’t believe in your power to create the outcome that you want. So for example, there is no magic bullet when it comes to really creating big, long term, permanent changes in your life. 

So, health would be a good example. You could walk every day. You could eat a generally healthy diet, and really objectively not experience much of a difference in the way you feel day to day. Maybe some improvements but, you’re not going to miraculously drop 80 pounds overnight, right? And so, there isn’t a lot of evidence that what you’re doing is having much of a positive impact when it comes to stuff like that. Many things are like that. 

Relationships, you can deliberately try to be nicer and kinder and more polite to your partner in small ways for a couple of weeks. Particularly, if you have been in a negative relational system with them for a long time, it’s not really going to create a lot of immediate change, because they are stuck in a very powerful narrative about who they are and who you are, and what this is. 

It takes a long time to change that, or the support of a professional to kind of break through it more, more quickly. But if you don’t really have that confidence, and understanding in your own ability to create big changes through playing a long game , and have that ongoing confidence that the small things you do every day do actually matter, they do accumulate. They do create powerful change over time like that drop of water dripping on a rock, like a couple million years from now, will actually have enough power to create a canyon where that little drop of water is that sense of self efficacy. 

That power of believing in yourself is very much connected to these ideas of grit, of continuing to try in the face of not having a lot of immediate positive reinforcement, not having things be immediately gratifying. The other piece of this is that it’s very well known that accomplishing any long term goals requires little increments of work every day to create these outcomes rather than these big sweeping changes that rely on you doing extreme things or having these big bursts of motivation. 

But the other thing that is true, it is very much related to the self efficacy idea is that you can fake it till you make it with your habits. If you are intentionally cultivating a positive habit that you know is going to create positive change in yourself and your circumstances in your relationships over the long haul, you will be able to attune your thinking to see the small, incremental, very subtle changes that do actually happen day to day, and that are very easy to miss, if you are have already decided that it doesn’t matter anyway. 

In very real ways, we all choose what we want to see. What we experience, typically, matches our preconceived ideas of what is going to happen, right? So when you are cultivating a mindset of self efficacy, and an internal Locus of Control, you are kind of programming yourself to see these very small steps forward rather than interpreting the same situations as obstacles as setbacks. 

We’re seeing the positive impact of our efforts as opposed to the negative, and that’s really powerful. The other thing, the other reason why this is very, very important is that we change our perceptions of ourselves, through our behaviors and through our experiences. To a degree, we have to decide what we want to believe, right? Because we can’t do anything without having some of that. 

But, these decisions are supported by the things you observe yourself doing, and the things you experience is happening. It’s through these behaviors and beliefs that you change your story about who you are, like what kind of person you are and what you are capable of doing, because you are doing it. This is something that Elise and I talked a lot about, and and one of the resources that we mentioned in our conversation was the book, Atomic Habits, by James Clear. 

Fantastic book and he talks a lot about this idea around how our behaviors really do change our self concept over time and that it is through our habits that we practice being the person that we want to be. So, behaviors have a lot of power. The point of that is that just taking action and doing the things that you would like to do, even if you don’t feel completely aligned with it. Just like that drop of water over time, it will change your self concept. 

It changes your ideas of who you are and what you’re capable of, so it’s incredibly powerful. I just offer that because many times with my clients that I see in therapy, or coaching, and Elise has the same experience. There’s this belief in our culture, this myth, that you have to feel positive. You have to want to do something. You have to feel good. You have to believe that you can, before you take action. 

That prevents a lot of people from taking action and therefore, becomes an obstacle to their experiencing themselves in a more empowered way. So just wanted to mention that. Related to that, Elise and I talked a lot about emotions and self efficacy and how they’re not the same thing. Feeling a certain way is not the same thing, and believing in your own power and ability to influence circumstances in your life. 

You don’t have to change the way you feel before taking positive action. You can feel really bad and do the right thing anyway, in every domain of your life. It’s okay to start by taking positive action, because a better emotional state will typically follow. Even if you’re a little dubious that it might, particularly, if you turn things into habits, and so you’ll feel better. Again, as we were talking about a minute ago, we will be changing your self concept in the process. 

I can be afraid and do hard things anyway. When you observe yourself living as a brave person, as evidenced by these behaviors, you become a brave person. It’s really cool, and it’s easier. It’s easier than we think, because it’s really rooted in behavior. Another thing is related to this. We also do need to find a balance between emotional self care and pushing ourselves too hard.

So right now, we’re talking about kind of one side of the coin, believing in yourself, doing hard things anyway, because they’re the right things to do. This also does require sometimes a great deal of discernment, and really like self awareness, to know whether or not the things that we want to do or want to achieve are actually in our best interests, and are actually the correct course of action.

Sometimes, the bravest and wisest and most important thing can actually be taking a step back to reevaluate our circumstances get reconnected with our values. Take a look at our habitual behaviors and our patterns to see and just double check. Are these in alignment with who I want to be? Are these going to carry me to a place that I want? Or have I accumulated over time a series of habits or mindsets that maybe are linked to action? 

Maybe, they’re doing something, but is it the right thing for me, and where it starts to get complicated is that we evolve over time. We change and our values change. The things that are important to us as people change. So, it is also very easy to get into habits, patterns, mindsets, that were very true for us at an earlier period of life, and that served a very positive purpose earlier in life, and that might not any longer. 

The things that were important to me and that carried me forward, and that brought value and meaning into my life in my 20s are extremely different than what is real for me in my 40s. You know what I mean? So, being able to slow down and take stock of that is also a very important part of believing in yourself, because when we’re checking in with ourselves: How do I feel? What do I want? Is this right for me? Where do I want to go? What do I need to do to get there?

When we’re having those conversations with ourselves, we are building trust in ourselves, not just to create positive outcomes, but like any relationship. When we’re asking ourselves, how do we feel? Is it good for you? Are you in the right place? What else could you be doing? What do you need to stop doing? Right? 

It’s like the experience that we have when we have an honest and emotionally intimate conversation with another person. When we feel heard, and understood, and people are being validating and responsive, it builds trust and security. We hope for that in our relationships with others, but genuinely believing in yourself and trusting yourself, requires you to be having those kinds of conversations, and understanding yourself on that level. 

That can be accomplished through things like journaling. It is also a huge component of therapy, or really meaningful coaching is that as you tell somebody like me, how you’re feeling, what you want. I’m asking you questions, kind of elicit that information. You’re not really telling me about those things. I am listening, of course. I’m receptive, but what I’m really doing is giving you the opportunity to hear yourself talk, to be understanding yourself in a different way, as you’re saying things out loud to me. 

So yeah, that’s a lot of the value of personal growth work and cannot be underestimated. So, I would encourage you to be spending time in that space. If your hope is feeling more confident and empowered and able to create positive change does need to be the right change. Then very lastly, the other thing that Elise and I talked about, was this idea that self efficacy is connected to compassionate self understanding. 

