Negative Emotions Can Kill Your Self-Confidence
Self-confidence is an important part of your life, in almost every way. Unfortunately, many people have a hard time achieving or maintaining their self-confidence due to the negative emotions they harbor about themselves. Maybe you are one of them. Without a positive sense of self-confidence, it can be hard to work towards achieving one. And if you have trouble with building or maintaining your self-confidence, then achieving overall success in your life can become exceedingly difficult.
You can draw confidence in yourself from confident people, and from the people they associate with. Gaining the confidence of others is one of the best ways to bolster that positive feeling within yourself, and set your course for success.
Take Control of Negative Thinking
Becoming aware of negative feelings that diminish how you feel about yourself, and learning to eliminate them, or deflect them entirely before they can take hold of you, is the most important skill in learning how to heal your self-confidence. The faster that you can learn how to achieve this, the faster you can regain your self-confidence.
Positive self-reinforcement is necessary in order to make a lasting change in your negative thinking. If someone gives you an accomplishment on how you handled a project at work, or tells you how good you are at playing the guitar, for example, that’s great. But you need to believe what they are saying, and think so yourself.
If you tend to be overly critical of yourself, these kinds of complements can be lost, and will hinder your efforts at regaining your self-confidence. Learning how to accept positive feedback through developing a positive inner dialog will go a long way toward establishing a strong sense of self-confidence.
Turning Things Around
Reducing negative feelings about yourself, or learning to deflect those that come your way, is key to having a strong sense of self-confidence. Learning to mentally filter out your negative thoughts, or finding a way of turning them into positive ones can go a long way. Resist immediately jumping to negative conclusions about the things you do. Often those conclusions are feelings, not facts. Learn to identify the difference.
Avoid negative self-talk. The more you put yourself down in front of others, the more they will begin to believe what you are saying about yourself and start to treat you with only the respect that you give yourself. When this happens, you can begin to believe that you don’t deserve to be treated better, and your self-confidence will begin an even bigger backslide.
When you are down, try to distract yourself from the feelings that are causing you to feel that way. Pick up a book and let yourself get drawn into the story. Play a computer game that requires some concentration or start planning for something that you are looking forward to.
Taking Control
Take control of how you value yourself. You should always expect the best from yourself. If you expect to be successful at what you do, or to be popular with new people that you meet, for example, most likely you can make those things happen. Self-confidence breeds self-confidence.
Taking responsibility for yourself means you must also know your limitations. You may not always be able to achieve your means, and that’s okay. Every situation isn’t perfect, every time. Pick out the parts that you have control over in making them positive experiences and learn to let the rest go.
If you learn to believe in yourself by releasing your negative thinking, you are well on your way to achieving the self-confidence that can make you feel better about yourself, and making your life easier to live all around.
