8 Power-Ups for Reclaiming Confidence

There is nothing more crippling than losing your confidence.

Without confidence, everything gets harder. You struggle to concentrate. Tasks feel overwhelming. If you stay there, you’ll even find a more long-term emotional impact, where you might fall into depression or become bogged down in indecision. Without confidence, you lose all forward progress.

This is why it’s so important to reclaim your confidence after suffering a blow. For a fast boost, try these eight power-ups.

Do What Makes You Uncomfortable

When you take risks, you stretch yourself in surprising new ways. This is a powerful feeling. Why? It takes confidence to step outside your comfort zone. Trying something new forces you to act with confidence, whether you started out feeling it or not.

Find Your Purpose

Knowing what you’re destined to do is a fantastic feeling and fills a person with confidence. If you’re unsure why you’ve set a particular goal, or are questioning what you’re doing, you’re not likely to feel confident at all. Solidifying the goal in your mind is a rapid boost to confidence then.

Keep Trying

It’s normal to experience failure from time to time. This kind of disaster can easily destroy confidence. You regain this confidence when you get up and try again.

Learn Things

Knowledge truly is power. When you really understand something inside out, you tend to be very confident (at least in that area). Continually learning new things expands your knowledge base. As a result, your confidence extends in new directions as well.

Drop the Idea Things Have to be Perfect

When nothing is ever good enough, confidence falters. How are you supposed to feel sure of yourself when you’re feeling things are always unfinished or lacking somehow? By accepting things as they are, warts and all, you’ll find you’re relax more and even become more confident in what you’re doing because you’re telling yourself that what you have or are doing is exactly what you need.

Dress for Success

How we present ourselves to the world really can affect our mental state. Wearing what makes you feel good about yourself will restore confidence. A change in attitude is only a change in outfit away.

Trust Yourself

When you doubt your instincts, you’re telling yourself you don’t really know what you’re doing. This is why it’s so important to ‘go with your gut’ when faced with a challenge. This kind of trust instills confidence in your ability to judge a situation or outcome.

Look Forward

Confidence has a hard time standing up to ghosts from the past. When you get caught up in your previous failures or uncertainties, confidence falters. Instead, look forward to positive emotions. When you recognize your potential, you start seeing just how amazing you are.

3 Truths About Reclaiming Confidence You Need to Know Right Now

Not everyone is going to get it right. Sadly, there’s always someone quick to point out when you’re getting it wrong. It’s when you come under fire that you lose confidence quickly.

To get past this kind of blow to our confidence, you need to understand these simple truths:

Not Everyone Has It Right. Not Even You

Haters are gonna hate. But just because someone comes at you with the most reasonable-sounding explanation in the world of why you’re an idiot (and you’re an expert at giving that speech to yourself), the truth is, the person doing the talking quite likely doesn’t know what they’re talking about. This is because of one simple truth: People really don’t know everything, and even when they think they do, they have a tendency to get things wrong. So just because something nasty has been said, it doesn’t make it right. Regardless of who it’s coming from.

A Lot of Criticism is Grounded in Jealousy

That disaster you’re beating yourself up over? How much of it was the result of the green-eyed monster? Too often, we give people authority over us they don’t deserve. We listen to their complaints thinking they’re right without questioning why they’re attacking what you’re doing. The biggest culprit of why you’ve drawn the attention of the critics is jealousy. Don’t let someone pull down your confidence just because they’re feeling threatened by where you are.

You’re Better Than You Think

The loss of confidence can make you the critic. Why? Because now you’re looking for justification for thinking you’re no good. And trust me, when you go hunting for this kind of justification, you’ll always find it. Here’s where you need to back up and take a good, hard, impartial look at yourself. Ask:

• Is This Thought Really True?
• For example, you might be thinking, “I fail at everything I do.” Is this realistic? Probably not.

• If This Thought Isn’t True, What Emotion is it Coming From?
• The most likely explanation? A lot of negative emotions come from fear. In the previous example, you might be afraid of failing, so by convincing yourself you’re a failure already, you no longer have to try.

• What’s a Truer Statement I Might Make Instead?
• Try rewording the thought and keep it honest. ‘I’m afraid of failing, but since I’ve succeeded in the past, there’s good reason to think I will succeed now.”

Confidence comes from accepting the reality of who you are and where you are. Remember, nobody, not even you, has a right to make you feel small.

7 Small Ideas to Reclaim Confidence in Big Ways

Children are absolutely fearless. If you ever doubt this fact, then spend some time on a playground, and you’ll see exactly what’s meant by this statement. They jump into play, enlisting the help of perfect strangers for companionship and to meet their goals. They climb and run and jump, frequently with unbridled enthusiasm that adults come to envy.

We’re actually born with confidence. Sadly, this becomes lost through experience. All it takes is a nasty trip and fall to teach a child to approach life with more care. As we grow older, the process continues. We lose confidence with every failure and start taking to heart every harsh criticism. Soon we become so immobilized we see no way out.

The good news? Confidence can be fixed just by making several small changes in your life. Read on to find out how.

Honor Small Achievements

If you’re feeling like you never do anything right, making a list of the things you do well, and the accomplishments you’ve made is a great place to start. Enlist the help of someone who knows you well, as they’re apt to think of the things you might be too close to see. Once you have your list, keep it handy and re-read it when you feel confidence flagging.

Pull Yourself Together

A lack of confidence can make you want to hide in your own clothes. Rather than losing yourself in baggy, unattractive clothing, pull out the outfits you know you look good in. You’ll find yourself feeling more confident every time you look in the mirror.

Clean Up Your Act

Like dressing well, just taking better care of yourself does wonders for confidence. Eat right, exercise, and be sure to get enough sleep. You’ll feel worlds better, meaning your outlook likewise improves.

Check the Self Talk

Speaking of outlook, what have you been telling yourself? If you’re hyper-critical, it’s no wonder your confidence is flagging. Instead, turn your inner dialogue positive, focusing on the things you like best about yourself.

Challenge Yourself in Small Ways

A little success goes a long way toward improving confidence. Give yourself a task to do you know you can complete then set about doing it. Just the feeling you get when you finish is enough to give you a positive boost.

Finish Something

We all have unfinished projects around the house or at work. Digging in and finishing up something you’ve needed to for a while will serve a twofold purpose: you’ll feel good about getting something done, and you’ll even reduce some of the stress hanging over you. Both things increase confidence in giant ways.

Be Nice

Doing a kindness always boosts your own mood. This leads to increased confidence as you realize you really can make a difference in someone else’s life.

Because confidence comes from acting, use this list as a jumping-off point. Soon you’ll be discovering a multitude of ways to increase confidence. How exciting is that?

Carrying the Burden of Your Past Into Your Future

When you focus on the past, this is known as having emotional baggage. Everyone has stuff come up about their past, but it’s when you focus on it and let it fester that it can cause problems in your present life.

It can also hold you back from enjoying your future life. Emotional baggage can stem from events that happened to you - such as from being in an abusive relationship, from physical or emotional traumas such as a car wreck, or from carrying a burden you shouldn’t be carrying – like guilt.

When you hold onto the burdens of your past, it affects how you live your life now as well as how you’ll live in the future. It can become your identity because you get stuck in a certain pattern that was created by a past event.

 Whatever it is that you experienced then colors how you behave with others, how you handle your day-to-day life, how you process thoughts and what your beliefs are today.

People carry the burden of the past because they’ve never healed the emotional blow that stemmed from the situation.

The hurt they felt back then is still there just under the surface. It might be something that’s steeped in anger or anxiety. Or it could be that you’re stuck in feelings of grief or sadness.

When you carrying a burden like this, it can make you feel like you never left that time in your life. Your emotions will feel as raw now when you think about it as they did back then.

Not only can it weigh on your emotions today when you focus on the past, but it can also hurt you physically. You can develop things like insomnia, chronic stress, stomachaches, elevated blood pressure and more.

In order to leave the past where it belongs, you have to heal. That means you must unload that baggage so you can move on. You should keep in mind that you can’t heal from what you don’t name.

So when it comes to the past, you have to look at it and uncover the pain that’s keeping you tethered to that event, person or whatever it is. Write out the things that bother you now about the past and why they bother you.

It can be helpful to take this list and speak out loud or write a letter that you eventually destroy to the past situation or to the person who wounded you. As you read out the words, picture them releasing into the air, taking the connected emotion with it until it dissipates.

Accept whatever you went through without assigning blame to yourself or someone else. This is a step toward letting it go. It doesn’t mean that someone else isn’t to blame. It doesn’t mean that it didn’t bother you emotionally.

It means that you’re recognizing that the past has had enough of your life already and you’re through with that. Once you identify what happened and what kind of emotional reaction it caused you, you find peace by loving yourself through it.

Be compassionate toward yourself. Forgive the pain of the past. Forgive your mistakes. Unpack the burden of your past by practicing self-help techniques if needed to help heal from past triggers.