Like, we were talking about earlier in our conversation, you do not have to be a positive person. You do not have to feel good. You do not have to know exactly what’s going on. You can not be any of these things that I think we kind of hold as ideals, sometimes in our culture, and it’s related to this. Being an empowered person with a high Locus of Control, who believes in themselves has nothing to do with rejecting or pushing away any negative feelings that might come up for you. 

Through this process, it’s okay to have negative beliefs, to have this little voice in your head that tells you you can’t accomplish your goals, to feel overwhelmed, feel discouraged. Like, that’s all part of the experience. So, we’re not pushing any of that away. It’s about listening to those thoughts and feelings and attending to them compassionately, like understanding why they make sense, understanding where they come from, and also understanding that the things we think and feel don’t need to necessarily control us. 

We can have thoughts. We can have feelings, and we can decide to take various courses of action that are connected to our values and connected to our desired outcomes. That may be different than what our thoughts or feelings are telling us. It’s really that self compassion, that understanding of what are my habitual thoughts. What do I know are those old loops that I play in my head? And what have I learned over time is something that I habitually feel or think that may not actually be true? 

I don’t have to make myself stop thinking that but, I think I’m probably not going to let it control my behavior or my decisions. And then related to this, too, is really making an intentional choice to support yourself or surround yourself, rather, with supportive people who believe in you. The people that are around us, the things that are reflected back to us through our relationships are enormously powerful, and we tend to rise to the level of the people that are around us. 

So, to have people who believe in you, who believe in themselves, who communicate positive expectations of you, who would know that you’re capable of so many things will help you grow in that area and I think also help you develop a more compassionate and really respectful relationship with yourself. Of course, not everybody in our lives was gifted by virtue of their own life experience with that kind of ability that they probably didn’t get the support and compassion that they needed in certain times of their life. 

So maybe, they do have a more negative, self critical mindset that they then kind of project onto others. So, it is also not that we need to reject those people. We can also have compassion for them. But if you spend time with them, do have internal boundaries. Maybe, you’re still with them, and still love them and want to have a relationship with them, but be making kind of empowered decisions about how much influence you would like their perspective to have on your self concept, your life choices. 

If you don’t have a lot of that in your life right now, look for some. We started this episode with the most inspiring music Kutandara here in Boulder, and that is what they’re doing. They’re taking these groups of kids and like, here’s a xylophone, here little xylophone hammer things, and here’s how you do it. Yes, you can. They have that experience of being around supportive people who say, yes, you can. 

We’re going to teach you baby steps, here’s what to do. And then, they have experiences of witnessing other people around them doing it and being successful. They start experiencing themselves as doing it. And then all of a sudden, they’re part of this magnificent group who’s really creating beautiful music, not perfect music. Maybe sometimes, they get there and they don’t feel like doing it, and then they do it anyway. 

But over time, it really does shape their self concept. They feel empowered. They feel stronger. They feel more able, because of what they choose to do. So, I hope that this episode was helpful to you and thank you for rolling with me through the imperfection of this process, but this is what we do. This is what we all do. So, thanks again and I’ll talk to you next time. Bye bye.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby is the founder and clinical director of Growing Self. She is a licensed psychologist, a licensed marriage and family therapist, and a board-certified coach, as well as the author of “Exaholics: Breaking Your Addiction to Your Ex Love,” and the host of The Love, Happiness & Success Podcast.

Learn more about Dr. Lisa

short essay on believe in yourself

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby is the founder and clinical director of Growing Self. She is a licensed psychologist, a licensed marriage and family therapist, and a board-certified coach, as well as the author of "Exaholics: Breaking Your Addiction to Your Ex Love," and the host of The Love, Happiness & Success Podcast.

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Self-Esteem

The power of believing in yourself, 8 insights on the psychology of self-efficacy..

Posted July 22, 2022 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods

  • What Is Self-Esteem?
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  • Self-efficacy is the confidence we have in our abilities in specific life domains.
  • Finely-grained self-efficacy beliefs are more useful in predicting outcomes than global self-confidence measures.
  • Self-efficacy is a key ingredient of self-regulation and achieving our goals.

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Years ago, right before starting on a big new project, I bought a framed note that spelled with golden letters:

She believed she could so she did.

I didn’t know who she was and what she did , but somehow, the words offered encouragement for my own undertaking.

The contract that humans draft with their loftiest dreams is surprisingly straightforward. Yes, we need skills to accomplish our goals . Yes, we need effort, strategy, resources, creativity , character, and even luck. But before we set the world in motion, we need the blessing of an inner ally, who, whether with a coy wink or a full-blown orchestra, makes us believe that we can .

This confidence in our abilities in specific life domains is known as self-efficacy . After studying self-efficacy for decades, psychologist James Maddux concluded that believing that we can accomplish what we want to accomplish is one of the most important ingredients for success . Indeed, countless research studies have shown that having high self-efficacy can help us pursue our goals , cope effectively with stress , engage in health-promoting behaviors, and have better psychological well-being .

Why do our thoughts and convictions have such a consequential hold on us? Is it the courage they impart to dream in the first place? Is it the resolve they extend when we stumble? Or is it because when we believe in ourselves, we can “risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit,” as poet E.E. Cummings writes.

Here are 8 insights from Maddux on the key role self-efficacy plays in our lives.

Self-efficacy can be more adaptive than self-confidence

Traditionally, psychologists have defined and measured self-confidence as a global construct that is consistent over time and across situations. It’s almost like a personality trait that people tend to have to varying degrees. The trouble with thinking of ourselves in global terms, such as having high or low self-confidence, is that it’s very easy to mis-predict outcomes.

Research shows that when it comes to our ability to predict behavior, situation-specific measures (i.e., self-efficacy beliefs) outperform global measures such as self-confidence. Thus, if you are considering setting a new goal, you’ll be better off breaking down your general self-confidence into components and thinking about your abilities in various specific situations. This is particularly important for people with low self-confidence, which can often become a self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, in cognitive behavioral therapy , the client who complains of low self-confidence is invited to explore some areas in life where they actually do well. This exercise can help individuals think about their particular competencies in various situations that they feel good about and move away from self-defeating thinking patterns.

Self-efficacy is a key ingredient of self-regulation

Self-regulation refers to the way we guide our behaviors, thoughts, and emotions in the pursuit of our goals, desired outcomes, and values . It involves using our past experiences and knowledge about our skills as reference points to develop expectancies about future events and states. Consider self-regulation as a circular process where complex networks, factors, and predictions interact with each other and unfold over time.

Being a good self-regulator is an acquirable skill that includes learning how to generate better self-efficacy beliefs, setting and pursuing effective goals, incorporating feedback, and having adaptive self-evaluations of performance. Self-regulatory skills (as well as the belief that one is a good self-regulator) is fundamental for psychological well-being because they can usher a sense of agency over one’s life.

Self-efficacy is not wishful thinking or a fake-it-till-you-make-it attitude

Self-efficacy is best viewed in terms of having confidence in your ability to apply your skills in particular situations. It is a much more nuanced concept than a blind belief of “I believe I can do it, and therefore I will succeed.” Notably, it entails having a clear understanding of your skills. Skills and beliefs about skills usually go hand-in-hand. This is why overconfidence without actual preparation (or lack of skills) can set people up for failure.

