“Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers, you cannot be successful or happy.”
Norman Vincent Peale
What is Confidence?
In everyone’s life, no matter who you are or what you do, the feeling of confidence you have about yourself and your abilities will directly lead to the amount of success you enjoy throughout your life. Confidence alone is not enough to lead you to the top but it can supply the power to get you there.
It is strange to think that such a force exists, that can be controlled simply by how one feels about themselves and their own abilities. If you look at who you are and what you can do from a positive point of view. If you are focusing on what you can do, you will feel confident and therefore experience more success. If on the other hand, you focus on what you can’t do or don’t have, your confidence can be shaken and you will find it hard to achieve success, much less enjoy your accomplishments in life. That is the unique characteristic of your confidence, that it is 100% created in your own mind.
How Do You Build Confidence
Why then do so many people lack confidence in themselves. It may be because they don’t have enough experience in what they are doing, that a lack of confidence will creep in to you thought process. It may be a failure in the past that was painful creeps into their mind and they think “I failed before, it might happen again.” It is also true that the actions of others, which are totally out of our control can work to erode and diminish someone’s confidence. You can’t control what other people think about you, or what they say about you, or how they treat you for the most part. These interactions with others can have an effect on your self-esteem and your confidence.
To be happy you have to develop a confidence in your abilities and in yourself. You can’t let learning experiences in the past ruin your abilities for the future. You also have to develop the ability to constructively absorb the actions of other people without allowing them to diminish your self-esteem or make you question your own abilities and talents. If you don’t believe in yourself, who will? If you don’t think you are a good person deserving of good things, who will? There is nothing so dependent on one’s own ability to look at themselves positively than the feeling of confidence. Often times I consider my actions in the past and recognize that there were literally thousands of opportunities to help build someone’s self-esteem and confidence that I did not take advantage of. Including opportunities to build my own. Fortunately, life provides a never ending cycle of opportunity to right these kinds of wrongs. Your decisions today can be the one’s that can help build the self esteem and confidence in yourself in others, if you decide that is what you want to do. Nobody controls how you feel about yourself, but yourself.
What is confidence:
