Self-confidence is the belief that you can handle a certain situation correctly. Self-confidence is knowing that you don’t lack any of the necessary skills in order to successfully complete a task. This task could vary from a social activity like being able to approach someone you don’t know, to a professional activity like the ability to complete a certain task that your work or your business needs.
Without confidence you will surely miss a lot of available opportunities because you will be afraid to take the risk of trying something that you aren’t sure you can handle. The following are some facts about self-confidence:
Self confidence is never inherited, it’s learned. The belief that you lack the confidence genes is just a popular myth.
Self confidence is not a general trait but instead you have different confidence levels for all the different activities you do. For example, you may be confident about your ability to drive a car but at the same time dread public speaking.
Self confidence is not constant with time; it may change to the better or worse because of the new events that happen in your life.
Self confidence may be independent of external factors, like being rich or having someone who loves you back.
You could be more confident through the total elimination of the dependency upon the opinion of others. This is because if you don’t really have a solid knowledge of your abilities and of who you are then you will most likely be depending on others to tell you who you are.
If they were satisfied with your actions then they may tell you that you are a good person; if not, they may label you with labels like fool, an idiot or anything else that suits their own faulty perception. You will of course welcome these labels and add them to your beliefs about yourself because you’ve left the decision to them from the beginning to tell you who you are.
How to Eliminate Dependency on Others’ Judgment
Correcting this problem is very simple: Get a piece of paper and write down your strengths and your weaknesses. Keep editing this paper until you are satisfied with what you’ve written. Now keep reading it daily until you are really sure that what you wrote down are your real abilities and skills. Now, whenever someone criticizes you or labels you, you can simply see if any of what he said matches your judgment of yourself. If it doesn’t then just drop the comment.
Is it rude to disregard the Opinion of others?
You may think that it’s rude to judge yourself without referring to others but lets face reality. If you are twenty years old, you should know yourself better than someone who’s only known you for few months and so your opinion about yourself will probably be the most relevant. Moreover, in such an imperfect world, you will never be able to get a sufficient answer to your questions and your quest for gathering clues from others will never end.
Just like anybody else, you definitely have people who consider you their enemy, people who are jealous of you or people who just dislike you for one reason or another. Such people will almost never tell you that you’re great or that you’re talented at a particular activity and so you will find it extremely difficult to get an honest opinion about your abilities from anyone. Consequently, the best thing to do would be to depend on your own judgment of yourself.
Self-confidence and Making Mistakes
Some mothers shout at their children as soon as they break anything, stain their clothes, forget to do their homework or when they do any other minor mistake. Treating a child this way results in making him think that doing something wrong is shameful and that making mistakes makes him different from other perfect people who do not make mistakes. When this child grows up and makes a certain mistake in public ( like dropping a glass or saying something wrong during a presentation) then he will feel embarrassed and might believe that he is not worthy. These kinds of thoughts will gradually but surely damage his confidence.
If you found a way to convince people that you are confident you will definitely have more fans and you will increase your chance of making someone fall in love with you.
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