In all my years in business and my personal life, one of the biggest things I’ve learned is that inner confidence is the key to it all. You can create and strengthen your confidence in any area of your life. What you believe about yourself is what matters most.
There are all kinds of strategies, ways of thinking, patterns of behavior and practical tips for improving your life and feeling better about yourself, but they’re all redundant if the foundation isn’t there. That foundation is the real you, the you that you know deep down you are. The trick is that it takes confidence to find that and to bring out who you are – here are the two keys to real inner confidence.
1. Get To Know Your Values
Personal values are a big passion of mine and I often get carried away with myself when I talk about them. I make no apology for that though – they’re one of the most important things you can know about yourself and are vital in getting genuine inner confidence. Your values are ten thousand feet down inside you, right at the very core of who you are; and they’re the building blocks, the foundations and cornerstones for you. A value is something in yourself, in others or in the world that’s most important to you, and could include things like beliefs, progress, family, fun, nature, achievement or freedom.
Why is it that some people and situations leave you feeling angry, frustrated, demotivated or deflated? It’s because one or more of your values is being denied, suppressed or repressed – and we experience that as a negative experience because it’s denying a fundamental piece of who you are. You know those times when you’ve felt really alive, lit up on the inside or buzzing? Those are the times when one or more of your values are being honored, and you can get more of that by living according to them.
Your values are all yours, and no matter what happens, no one can ever take them away. You can have absolute confidence in them because they’re there all the time just waiting for you to notice and use them. When you get to know your values, you can start to make choices and align your life around them. It is difficult to build the life you desire without having your choices and practices align with your values. It’s really simple and it feels amazing because all that really means is that you’re allowing who you are to live in the real world. No one else can be better at being you than YOU!
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2. Exercise the Muscle
Confidence is a muscle, and like any muscle you need to exercise it so that it doesn’t shrink and waste away. I am a lover of fitness and doing physical stuff so this makes so much sense to me that we have to exercise our confidence muscle as well! The problem is that unlike your biceps or glutes, which tend to stay in the same place, your confidence muscle can be harder to find. How do you develop your biceps or firm up your glutes? By doing exercises that are designed to work that muscle over a period of time until you see the results you were looking for.
It’s just the same with confidence. Let’s say that you’re the kind of person that doesn’t take many risks, the kind of person who goes through each day doing what needs to be done and doing it well, but not really stretching yourself. You like your comfort zone…who doesn’t! We are all human. You might talk yourself out of doing something because it’s too scary or because you think to yourself ‘I’m not good enough,’ ‘that’s not who I am’ or ‘I don’t really want it anyway.’ That kind of person lives within what they know and what keeps them safe and comfortable. The fewer risks they take, the less confident they need to be and so the less confident they become. This is why stepping outside your comfort zone is key. It is the pathway to not only building confidence but growing, expanding and living a full vibrant life.
To work your confidence muscle you need to be prepared to take risks – big or small. You need to be willing to stretch yourself in an unfamiliar direction, to try something new or try something in a slightly different way. You need to open yourself up to the possibilities around you and push yourself to increase what you know, what you do and who you are. The more open you are to risk, opportunity and possibility the more confident you need to be, and so the more confidence you’ll develop. That’s your confidence muscle – the question is, what are you going to do to exercise it?”
I encourage you to write down two areas of your life you want to feel more confident in. Spend some time this week thinking of actions you can take to move you out of a comfort zone in that area of your life. Set a deadline to take a step in that direction. A lot of the time we know what we need to do, but it is the lack of action and putting what we know into practice that holds us back.