Self-efficacy can help in challenging and uncertain times

A powerful source of self-efficacy is actual performance—things you’ve done well in life. Often, when people encounter what appears to be a new problem, they see it as being entirely different from what they have experienced before. That’s rarely the case. Any challenge, if you live long enough, will have some similarity to other challenges you’ve faced and overcome before. If you stop and think about the ways in which a current challenge is similar to other challenges you successfully dealt with in the past, you can draw upon your experience and boost your sense of self-efficacy for managing this “unprecedented” circumstance. It can also attenuate the fear of uncertainty and of encountering something you have never encountered before.

short essay on believe in yourself

Even the pandemic had elements that were not entirely new to us. Everyone, for example, has had times in their life when they felt isolated—perhaps they were separated from loved ones or felt alone in a foreign place. When we break things down to their components, most things can be considered a matter of degree of variance, as opposed to being a whole different kind of experience. This insight can help us deal with our circumstances more effectively, however uncertain and ambiguous they may appear.

Self-efficacy is important for resiliency

Resilience is often defined as the ability to bounce back from adversity and recover our equilibrium when we’ve been caught off balance. Resilience comes into play when we encounter barriers in our pursuit of desired goals. Research suggests that when facing a challenge, low-efficacy individuals might self-reflect in negative ways (“I knew I couldn’t do this…”) or disengage, while high-efficacy individuals will have more confidence in their abilities to find solutions to their problems, and thus be more resilient. A growth mindset (as opposed to a fixed mindset) promotes resilience and an acquirable view of skills, thus providing a better foundation for developing self-efficacy beliefs.

CC0/Pixabay/Ijmaki

Experience fosters self-efficacy

What helps most in gaining self-efficacy is experience—trying something new and working at it, usually by breaking down goals and skills into manageable pieces and practicing them separately, again and again. When we think of a big goal simply as a series of small goals one after the other, it can give us the courage to dive in. Over time, as people acquire a sense of mastery over various skills, they will also accumulate self-efficacy beliefs. Once you realize the principle of these learnable self-regulatory skills, you can apply them to different situations.

Believe in yourself, but let your actions speak for you

It’s difficult to accomplish great things without believing in oneself. However, watch out for people who are constantly telling others how good they are at things. I would argue that a person who truly believes they are good at something is not going to feel the need to broadcast it. They will let their actions speak for them. In fact, someone who is constantly boasting about their greatness is probably trying to give themselves a pep talk, because their self-efficacy is not high after all.

Advice from a self-efficacy researcher for leading a happier life

For me, it goes back to trying not to think of ourselves in global, all-or-nothing terms or even fixed personality traits and aptitudes (“I’m not good at math—that’s just the way I am.”) Instead, it could be more helpful to see ourselves as complex individuals, with different skills and abilities that are not fixed and pre-determined, but rather are subject to change and growth.

Success, whichever way you define it, includes becoming better self-regulators by continuously honing our skills and engaging them in the right way. If people pay attention to the anatomy of their successes, they will likely realize that the skills they use to accomplish their goals can be generalized to accomplishing other goals. This is how self-efficacy beliefs are formed and a growth mindset is established.

Many thanks to James Maddux for his time and insights. Maddux is University Professor Emeritus at George Mason University and Senior Scholar at GMU’s Center for the Advancement of Well-Being .

Maddux, J.E., & Kleiman, E.M. (2020). Self-Efficacy. The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology, 443.

Maddux, J.E., Kleiman, E.M., & Gosselin, J.T. (2018). Self-efficacy. In D. S. Dunn (Ed.), Oxford bibliographies online: Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Maddux, J.E., & Gosselin, J.T. (2003). Self-efficacy. In M. R. Leary & J. P. Tangney (Eds.), Handbook of self and identity (pp. 218–238). The Guilford Press.

Conner, M., & Norman, P. (1995). Predicting Health Behaviour: Research and Practice with Social Cognition Models. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Diseth, Å. (2011). Self-efficacy, goal orientations and learning strategies as mediators between preceding and subsequent academic achievement. Learning and Individual Differences, 21 (2), 191-195.

Zhao, F. F., Lei, X. L., He, W., Gu, Y. H., & Li, D. W. (2015). The study of perceived stress, coping strategy and self‐efficacy of C hinese undergraduate nursing students in clinical practice. International Journal of Nursing Practice, 21 (4), 401-409.

Milam, L. A., Cohen, G. L., Mueller, C., & Salles, A. (2019). The relationship between self-efficacy and well-being among surgical residents. Journal of Surgical Education, 76 (2), 321-328.

Marianna Pogosyan Ph.D.

Marianna Pogosyan, Ph.D. , is a lecturer in Cultural Psychology and a consultant specialising in cross-cultural transitions.

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Essay on believe in yourself

Essay on believe in yourself 3 Models

Last updated Friday , 15-03-2024 on 11:00 am

Essay on believe in yourself is important, because self-confidence is the most important success factor, without your self-confidence you will not achieve your great goals. We offer several models such as, a short essay on self-confidence, definition of self-confidence, a paragraph about steps to increase your self-confidence, what are the manifestations of self-confidence, how do I develop my self-confidence, sayings that encourage you to be confident in yourself, obstacles to self-confidence and how to overcome them, and what is the difference between self-confidence and arrogance.

Interesting topics suitable for students in the fifth and sixth grades of primary school, and students of the first, second and third grades of middle school and high school. The elements of an essay on believe in yourself include an introduction, and a conclusion.

Essay on believe in yourself

One of the most important factors for a person’s success is his self-confidence, so in essay on believe in yourself we will show the importance of this trait, and how a person of average intelligence but has self-confidence may achieve better success than someone who is smart but does not believe in himself.

Your self-confidence is the key to many opportunities that you can take advantage of, especially in the oral exams where you have to speak tactfully and without fear.

And also when you apply for a job and other social relationships in which you must be a positive person, and therefore we will present the essay on believe in yourself

 There are some tips that help you increase your self-confidence and enhance your sense of positivity such as psychological support and taking care of your external appearance. In addition to educating yourself, knowing local and global events, and avoiding obstacles that make you lose your self-confidence, such as neglect, laziness or lack of self-esteem, praising others more than they deserve, and so on.

Definition of self-confidence

Essay on believe in yourself in which we define self-confidence as a person’s sense of his own worth and belief in his abilities, and this confidence is translated into behavior and actions.

Self-confidence stems from oneself and not from others, and therefore all his behavior is natural and controlled, without fear or anxiety.

Self-confidence must come from yourself, because if you rely on gaining your confidence in yourself from the opinions of others, you will never gain it, because you will not find someone who prefers you over himself.

Self-confidence is your ability to make tough decisions at the right time. Many people miss out on great opportunities because of a lack of self-confidence, and consequently feel regret afterward that haunts them throughout their lives.