Self-Awareness Is Key to Mental Well Being

There may be emotional issues that cause strife in your mental well-being. Most of this is related to events that are unresolved from your past. You may struggle with this because actively solving things might not be how you operate in life, so you end up just pushing aside any issues, thinking you’ll deal with it later.

Confronting things that bother you may not be comfortable and you may be afraid it will feel even more painful to look at something under a microscope when you could push it out of your mind instead.

You may fear that if you examine it closely, you might begin to cry and won’t be able to stop – you’ll fall apart. If you find that you’re uneasy confronting whatever is going on internally, then you should know that the problem will never be solved if you don’t push past that uneasiness.

Avoiding something just keeps it swept under the rug, but it’ll always be there and can fester and bubble up to the surface at any time. When you become self-aware, you gain the insight to figure out what your emotions are doing and how they’re impacting your life.

For example, you’ll recognize that you’re angry and you’ll know why you’re feeling that anger. But in addition to that, you’ll be able to see clearly how the emotions that you have can hold you back.

Self-awareness gives you the means to uncover the emotions that are responsible for determining several things, such as how you make decisions, how you don’t make a decision because you don’t want to deal with something, and also how that emotion might inadvertently be the symptom of a bigger issue.

Sometimes people seem to possess a certain personality trait, such as being considered an angry person. But they aren’t truly angry. Deep down, the root of that emotion could be because they’re grieving over the loss of something.

It’s just covered in anger and manifesting in that type of emotion. Once you confront the emotions that you’re experiencing, you can get to the truth. It could be that you practice avoidance in a relationship.

You don’t want to face the emotions that are going on, even though they’re causing you pain. Because you know if you do that, then action is going to be required and you don’t want to have to make a choice to leave or stay - so you put up with the emotional turmoil instead.

When you have unresolved emotions that impact your life, it can affect your mental well being. It can leave you agitated internally, even if you don’t always show that outwardly. This inner emotional turmoil can cause stress to build up and affect you physically.

The root of your emotions is never something easy to face. By becoming self-aware, you will reach the stage where you can know the truth about whatever is going on so you can fix your life and heal.

8 Minute Meditation

Choosing to take care of your mental health can mean turning to helpful resources, such as meditation. But like other people, you might have a lifestyle that’s busy and you don’t see how you can add one more thing to your schedule.

Yet the very hectic manner of your life is the biggest reason you need to take care of your mental health. You might think that meditation is something that’s just too difficult and that you’ll never be able to figure it out.

Maybe you’ve even thought about medication in the past, but decided against it because you thought it would be too complicated. That’s why the book 8 Minute Meditation is so helpful.

You can start a meditation practice that you can do in just 8 minutes so time won’t be an issue. It’s made for people who want to quiet their mind, find peace and improve mental health.

Plus, the guidelines given by the book are simple enough for a beginner to be able to do. The book covers exactly what meditation is and how it’s not a one and done thing but rather something that you can take and use throughout your life.

It also shows how meditation can improve your mental health and your life as a whole. But it also covers what meditation may not be able to help you with. You’ll gain a fundamental understanding of the myths surrounding this tool.

These myths are debunked in the book. You’ll also understand what some of the common issues are that might hinder your ability to participate. The author shares that meditation isn’t something that you set a goal for and accomplish.

It’s something that’s ongoing and can last for a lifetime. The book begins by giving readers instructions that teach you how to set up a meditation habit. It starts out with an eight week program and shares with readers whatever breathing practices they need to follow.

The author shows readers what they need to do as far as breathing techniques. Plus, you’ll learn what you need to do in order to handle your thoughts as you meditate. The book answers questions you might have on beginning a meditation habit targeted toward mental health and well being.

One of the reasons that the book is so easy to digest and makes meditation simple to put into practice is due to the way the author breaks down the instructions into actionable steps.

In fact, once you read through the instructions, you can get started meditating in just 10 minutes. You’ll be able to calm your mind and emotions and learn a healthy way to de-stress as well. If you’re someone who’s looking for a way to practice mental health care, then the strategies in this book are a great idea to implement.

Click here-below to purchase a copy of this book on Amazon 

4 Things You Need to be Doing Now to Reclaim Lost Confidence

Confidence. It’s such an essential part of who we are, that we become crippled when we lose it entirely. Even a ding on our confidence levels can have a way of setting us back or even derailing our day. This is why it’s so important to reclaim lost confidence quickly when you lose it.

Thankfully, there’s been a lot of scientific study into confidence and what happens in the brain to inspire it. Read on to find out about 4 scientifically proven things you need to be doing right now to reclaim lost confidence.

