Lasting Tips for Learning How to Be Confident

“Pray to God, but row away from the rocks.”
Hunter S. Thompson

Learning how to be confident can sometimes be hard. It can be hard to predict where life will take you, and you can find yourself in some pretty rough spots through no fault of your own. It is in times like this where you may feel hopeless and want to leave the situation up to chance. However, you also always have some degree over what we can control. Fostering that feeling of control is where you can develop more confidence and self-efficacy.

It is in focusing on the things you can change that help you handle stressful short-term battles. Plus, having this mindset helps you realize you have considerable influence over life in general, and you can build towards the life we want long-term. Learning how to be confident is about fostering the attitude that you have self-efficacy.

The American Psychological Association defines self-efficacy,

“An individual’s belief in his or her capacity to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance attainment. Self-efficacy reflects confidence in the ability to exert control over one’s motivation, behavior and social environment.”
APA

How you evaluate yourself daily is critical because these evaluations affect the goals you strive towards, the amount of energy you expend to pursue those goals, and the likelihood of achieving particular levels of performance necessary for goal attainment.

This feeling of self-efficacy can shape your life, because you think you can either conquer your challenges or will be defeated by them. Learning how to be confident is no different, it is about knowing you can accomplish what you set-out to complete.

If you don’t believe in your abilities, you might set smaller goals that you think you can attain. If you need permission to dream bigger, here is your approval. I know you have the ability to dream big, and you can develop the needed skills to attain those dreams.

Questions to Assess Your Base Level of Confidence and Self-Efficacy

Are you confident in your ability to achieve your goals?
Are you able to bounce back quickly after stressful events?
Do you keep trying and learning even when the challenges seem difficult?
Do you see setbacks are learning opportunities?

If you answered yes to these questions, then you have a strong sense of self-efficacy. If not, the good news is like any positive trait, you can develop self-efficacy further! Before getting into how to increase self-efficacy, it is vital to understand where self-efficacy originates.

Sources of Self-Efficacy and Confidence

1. Mastery experiences

Very Well Mind recommends fostering Mastery Experiences. Mastery experiences are past accomplishments. These are when you faced a challenge and overcame it or controlled a chaotic environment that lead to a positive result.

Having direct experience in positively influencing events is a keystone source of self-efficacy because it proves to yourself that you’ve navigated hard challenges before, and you can do it again. However, failing in these situations can result in lower levels of self-efficacy.

One way to turn failures around is to reflect on what could have been done better and use those insights the next time a similar situation presents itself. There is never any disastrous failure as long as everything is a learning opportunity. Then, with this new knowledge, you can tackle the next challenge with an improved chance of success and attaining another mastery experience.

2. Vicarious Experiences

You do not have to experience all these feelings yourself to learn feelings of learning how to be confident. Positive Psychology recommends that you can learn from others. Look for people similar to yourself and see how they succeed by their sustained effort towards their goal. Looking to role models can build a vicarious feeling that you possess the capabilities to master the activities needed for success in that area.

The McCranie quote of, “the master has failed more time than the beginner has even tried.” applies here. Everyone starts as a beginner even with talent levels in consideration, eventually, those who believe in themselves, learn from other’s experiences, and practice will ultimately reach their goal.

It can be intimidating looking to role models to see their success. Look how they started. You will find every artist, entrepreneur, writer, CEO, scientist, and everyone else stumbled at first. Seeing their beginnings shows that everyone is just doing their best and that you can join their ranks too with dedication and time.

3. Verbal persuasion

Influential people in our lives like parents, teachers, managers, and coaches can strengthen our beliefs that we have what it takes to succeed. When other people believe in us, it raises our effort in trying to develop mastery, and also sustains us when problems arise.

Find people who are encouraging to push you towards your goals. Finding people doesn’t mean you need cheerleaders who only cheer you on. Work on finding people who can provide constructive criticism, and can help you align to the best way of achieving your goals.

4. Emotional & Physiological Stress

The emotional state you’re in will influence how you judge your self-efficacy. Feelings of sadness, stress, and tensions can lower your feelings of self-efficacy, while positive emotional states like joy can increase your feelings of self-efficacy says Positive Psychology UK.