A lack of self-confidence makes a person care about the opinions of others, and all his behavior is abnormal, and anxiety and stress appear on him when he is with others. He cannot make any decision except after consulting a large number of people, whose opinions may differ, and thus he becomes confused and tense, and in the end he is unable to reach a correct decision.

Self-confidence is the most important success factor

All life experiences have proven that self-confidence is the most important success factor, because a person who is confident in his abilities will accept challenges without fear, and thus will discover solutions and be able to complete the path of success and reach its end, thus achieving his great goals.

A person who is not confident in himself will back down at the first problem he encounters, because he does not believe in his abilities and is deeply afraid of failure.

It is important to realize that success will not come if you believe that you are unable to achieve it, and therefore you must have self-esteem and that you can achieve what you want, even if you fail at the beginning, you will achieve what you want in the end.

Often failure is the strongest motivation for success, and this is what a self-confident person believes in. He is not afraid of failure, but considers failure an experience that he benefited from in correcting his mistakes.

Steps and tips to increase your self-confidence

In the essay on believe in yourself, I will offer some tips that boost your self-confidence, including:

  • Support yourself: You should always support yourself by remembering your abilities and skills, and praising yourself with words of praise. Self-support is the best way to increase your self-confidence.
  • Taking care of your external appearance: Your appearance in a decent and elegant manner makes you confident in the acceptance of others, and thus increases your self-confidence.
  • Pay attention to your body position: You must have information about the use of body language, so that you can use it optimally. One of the most important of them is to make sure to straighten your back and raise your head while talking to others. In addition to looking directly into the eyes of your interlocutor, do not look at the floor or the wall while talking to others.
  • Walk at a faster rate: It is important that your steps be steady and relatively fast, because walking quickly gives others a feeling that you are an important person, you have a lot of work, you value time, and your health is good. While walking slowly gives the impression of exhaustion, fatigue, and lack of seriousness in work.
  • Feel proud: Talk about your achievements with pride, and make sure that you have abilities that are different from others.
  • Sit in a prominent place: be sure to sit in the front rows, not in the back rows, and not in a far corner of the room. Being in the front row indicates that you have confidence in yourself.
  • Speak in an appropriate voice: Make sure that your voice is not loud or low, but rather your voice must be appropriate for all those present to hear, and your words must be clear and understood by everyone.
  • Share your opinions with others: You must express your point of view in the discussion sessions, and not isolate yourself from others and only listen.
  • You should exercise: Doing any kind of exercise increases your self-confidence.
  • Follow-up of local and global events: It is important to be aware of local and global events, as this greatly increases your self-confidence.

Manifestations of self-confidence

Undoubtedly, there are manifestations of a self-confident person. In the essay on believe in yourself, I will mention some of these aspects as follows:

  • Psychological reassurance: There is no doubt that self-confidence gives you psychological reassurance, and thus you can deal with life problems better.
  • Positive optimism: Confidence gives you a sense of optimism because it makes you believe in your abilities, and that it is possible to achieve your big goals.
  • The ability to perform well: Self-confidence is the key to success in all our work. Therefore, there will be no fear of failure, and therefore we will not work under psychological pressure.
  • Speed ​​of decision-making: One of the manifestations of self-confidence is the speed of decision-making, because you believe in your mental abilities to understand, analyze and draw conclusions, while a person who does not trust himself hesitates to make decisions on his own, and relies on consulting others.
  • Achieving success and happiness: There is no doubt that self-confidence is your way to success, and success leads to our feeling of happiness.

Obstacles to self-confidence

In fact, there are personal characteristics that may be an obstacle in the path of a person, and the result is a lack of self-confidence, and among these characteristics are shyness, laziness, neglect, fear and lack of self-esteem. I will talk about these characteristics as follows:

  • Lack of self-esteem: Oftentimes a person has good skills and the ability to do things that others cannot do. But despite this, he despises himself, and looks at others as better than him, and feels that he is a failure, and this feeling reinforces a lack of self-confidence. Therefore, you must trust and believe in your abilities.
  • Neglect and laziness: One of the factors that lead to a lack of self-confidence is neglect and laziness, which are personal characteristics that can be overcome and changed. All a person needs is the will to change. If you have the will, it is possible for you to acquire new qualities that are better than you are.
  • Not learning from the experiences of others: You must believe that the experiences of others are yours as well. It is not reasonable for you to do all the experiments in order to be convinced of their results. Life experiences are experiences gained from your personal experiences and the experiences of others as well.
  • Fear of failure: Mostly everyone is afraid of failure, and in the essay on believe in yourself I will explain the effect of fear of failure on your inability to achieve your goals. Where the degree of fear differs from one person to another, there are people who are so afraid of failure that they cannot make any progress, and the fear of failure is the reason for their failure. While there are people who can make their fear of failure a strong motive for success.
  • Exalting others more than they deserve: Exalting others more than they deserve is one of the factors that make you not trust yourself, because at the same time you underestimate your abilities, and this will result in a lack of confidence in yourself.

The difference between self-confidence and arrogance

There is a big difference between self-confidence and arrogance, because self-confidence is a person’s belief in his true capabilities, which he already possesses, while arrogance is a person’s belief that he has capabilities that distinguish him from others, when in fact he does not possess these capabilities.

A self-confident person is often a humble person, while an arrogant person is superior to others and despises them.

Self-confidence is a good quality, because it is a constructive quality that drives you to progress and self-development. While the characteristic of arrogance hinders its owner from benefiting from others because he feels that he is better than everyone and does not need their expertise, and therefore the arrogant person cannot develop himself.

In addition, a self-confident person is loved by others, while an arrogant person is not loved by anyone, and everyone alienates him.

Words about self-confidence

Undoubtedly, words of praise improve a person’s self-confidence. Words are a double edged sword, with some words we can help someone to trust themselves and become a creative person. But some words also cause a person to feel failure and frustration, and may make him lose confidence in himself completely.

Therefore, we must care about encouraging others, mentioning their advantages and praising them because this gives them self-confidence. There are beautiful sayings about self-confidence. I will mention some of them in the essay on believe in yourself as follows:

  • In the words of Dr. Robert Anthony: “You can have anything you want if you are willing to let go of the belief that you cannot have it.”
  • You must refuse to be less than you deserve.
  • A self-confident person does not seek approval from others for what he does.
  • You have to do what you think you can do.
  • Every failure makes you stronger, so don’t despair.
  • People are like colored windows, they shine when the sun falls on them, but in the dark their beauty does not appear unless the light shines from within.
  • Every experience is an addition to you.
  • No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
  • Never bow your head, hold it high.
  • With every step you take, you become stronger.
  • Don’t expect everything to be perfect, so you must challenge your circumstances.
  • Don’t think too much about what other people think of you.
  • When you believe in yourself, you can take risks.
  • Self-confidence is your key to success.
  • When you trust yourself, you will be yourself.
  • Confidence does not come from always being right, but from not being afraid to be wrong.
  • Talk to yourself as if you were talking to someone you love.
  • Deep fear does not come from being incapable, but from your view of other people’s opinions.
  • Self-confidence pushes you forward, it is like a force that pushes you forward.