Start with a Vision

Perhaps one of the most underrated techniques to attain success is visualization. Most people look at this in surface terms. They might picture the project completed without taking the time to really envision the act in absolute detail. The thing is the more complex the visualization, the more likely you are to realize the success you’re striving for. Why? You’re actually building neural pathways designed to ‘trick’ your brain into thinking you’ve already succeeded, leading you to step out with a lot more confidence when you’re working toward your goals.

Use Affirmations Often

Silly as it seems, using positive statements about yourself frequently will turn into positive self-talk. This kind of internal dialogue bolsters confidence without you even realizing you’re doing it.

Win Lots

How many successes have you had today? Most people would probably say very few, focusing only on the big victories such as the promotion at work, or meeting some big relationship milestone. The thing is, our day is filled with small successes. By recognizing all these minor victories, you signal your brain that, yay, you did this thing. This creates a rush of dopamine (the ‘feel-good’ brain chemical) coupled with a dose of testosterone, which acts as an appetite for more victories, making petty wins addictive. All this together creates a biofeedback loop that pushes confidence levels higher the more you ‘win.’

Change Your Position

Body language tells the world everything they need to know about you. When confidence is low, you look it. Your entire body slumps, your limbs feel slack, and your energy levels drop down to nothing. But doing something so small as sitting up straighter or taking a more assertive pose, your body recognizes this as confidence. As a result, you start feeling more confident inside, whether you’d felt confident before shifting position or not.

Understanding how the mind works make restoring confidence an easy task. These actions are all simple, easy to do things even when you’re not feeling confident at all initially. The results will speak for themselves.

5 Steps to Fix Confidence Quickly

You didn’t even see it coming. One minute you thought everything was fine, and the next, you were looking at a disaster. The question is, what are you going to do next?

Confidence can take a hit anywhere, whether you’re trying to accomplish something new you’ve never done before, trying to get ahead at work, or even looking for that special someone. The problem is, without confidence, it’s hard to pick yourself up and keep going. Since you know the only thing standing between you and success in moments like this is you, fixing confidence is crucial. Lucky for you, these five steps should get you there quickly.

Fake It

In psychology, the phrase is to “Act As-If.” How do you do it? If you’re not feeling confident, act like you are. The funny thing is, once you get started, your body will kick in and will begin to find the old confidence for you all by itself. Don’t believe it? An entire Harvard study proved this to be true.

Take Care Of Yourself

Things battering at your confidence can do quite a number on you. Covering up can only get you so far. Sometimes you just need to deal with the stuff that hit you hard in the first place. Here is where you acknowledge the emotional impact of what just happened. It might be you have some stuff to work through. The key here is not to go, so caught up wallowing in negative emotions that you forget to heal. Do what you need to process the situation, then move on. Sometimes therapy helps in this stage if you’re having more trouble than you know how to handle on your own.

Learn the Lesson

Failure hits confidence hard, but can also be an excellent teacher. Ask yourself what you can discover from this challenge and allow yourself to grow from the experience.

Make it Hard

Quitting is the easiest thing in the world to do, especially when your confidence is shattered. How to hang in there and restore your confidence? Making it impossible to give up. By using accountability partners or programs, you’ll find it harder to let go of the project and walk away. The upside to this? By being forced to keep going, your confidence will begin to rebound.

Look for the Accomplishments

Very rarely are you faced with a total catastrophic failure. Examine what’s going on. What things went right? Where are the successes? By noticing what you’ve accomplished, you’ll find your confidence comes creeping back.

Confidence can be a tricky thing, but with some careful examination of what you’re already doing now and taking some solid action to put yourself back in motion, you’ll quickly find it’s not as hard to be confident as you once thought it was. Here then, are the seeds to your future success.

7 Ways to Enjoy Life More

You may not realize it yet, but if you are alive and reading this, you’re supposed to enjoy your life and be happy. Despite the dire outlook, you may experience on the evening news, life is not supposed to be a never-ending nightmare of bad news, tragedy, and hard knocks. However, sometimes it seems that’s all there is.

How can you start to enjoy your life, as if it’s your last one, right now, even when nothing is perfect?

Write a Life Mission Statement

The only way to make the right choices in life for yourself is to know what you stand for. What is it that you want to leave behind as your legacy? What about this life is important to you? What ideas, morals, and values are guiding you through this life?

If you can create a life mission statement or vision statement that spells you who you want to be at your very best, you can use that as a founding document to guide every choice you make from this day forth.

Become Mindful of The Power of Now

One of the problems with life is most of us are always thinking about the past or the future. However, your life is right now. Right now, it is truly all you can be certain of having. Because of this, you need to realize the power of now and become more mindful about truly and fully experiencing the moments in your life.

