Boost Your Confidence with Mindfulness
Do you need to boost your confidence?
Do you wish you had more self-confidence, but don’t know where to start?
When you’re faced with a new challenge, or opportunity, does the self-doubt gremlin pop into your head, and make you start doubting yourself?
Do you start to wonder if you’ll ever be able to do it? If you’ll ever be good enough?
That’s the biggest problem with self-confidence. It’s never about what you can, or can’t do. It’s always about what you BELIEVE you can, or cannot do.
Henry Ford once said,
Whether you believe you can do a thing, or you believe you can’t, you’re right.
Fight the fear
Maybe you’ve never done it before, or maybe you have and failed miserably, but things can be different this time.
When something has gone bad for you before, you may well believe that you’ll fail, or struggle the next time. You don’t feel confident about doing it again.
Once that happens, you start to make up stories in your head. Stories about how useless you are, or how even if you try, you’ll make a complete hash of it. This gives you the perfect excuse to get out of doing it.
And now that’s knocked your self-esteem as well. Soon, you’ll begin to wonder if you’re even worthy of being asked in the first place!
Once you get to this stage, you really will need something to boost your confidence again.
Using Mindfulness to boost your confidence
If you’ve read the article asking ‘What is Mindfulness?‘, you’ll know that mindfulness is really about concentrating on events and feelings that are happening now.
This basically means that…
…if we examine our thoughts, our emotions and the physical sensations, of a particular experience, but don’t judge them, we can start to be fully present for every experience in life, and actively set our own intention for them.
Being Mindful about the opportunity you’ve been given, or the challenge you have to face can be extremely beneficial. It’ll help you become aware, that those unhelpful thoughts are exactly that – unhelpful thoughts.
They’re not a description of what’ll happen, or even probably happen. They’re simply a reminder of what may have happened in the past (Us humans tend to catastrophise about bad events).
So, if you want to boost your confidence, be mindful. Put yourself into a positive mindset and remind yourself of all the things you do well.
You can even take your mind back to that terrible time when you messed up and ask yourself what you can learn from it? What can help you improve this time?
Put aside your judgements about the last time, and start anew. This time you know what went wrong, this time you know better!
Mindfulness is all about letting go of the past, not worrying about the future and concentrating on the now.
Look at this new challenge, or opportunity with a ‘beginners mind‘.
Forget about what happened in the past, you can’t change it. But, you can always learn from it and that’s what gives you your strength now.
By all means, make a plan. Think through what you need to do, or achieve to make it work. Then move forward with a positive and calm mindset.
When you take away the power from the unhelpful thoughts, you can start to move forward with confidence.
Final thoughts
When you start to have thoughts like ‘I can’t do this!’, don’t judge yourself. Remember they’re just thoughts, and make a different choice.
Choose to think positive thoughts about what could happen this time, rather than negative thoughts about what happened before. This time, think “I have a plan, this time I’m prepared, I can do this!”
Then, go do it!
What new experience have you been thinking about lately? Why not use this strategy to help push you to give it a go?