At the end of the essay on believe in yourself, I presented an easy topic from which you can learn a lot of tips that help you to boost your confidence. The most important of these tips is your belief in your abilities and working on developing them through learning, and not being afraid of failure. Because failure is an experience that you can also benefit from in correcting your mistakes.

It is important to realize that the road to success is not easy, it is full of challenges and you have to face these challenges and find solutions. And make sure that with every step you take, you are getting closer to your goal, and therefore you must refuse to be less than what you deserve.

I hope you benefited from the interesting essay on believe in yourself, and I would be glad to receive your comments.

To read more, click on the following link:

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How To Believe In Yourself

After personally experiencing the good that focusing on positive thinking can bring, I can confidently say your ability to believe in yourself can change your life.

The process of thinking and talking about what you want and how to get it actually makes you feel happier and in greater control of your life. 

And when you feel in control of your life, you start to believe in yourself more and boost your confidence. 

Why Believe in Yourself?

Have you ever heard the quote, “if you believe it, the mind can achieve it?”

Or, “whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right?”

These quotes exist because the mind is incredibly powerful, and your self-belief has the power to either limit you from reaching your full potential or propel you to do great things.

Confidence in yourself equips you to take action. It also helps you  take bigger risks , which can result in bigger rewards.

Positivity works similarly.  Scientific studies have proven that when you experience positive emotions (such as love, joy, or contentment), you’ll see more possibilities in life. Positive thoughts can even build your skill set! Because positive emotions broaden your sense of possibilities, they also help you build new skills and resources. Negative emotions do the opposite.

Bottom line? If you believe in yourself, you’re more likely to succeed–and to be happier in all areas of life. . That is true believe in yourself meaning.

What Does It Mean to Believe in Yourself?

Now that you know why it’s important to believe in yourself, it’s time to define what that actually means and looks like, as it can be a bit different for everyone.

Start by thinking about a goal you have set for yourself. How likely do you think it is that you will take part in actions to accomplish that goal? This is a good indicator of your self-belief.

If you don’t think you’ll accomplish that goal, it may be time to start believing in yourself more.

Self-belief is also about positivity. A positive mindset and positive self-belief go hand in hand. If you have a positive outlook on life, you are more likely to believe in yourself.

Psychology Today explains that if you believe in yourself, you have:

  • Self-worth (the sense that you have value as a human being)
  • Self-confidence (a  positive attitude about your abilities, qualities, and judgment)
  • Self-trust (faith that you can rely on yourself)
  • Autonomy (feeling able to choose and direct your own behavior)
  • Environmental mastery (your belief that your efforts will result in the changes you desire)

If you feel like you don’t believe in yourself, don’t panic. There are actionable steps you can take to have more confidence, trust, and positivity–all of which will lead to a stronger and better sense of self-belief.

Learning how to believe in yourself starts with thinking positively and vocalizing positive statements to yourself to build your self-esteem.

It also includes identifying what your highest values and aspirations in life are and setting expectations so you can be true to yourself — which will let you live your best life.

At the end of the day, believing in yourself doesn’t have to be a complicated process.

Try some of these proven methods to help you believe in yourself and even boost self-confidence.

Believe You Have Confidence

Perhaps one of the hardest things to do in life is to accept how extraordinary you really are, believe in yourself, and then incorporate this awareness into your attitude and personality.

But there is no one like you. You have unique contributions to share with the world that only you can give.

After all, we all have our own talents, skills, and abilities that make us extraordinary.

So one key to having confidence is by saying it. Tell yourself you have confidence, and then believe it.

Your thoughts become words and your words become your actions. So if you continue to tell yourself that you believe in yourself, eventually you really will believe in yourself.

Start by repeating affirmations such as, “I believe in myself,” every day.

It’s that simple.

Have the courage to accept yourself as you really are — not as you might be, or as someone else thinks you should be — and know that taking everything into consideration, you really are worthy to have the kind of life you want. You are an extraordinary person.

Know Your Value

Your beliefs determine your expectations. 

If you have positive values, you will believe yourself to be a good person . And, if you believe in yourself to be a good person, good things will happen to you. 

When you expect good things to happen to you, you will be more positive, cheerful, and future-oriented. You will look for the good in other people and situations.

For example, if your value is that this is a good world to live in and your belief is that you are going to be very successful in life, you will expect everything that happens to you is helping you in some way.

As a result, you will have a positive mental attitude toward other people, and they will respond positively toward you, helping you be a more cheerful and optimistic person that others will want to work with and for, buy from and sell to, and generally help to be more successful.

Build Self-Esteem

When you take steps toward building your self-esteem, your confidence grows and the natural outcome is that you start to believe in yourself. Use these six elements of self-esteem building to help you learn how to believe in yourself:

Setting clear, accomplishable goals gives you purpose and makes you feel good about yourself. Each step you take toward achieving your goals builds your self-esteem.

People with high self-esteem have high standards, and they make choices that are consistent with their standards. Develop values and ideals that you can be proud of, and make sure your goals are aligned with them. 

SUCCESS EXPERIENCES

When you are setting your goals, write down the smaller milestones it will take for you to reach them.  Each positive experience you have with success — large or small — will add to your belief in yourself. 

COMPARISON WITH OTHERS

Identify people you respect and look up to, whose standards align with the ones you want to have. As you progress, compare yourself to see how you measure up and get clues about how you can improve.

RECOGNITION

Recognition from people who are important to you, such as your family members, boss, or mentor builds your self-esteem. Striving to achieve your goals will attract recognition.

Along with recognition are tangible rewards. Your self-esteem grows as you work toward and receive a bonus at work, certification or licensure, an advancement in position or level of trust, or other status markers. 

Identify, Question, and Overcome Feelings of Self Doubt

If you’re trying to focus on self-improvement, doubt is an important area to tackle. Self-doubt can have a major impact on our lives and whether we reach our goals.

Self-doubt is a feeling of uncertainty about the truth. People who are experiencing self-doubt are unable to accurately judge their own abilities. If you feel unsure of your abilities, this may signal self-doubt.

You can fight against doubt by working on developing self-love and showing yourself more compassion. Give yourself grace when you fail; we all fail from time to time. Think about your strengths and focus on those more than your weaknesses.

Positive self-talk and daily affirmations are also methods that can help you start believing in yourself. We’ll cover those later in this post.

Use Visualization

One final way to better believe in yourself is visualization. Visualization is the practice of imagining your goals coming true–the process you’ll take to reach them, and what it will feel like when they come true.

Visualization  motivates you to get to work. It also helps reduce anxiety and build your self-confidence.

To start trying visualization, sit quietly and take deep breaths to start your visualization practice.

You may want to visualize what your life would ideally look like one year from now.

Do you have a new job? Are you spending lots of quality time with your family? Have you reached a certain goal? Include lots of detail in this visualization (which is almost like a daydream).