Even during bleak times where they lost their job or were diagnosed with illness, people with high self-efficacy still did what they wanted, despite their circumstances.

People with high-level of self-efficacy worked on their goals, they just shifted them. Instead of working towards a promotion – they remodeled their kitchens to be more bright, they learned to make new meals, developed new hobbies, perfected their art style, volunteered to help those in need, planted gardens, helped teach their children, marched for Black Lives Matter, and work on improving themselves.

Yes, it was a time when a lot of choices were taken away, but they found they still had some control over how they spent their day and what they wanted to work on.

Guides for Building More Self-Efficacy

It can be hard to start developing a sense of control in your life. To help, below are some in-depth guides where you can see you can take control of very specific areas of your life and build the life you want!

Tips for Learning How to Be More Confident

1. Celebrate Your success

The first area you derive self-efficacy from is your mastery experiences, the proven areas of success. Take five minutes and write down successes you’ve had in your life. Be it in school, work, pet projects, developing hobbies, and relationships. Focus on where you have felt a sense of pride for your accomplishments.

Then keep a daily journal and keep a note of the successes you have every day. By noting your accomplishments, this will make your accomplishments more salient to you whenever they do happen.

Also note where you’ve failed and how you can improve for next time. Taking note of failures will keep you humble and keeps you looking for those learning opportunities.

2. Learn from Others and Pick Good Role Models

For learning new skills, turn to the experts and learn what you can from them. Then find a role model similar to yourself to see the actual execution. Picking the wrong role model to emulate can backfire and make you feel like a failure.

For physical fitness, I look at Chris Hemsworth’s routines. But I can’t pick him as my role model. He has two nutritionists, several personal trainers, and can work-out for hours at a time.

For my role model, I should pick my co-worker who got in shape in six months in a similar situation to myself. Learning from experts and picking appropriate markers can build feelings of success. Plus, I can ask my co-worker what he does to emulate his success.

3. Pay attention to words of confidence and practice self-compassion

Due to negativity bias, the tendency to only see the negative, it can be easy to let negative things people have said to you stick around in our heads for years.

Dwelling on the negative hurts your feeling of self-efficacy and confidence. Remember times when people have said encouraging words to you and believed in you. Maybe it was a family member, a friend, a teacher, or a valued mentor. Look to those who believe in you and listen when they say they believe in your abilities. Don’t dwell on those who just want to tear you down or only can see you from one perspective. Learning how to be confident is about picking who you listen to and knowing why you do so.

Also, watch how you talk to yourself. Do you speak encouragingly to yourself, or do you beat yourself up? When encountering hard tasks, remind yourself of success and tell yourself you can overcome the difficulties. Be your support team. Offer yourself self-compassion to overcome challenges along the way. Learn insight on how to practice more self-compassion here!

4. Use meditation and other centering practices to regulate emotions

Trying to feel like you can change something in your life while you are feeling sad can become a vicious cycle. You don’t think you can, or even that you don’t deserve to feel better. You try and inevitably fail, and see that failure as confirmation, leading to a feeling of more helplessness. This battle was lost before it even began.

Instead of forcing yourself to try, take five minutes to acknowledge your feelings, and then try the task. Have self-compassion that feeling sad is normal, and tackling a new challenge can be scary. Re-focus your energy.

Do this through meditation, or write how you are feeling. Then after acknowledging the feelings, focus on building a positive mindset. Then go into the task with this improved mindset. Even feeling neutral is better than feeling sad and looking for failures.

Main Take-aways

Self-efficacy is the feeling that we can positively impact the events and challenges in our lives
The feelings that promote high self-efficacy are past successes, seeing others similar to us succeed, having others believe in us, and our current emotional state
To foster feelings of higher self-efficacy, look for areas of success in each of these categories
Learning how to be confident is about learning and fostering your sense of self-efficacy.

Action items

Write down some of your past successes. Write down the things those who believe in you have said. Take one minute to feel how good it feels to remember these successes. Feel how empowering all these actions were. Look for new events in your day to day life tomorrow to help strengthen this feeling. This is step one for learning how to be more confident!

Lasting Tips for Learning How to Be Confident

Questions to Assess Your Base Level of Confidence and Self-Efficacy