While, of course, you do have to take small steps today to take care of your future, you don’t need to live only for the future to genuinely enjoy your life. You need to live for now, while planning for the future.

Be Your Own Best Friend

So many times, we are nicer to our friends and family than we are to ourselves. The thing is each of us is truly alone. That isn’t to be depressing, but the idea that you need someone else to prop you up and make you feel good about life is not true. You can feel in love with life even when it’s just you because, ultimately, it’s always just you even when you enjoy fabulous companionship.

Making the right choices for your diet, exercise, education, career, and so forth are all things you need to do in a loving way. If you wouldn’t direct your best friend to do it, why would you do it to yourself?

Do Things That Bring You Joy

Many times, in our societies, the idea of experiencing things just for the joy of it seems foreign. But your value doesn’t only depend on how much you produce and how much energy you expend doing things. Your value also can be expressed through the joyful things that you do.

Every day do something that makes you smile, laugh, and cry with happiness. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hike in the woods, a bungee jump, or if you want to sit in a hammock and read a book for an hour – doing things that fill your heart and mind with joy is important for your happiness.

Help the Less Fortunate

It’s hard to be down about our own situation if we are actively involved with helping those who are less fortunate. And sadly, there is always someone less fortunate than you even if you don’t realize it. Make an action plan to involve yourself in empowering others and helping others, and you will experience a lot more joy in your life.

Stop Being a People Pleaser

Conversely, you don’t need to work so hard, making other people happy. For one thing, nothing is ever enough for some people. They don’t mean it, because they probably don’t even give it a thought that you’re just pleasing them by your actions or attitude. Because of this, it’s not their fault that you’re spending all your energy trying to please others. It’s okay to say no to things that you don’t want to do or don’t have time to do.

Practice Gratitude

Of course, always take the time each day to express in your mind, in a journal, or even to someone else what you are grateful for. The mind pays attention to what you focus on. If you focus on what’s not going right, you’ll start to feel nothing is right. If you focus on what is right, you’ll start to feel like more is right with the world.

You really can start to be joyful in your life right now. One way to prove this to yourself is to travel more. When you travel to other countries and see how happy some people are, even though they live in very different environments than most western nations people do, it starts to become more clear about what drives happiness, and it turns out it’s inside you and has been all along.

How to Boost Your Courage

It’s important to understand that the meaning of courage does not mean that you don’t feel afraid. It means that you feel the fear, but you do “it” whatever “it” is anyway. If you’re not afraid, you don’t need courage. If you want to do more things with courage, you’ll need to learn more and get help from others.

Educate Yourself

The more you know about anything the less fear you’ll feel. Whenever you are needing courage, the best thing to do is learn more about the situation. Learn about every single angle, learn about different outcomes, read all studies, and get as much information as you can about whatever it is that causes you to fear.

Keep Your Physiological Responses in Check

You may wonder how some people act even in the case of fear without totally losing it emotionally. One way is to practice stoicism. That means that you recognize the fear, but don’t let your emotions succumb to them. Doing this will help you calm down any responses that your body makes such as shaking, crying, and so forth.

Borrow Courage from Friends

There is always power in numbers. Doing particularly scary things with someone else almost always makes the activity easier to accomplish. When you find the right people to put on your team or to join with to get things done, you can boost your courage exponentially.

Focus on the Results

Another way to boost your courage is to focus only on the results that you are trying to achieve instead of the process. For example, if you know that when you finish this project that fewer people will suffer that is going to help even if it’s hard to get it done.

Make Courage a Habit

Like most things, the more often you follow through on taking an action, the more your skill will grow. The more you take that action, the more secure you’ll feel because you know what to expect and you have more self-confidence due to past experiences. Your mind and body will remember that you can do it, even if you feel nervous or scared.

Implement The 2 Minute Rule

If you’ve done your research and you’ve taken precautions, just do what you feared for at least two minutes. The key is to start because once you are engrossed in the activity, you don’t usually feel the need to stop.

Feel the Fear but Keep Going

As mentioned, the definition of courage is to feel fear but keep going anyway. This is truly the only way to conquer fears. No amount of education or planning will take away all the fear if courage is needed. Therefore, feel it, and do it anyway.

Focus on The Positive

It can be hard to be positive when you’re fighting negative self-talk. fear to focus on the positive. However, if you find a way to do that, you’ll find that you can get so much more done even if you’re scared because you know why.

Courage is an important component in life because there are so many things that take courage. Even getting up each morning and walking out your door requires courage, but it’s likely you never gave it much thought since you have had plenty of practice getting up and out of the house each day.