You can also get more specific and visualize certain goals coming true. If you want to write a book, picture yourself sitting down at your desk, creating an outline, and beginning to write. Then imagine how it will feel when you sign with a publisher and host your first book signing.

The power of visualization can help us do amazing things.

How to Be More Positive

While believing in yourself and staying positive isn’t something you have to do every hour of every day, it is important to incorporate even a little bit into your everyday life.

Even during the toughest days, try these things to help you experience more positivity in your life.

Incorporate Positive Self-Talk

Positive self-talk is a powerful tool to help you feel better about yourself. According to Healthline, practicing positive self-talk can allow you to enjoy benefits such as:

  • increased vitality
  • greater life satisfaction
  • improved immune function
  • reduced pain
  • better cardiovascular health
  • better physical well-being
  • reduced risk for death
  • less stress and distress

Having a positive attitude is clearly important, and self-talk is a great way to get there.

You can incorporate positive self-talk by speaking to yourself aloud or in your head. Don’t compare yourself to others–just focus on yourself and what you’re doing right.

This might sound like positive affirmations, such as, “I am kind,” “I have value,” or “I will work hard today.” You could also choose to highlight your positive qualities or think about small successes.

Practice Daily Gratitude

Gratitude is one of the key components involved to help you tap into the power of positive thinking. When you practice gratitude, you’re more focused on the blessings that are already in your life. You’ll focus on positive things like your friends, family, and past successes instead of constantly wanting something new.

According to Harvard Health,  studies have actually proved the association between gratitude and a person’s well-being. In one study, people who practiced daily gratitude were more optimistic and felt better about their lives! Your work and personal relationships can improve, too.

Start pursuing gratitude to remind yourself that you have a good life here and now, even if it’s not quite the way you want it to be. Keeping a gratitude journal where you write a few lines every day is a simple method to start shifting your mindset. Follow these tips as you write about what you’re grateful for in your everyday life:

  • Instead of naming something general (“my job”), be specific with an event that happened that day (“my boss investing in me by paying for a webinar”).
  • Stick to the same time of day, each day to help stay consistent.
  • Write a minimum of one thing per day.
  • Record something different every day.

Try Meditation

Meditation is a form of self-reflection that, among other benefits, can help you move past self-doubt and foster a more positive attitude. When you meditate, you clear your mind of distractions. This helps you relax and reduce any anxiety.

There are multiple  types of meditation . You might practice mindfulness meditation, where you quietly observe your thoughts as they pass through your mind. Try focused meditation to concentrate on any of your five senses. Or practice mantra meditation, where you can chant a repetitive sound to clear your mind.

If you struggle with negative thoughts, meditation could be a helpful method of moving past feelings of unsupportive self-disbelief to feel confident in your own life.

Yoga Journal recommends noticing negative thinking patterns and  intentionally replacing them with an opposite thought.

Did you know that regular exercise can help build confidence, foster a growth mindset, and increase your overall self-worth as a human being?

The Mayo Clinic states that  physical exercise stimulates chemicals in your brain that can help you feel happier, more relaxed, and less anxious. Plus, you’ll gain a myriad of physical health benefits–such as improved sleep,  which can make you feel happier , too.

There’s no one “right” way to exercise. The best kind of physical activity for you is whatever fits your own abilities and makes your body feel good.

If you’re new to the fitness world, start exercising by performing simple movements like squats or lifting dumbbells. If you have access to workout equipment, you can walk on a treadmill, ride a bike, or use an elliptical.

A mixture of cardiovascular exercise (like walking, running, or cycling) and strength training (like push-ups and squats) is best.

Make sure to check with your doctor before beginning any new exercise routine.

Being kind to someone isn’t just about the recipient. It benefits you, too. Kindness has been shown to increase self-esteem , empathy, and compassion. It also improves your mood and helps your mind–showing kindness to somebody boosts serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins, which create feelings of happiness.

How can you show kindness to someone else today? Often, small gestures mean just as much as big, flashy ones. Consider using one of the many ideas on this list to take action with kindness:

  • Give a compliment or a word of encouragement
  • Buy a coffee
  • Let someone merge in front of you
  • Give someone your seat
  • Pick up litter
  • Write a good online review
  • Write a thank-you note
  • Talk to a lonely stranger
  • Donate items you no longer need to a local charity
  • Anonymously leave a favorite treat in the break room
  • Mentor someone
  • Babysit for free

How to Improve Self Confidence

Self-confidence is a feeling of complete trust in your abilities , knowledge, and skills.

To be confident means that you have a generally positive attitude and a healthy way of thinking about yourself.

The more you believe in yourself, the more self-confidence you will naturally have.

Read Self-Confidence Books

The more positive elements you have in your life, the easier it is to gain confidence and believe in yourself even more. 

Deciding to make small changes in your routine and surroundings can have a big impact on your ability to develop confidence and stay positive. One of the best ways to achieve this is by reading self-confidence books.

When it comes to building self-confidence, there are so many authors who have written about proven methods to help do just that. 

Consider reading a few of these works to help you understand how to build self-confidence:

  • “The Power of Self-Confidence” by Brian Tracy
  • “The Confidence Code” by Claire Shipman
  • “Get Out of Your Own Way” by Philip Goldberg and Mark Goulston
  • “The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem: The Definitive Work on Self-Esteem by the Leading Pioneer in the Field” by Nathaniel Branden
  • “Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds”  by David Goggins
  • “The Self Confidence Workbook: A Guide to Overcoming Self-Doubt and Improving Self-Esteem” by Barbara Markway, Celia Ampel, and Teresa Flynn

Remember Your Past Achievements

One of the best ways to combat negative self-talk and boost low self-confidence? Spend some time reflecting on your past success.

Making a list of your accomplishments is a powerful way to gain more confidence in yourself. The list will remind you that you’ve done it before, and you can do it again.

Grab a pen and paper and get to work listing your achievements over your life. You might start out the list something like this:

  • Graduated from college summa cum laude
  • Received an award after six months in my first job
  • Wrote a book on the weekends

If you’re having trouble coming up with items to add to your list, get out of your comfort zone and ask a friend, family member, or colleague for their input on your own abilities.

When your list is complete, stick it somewhere you’ll see it every day, such as your refrigerator door or bathroom mirror.

Improve Your Self Belief

It might take a little work. But over time, you’ll get a sense of where your struggles lie when it comes to self-belief –which will allow you to take action to overcome them.

Need a little help along the way? Check out my 14-step goal-setting guide. This free resource teaches you how to set and achieve any goal you can imagine. You’ll grow your self-confidence and self-belief as you learn which mistakes to avoid and where to focus your energy.

Download the guide here and take the first step on the road to success!

« Previous Post Setting and Reaching Your Goals to Achieve Success Next Post » Self-Discipline Habits To Improve Your Life

About Brian Tracy — Brian is recognized as the top sales training and personal success authority in the world today. He has authored more than 60 books and has produced more than 500 audio and video learning programs on sales, management, business success and personal development, including worldwide bestseller The Psychology of Achievement. Brian's goal is to help you achieve your personal and business goals faster and easier than you ever imagined. You can follow him on Twitter , Facebook , Pinterest , Linkedin and Youtube .

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Home » How to build confidence » How to be confident

18 tips for being confident from within

Does it sometimes seem like everyone around you is confident and sure of themselves? Chances are, they have doubts just like you. So what’s the secret they’ve discovered about how to be confident ? They know that confidence is not something you have , it’s something you create . Being confident is nothing more than a feeling of certainty that you can accomplish whatever you set your mind to. Confidence comes from within, and you can find ways to believe in yourself at any time.

That’s not to say learning how to build confidence will solve all your problems. Everyone has bad days or moments that upset them. Being confident also doesn’t mean you’re completely sure of yourself at all times. Creating confidence is not about knowing it all; it’s about trusting that no matter what happens in a particular situation, you’ll be able to handle it and learn from the outcome.

Take this quick quiz to discover your top human need

Why is confidence important?

Learning how to be confident is important in every part of your life, but there are some instances where it’s crucial – especially at times where you feel like giving up . If you are a leader and in a position that requires being convincing and trustworthy, being confident is non-negotiable. No one will follow a leader who appears unsure of themselves. Lack of confidence can seriously impact your ability to put together a winning team and guide them to achieving your shared goals.

Even if you’re not in a leadership role, confidence is vital to being a team player in many situations – whether you’re in a sales position or need to present a confident face during frequent client interactions. Being confident helps you make instant connections and build relationships that will ensure you and your company succeed.  

Knowing how to be confident in yourself is important beyond the workplace, too. Learning how to be more confident can help you attract a partner you can build a healthy relationship with. It can also help you effectively handle conflict and seek out new opportunities ­that will foster your personal growth.

The principles of how to be confident

If you want to learn how to build confidence , you must be willing to change your state . Your state is essentially your mood at any given time of day. Your mood is influenced by how you feel about yourself at that point in time. The good news is you can change your state at any time – no matter what’s going on around you – as long as you know how to do it. Here are the main principles of building confidence and certainty that anyone can use to their advantage – and some real-life examples to help you apply them in any area of your life.

Body language

Physiology is key when learning how to be confident . M astering the body language of confidence can put you on the path to success. Think about someone you know whom you consider extremely confident. When you first met them, you probably knew they were confident before they even started speaking. You knew they were self-assured because of the way they carried themselves and moved. They made eye contact, shook your hand firmly and stood up straight. Now do a quick inventory of your body. What’s your posture like? How are you breathing? We all get in negative states, which can lead to slouching, shallow breathing or hanging your head. You have the power to change how you’re feeling by controlling the way your body moves and the way you present yourself.

Thinking positive can manifest itself in several ways. First, change your focus – because “Where focus goes, energy flows,” as Tony says. Instead of getting hung up on all the ways something could go wrong, focus on all the ways it could go right . Think about how you’re going to nail your presentation and how pleased your coworkers will be to hear it. What you focus on becomes your reality – and that includes what you focus on within your own mind. Replace negative words with positive ones and start seeing the bright side of situations. By changing your focus, internally and externally, you’re changing your state. And by changing your state, you’ll change your life.

Emotional control

Humans have the unique and incredible capacity to experience a wide range of emotions. But if you let your emotions dictate your experience of life without pinpointing why you feel a particular way, your emotions control you. The truth is that you control the way you feel , including whether or not you feel confident. Confidence is not something people are born with – it’s something you must create. Building confidence creates the feeling of certainty that you can accomplish what you set out to do. Confidence is like any other emotion. It is something you feel, and you can train yourself to access it in an instant.

A growth mindset

What do you think being confident entails? You may have some idea that confidence only stems from prior success – that you can only know how to be confident in yourself after you’ve become wildly successful. This sort of core belief severely limits you. Confidence doesn’t come from your outward achievements – it comes from within. Being confident means that if you do fail, you can pick yourself back up and try again instead of throwing in the towel. Once you start taking actionable steps toward your goal of being confident, your beliefs will gradually start to solidify. It’s time to adopt a growth mindset and start believing that you can learn how to build confidence . As Tony Robbins says, “Whatever you hold in your mind on a consistent basis is exactly what you will experience in your life.”

where focus goes energy flows

How to be confident

What do those principles have in common? They are all about becoming the master of your emotions. You must change your perspective and your mindset, and choose to be confident. And part of achieving this is believing – building certainty – that you are confident. That can sometimes be easier said than done , but there are specific actions you can take to apply these principles and become confident.

1. Practice self-love

To truly learn how to be confident , you need to love yourself first. When you fall in love with yourself , you’ll have confidence no matter what happens in life, because that confidence will come from within.

To master the art of self-confidence, first master the arts of self-awareness and self-love. Determine your values , and be proud of them. Embrace your strengths and weaknesses equally. That doesn’t mean you can’t work on those weaknesses. It’s about appreciating who you are and what makes you different from everyone else on the planet. When you start questioning your self-belief, remember to love yourself first.

2. Conquer your limiting beliefs

Without self-love, people unconsciously adopt limiting beliefs about what they are capable of or what type of relationship they deserve. This leads to self-sabotage and reinforcement of these beliefs – and overcoming them is the first step to total confidence. Ask yourself: What are the beliefs that are causing your lack of confidence in the first place? Negative emotions like self-doubt or anxiety are deeply connected to the opinions we have of ourselves based on our life experiences. They’re your brain telling you that it’s time to examine these limiting beliefs and replace them with empowering ones . 

3. Connect confidence to your goals

Why is learning how to gain confidence important to you? Do you present at conventions where you interact with a huge number of people? Do you run a company or a team and need to present a strong sense of leadership? Maybe you’ve started dating and want to make a good impression when you meet a potential new love interest. The first step is knowing the purpose behind why you want to achieve it. Once you know your purpose , learning how to build confidence becomes a matter of retraining your brain.

4. Change your physiology

The fastest tip for building confidence to radically change your physiology. Stand up straight. Square your shoulders and open up your chest. Breathe deeply. Maintain brisk, purposeful strides when you walk to cover more ground. Maintaining a posture like this makes you feel stronger and where your body goes, your mind follows. You can also observe others’ physiology to learn more about them and gain an edge in negotiations . Certain signs, such as body angle and amount of physical space they take up, can clue you in on how a person perceives a situation – and how they can be persuaded .

5. Take credit for your achievements

Just as adjusting your body language can make you feel confident even when you’re not, speaking up for yourself even when you don’t feel you deserve it can also have that effect. Confident people may make more money in the workplace due to one straightforward reason: they take credit for their achievements – and they do it when it matters most. If you made a contribution that accomplished a goal for the company or led to a positive outcome, it isn’t bragging to point it out to your manager or CEO – it’s a fact. As long as you state it in a matter-of-fact way, it won’t just make you look good – it will make you feel good, too.

6. Assess your top human need

Another vital step toward knowing how to be confident in yourself is to determine what drives your decisions. We all have Six Human Needs : certainty, significance, variety, love/connection, growth and contribution. We value one of these needs more than the others, and it affects every decision we make in life. It can even affect our confidence. If your top need is certainty, you may feel unsure in unfamiliar situations. If your top need is significance , you’ll start feeling insecure if you don’t get the recognition you need. Take Tony’s Driving Force Quiz to determine your top need and start thinking about how it could be affecting your confidence levels.

7. Improve your self-talk

Our words create our emotions, and our emotions create our world. If we’re not feeling confident, it’s a result of the stories we tell ourselves – and the words we use to tell them. The self-talk you use has an important effect on your confidence. What kind of questions are you asking yourself? If the things that come to mind are, “How come I’m not successful?” “Am I not smart enough to reach my goal?” “Do other people see me as a failure?” then you are setting yourself up for failure. Catch yourself when you are thinking negatively and shift the pattern of your thoughts. Ask yourself things like, “Why wouldn’t I accomplish everything I set my mind to?” and “Why would I waste time on my anxieties instead of focusing on my strengths?” When you ask better questions , you get better answers . 

8. Shift your perspective

If you’re feeling discouraged, sometimes all you need to do is reframe your mindset. First you must 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.” This is his top tip for how to be confident : See failures as opportunities, not obstacles. Focus on the positive, instead of the negative. Embrace all of the gifts of life – and live fearlessly.

9. Practice gratitude

Practicing gratitude is key to living a happy life. Tony says, “When you are grateful, fear disappears and abundance appears.” Stop thinking of your body as existing only to look at – or worse, for others to look at. Your body is more than a vessel or a painting to be admired. Think about all the things your body does for you. Think about all the things you have to be grateful for, instead of what you don’t have. When you change your mindset from one of negativity to one of abundance , you’ll stop approaching life with a scarcity mindset that breeds negativity and anxiety and start believing that no matter what, the universe will provide for you.

10. Use power poses

One of the deepest ways to increase confidence is to connect to your inner power. All of us have strength within us, but when we’re feeling low it can be difficult to remember it’s there. Consider developing your own personal power pose and breathing deeply to reconnect to your strong core. Your pose can be a yoga pose – warrior is an especially empowering one – standing with your hands on your hips and your feet shoulder width apart or standing with your head held high and your back straight. The important thing is that your pose achieves the goals of awakening your inner strength and carrying that strength and confidence into every interaction.

11. Think of past successes

There’s one incredible trick that will help you figure out how to be confident even when you’re at your absolute lowest: thinking about something you’re proud of. If you’re nervous or feeling unsure about an upcoming situation, picture a recent accomplishment or a time where you successfully handled a similar situation. Maybe you’ve never given a company-wide presentation, but you have confidently presented to clients on calls. Reliving these moments can help you unlock your potential . Your mind will begin to think in positive terms, not negative ones. Channeling moments of pride can help you to see the big picture more clearly – ultimately building your confidence.

12. Use goal visualization

Positive visualization is a powerful tool to wield on the road to understanding how to build confidence . When you visualize something over and over again, your mind begins to believe that it has already happened. When the situation finally arises – you’re making that presentation, asking for a raise or confronting a coworker – your brain thinks, “I got this.” That’s confidence. Visualize a specific situation at work. Think of yourself succeeding and do your best to minimize any thoughts of failure. Remember that you get what you focus on.

13. Make eye contact

For those who aren’t sure how to be confident , making eye contact can be uncomfortable at first. But like changing your physiology, you need to just do it – confidence will follow after you take the action. Connecting with people and showing confidence through eye contact is one of the quickest ways to exude confidence when you meet new people and can strengthen relationships long-term. Use the 80/20 rule of meeting someone’s eyes 80% of the time and focusing on something else the other 20% so you don’t appear too intense or make the other person uncomfortable.

14. Create healthy routines

To get in touch with your personal power, you need to adopt new routines. Consider building a meditation practice into your routine. Mindfulness meditation is shown to reduce anxiety and help you focus on your core competencies. You can even use incantations – a powerful way to use your body and your voice to set intentions. Or, start your day with priming , an exercise Tony himself uses every morning that’s a combination of all three of these routines. By incorporating how to believe in yourself into your morning routine, you can set the tone for a day filled with confidence.

15. Unlock the power of proximity

Learning how to believe in yourself is like running a race set on an uphill course. You’ll need fuel for the journey. To fuel self-belief, surround yourself with people who inspire and support you. This is the law of attraction – the idea that, as Tony says, “Proximity is power.” Whatever you want to achieve in your life, find people who will elevate you, not bring you down. You can do this by finding a mentor or joining a mastermind group . This is different than your group of friends or your family. When you tap into the power of proximity , you’ll gain trusted advisors who can not only support you, but challenge you to be better.

16. Feed your mind

The law of attraction isn’t just about who you associate with. It’s also about how you feed your mind : what you read and watch on a daily basis. Make a point to seek out advice from others who have achieved your goals, even if they are not your mentor or coach. Watch documentaries about people who have done great things in life. Read inspirational quotes and write down your favorites. Learn about new topics that will help you reach your goals, like finance, or that will help you face your fears – like how to be confident or deliver a presentation. You’ll condition your brain to believe in yourself , because it will know that you have the skills you need to succeed.

17. Learn a new skill

It’s human nature to experience fear and anxiety . But when you believe in yourself, you realize that those emotions are there to encourage you to take action, not to hold you back. Face your fears by learning a new skill. Whether you learn how to write code or how to play the piano, you’ll increase your feelings of self-efficacy – your belief in your abilities to execute tasks, control your own behavior and attain your goals. Research has even shown that learning is directly related to happiness – it releases dopamine in the brain, known as the “reward molecule.” You’ll make new neural connections, strengthen your decision-making skills and more. You’ll begin to have faith in yourself, one new skill at a time.

18. Live in the present

Confidence in relationships can be one of the most challenging areas. If you’ve been wronged in a previous relationship – or your current one – it can be hard to let go of the past and forgive. We want to avoid pain and fulfill our need for certainty, but this prevents us from living in the present . Learn to appreciate what you have right now, without worrying about what’s going to happen tomorrow – or what happened yesterday. Free your mind, be here now and confidence will follow.

Learn how to look confident

believe in yourself

Build sales confidence

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Practice positive thinking

fear into power

Feeling confident starts from within with positive thinking. Learn how to reframe your mindset to start thinking more positively and feel more confident as a result.

Believe you are good enough

fear will drive you or destroy you

Our psychology is the only thing standing between us and total confidence. Learn how to stop standing in your own way and allow yourself to feel confident in your skills.

Ask yourself: Am I controlling?

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Ready to learn how to be confident?

Attend Unleash The Power Within to challenge your limiting beliefs, develop your strengths and discover how to be more confident in life.

© 2024 Robbins Research International, Inc. All rights reserved.

Home / Essay Samples / Life / Believe in Myself / Success is in Believe in Myself

Success is in Believe in Myself

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