Don’t let your insecurities take hold of you. Learn how to be self-confident. You can do it!

How to become confident. A very important part of our life is based on confidence, confidence in our abilities, in our work, and our relationships. This includes our business partners, personal relationships, and family. To be successful, it’s important to have confidence. People with high self-confidence are considered natural leaders with the ability to reach their objectives.

No one is completely confident in themselves, although some may seem the opposite. We all face uncertainty. This can be either because we would like to control the future or because we don’t value ourselves enough.

But if we learn to live with our own doubts and limitations, and we are aware that in life there are things beyond our control, we will gain confidence. This is because we will know how to deal with our fears.

It’s common to pretend that successful people never have doubts, that they are decisive, that they never regret, and that they always know what to do. That couldn’t be more false. The thing is, everyone, even the best leaders, doubts themselves. While they achieve their goals, they are almost always pursued by indecision.

Doubt is a very human response to all the challenges that life throws at you. However, it shouldn’t prevent you from overcoming obstacles and achieving your goals. Here are some valuable tips to overcome doubt and direct your energy towards something more productive.

How to become confident and gain self-confidence

What is self-confidence? If you ask a wide variety of people, you will come across so many different answers. Some of them may even surprise you.

• Some will say that not having doubts about what should be done, and knowing how to do it is being self-confident.
• Others will argue it’s about acting despite doubts and trusting the results.
• For some, it’s about being immune to criticism.
• For others, it consists of knowing how to listen to those same criticisms without falling into self-deprecation.

Perhaps this last option will allow you to better understand the dynamics of insecurities. This way you may even learn how to overcome it.

There is a direct relationship between valuation and insecurity, and it starts in our early individual history.

If we are valued for who we are, for being here, for simply existing. If this appreciation is conveyed to us through gestures, attitudes, and words. And if we are recognized for our achievements, that we are useful, we will soon understand that we’re important to others. All of this will give us confidence.

Unconditional love and appreciation, which are given to us because we exist, are basic pillars in the construction of self-confidence.

False ideas about self-confidence

When we know how to feel valuable for ourselves, we are likely to go out in search of models. An inner voice tells us that we can’t do it. We start thinking that we aren’t worth much and that our resources are scarce or weak. A person without confidence believes and tells themselves:

“Being as I am, I will achieve nothing, so I must be like so-and-so since they feel confident in themselves”

We assign to these models all the conditions that, as we imagine, make up a confident person. That is, we put in them everything that we don’t see in us.

Thus, we will see them as persons who don’t hesitate, who feel strong, and who don’t admit doubts. As a result, they’re no longer humans, because humans are flawed and everyone has their own faults and fears.

We create an ideal of confidence that, like all ideals of the self-forged from our wants, becomes an unattainable goal and, by its presence alone, painful.

We must also highlight that to compensate for our sense of insecurity, we create a model of confidence far removed from true human emotion. This model then ends up being impossible and, in the end, gives us even more insecurity.

No one is free from doubt, fears, or uncertainty. Those who claim to not feel these human experiences are, in fact, the ones who feel them the most.

When you don’t admit the possibility of defeat, of error, of doubt, of not having control over something or someone, you aren’t self-confident. When you fear criticism, when you live under the overwhelming pressure of exigency, you often appeal to mechanisms of compensation created to hide all that.

Doubt leading to self-confidence

You can convince others that you’re a confident person, but you won’t ever convince yourself. You will live all your life with a great load of inner tension. As a result, you will spend all of it ensuring that you don’t look doubtful, uncertain, and fearful. Thus, you will become your worst enemy and create enormous present and future emotional costs.

To sustain that image you will have to close every door that leads to your interior. For this, you may even have to censor every question about yourself, your feelings, searches, and needs.

Denying insecurity doesn’t make you confident. All it does is turn you into someone void of emotions which in turn makes you even more vulnerable. In contrast, by accepting your doubts, fears, and uncertainties, you will be able to ask yourself what you need to face any situation. This leads you to explore what resources do you need and have inside you as well as their state.

How doubt helps you

Doubt tells you what you need to grow stronger. For example, what help you should ask and to whom, and how to do it equitably and functionally. Doubt helps you to transform and grow.

Those who build an image of unshakable confidence and present themselves in the world clinging to it are prisoners of that facade. Those who admit their shortcomings, their imperfection, are more whole and free.

When a person discovers and accepts their values and abilities, they cease to set up themselves by pursuing external models, so often illusory and false. They gain the freedom to be in their own way.

The more you know yourself in your possibilities and limitations, the more you value yourself with what you have and with what you don’t do. As a result, you are better able to assume your existence in the here and now.

Fear of the future

It is precisely in the here and now where your life really takes place. Insecurity, such as fear or anxiety, is related to what has not yet happened, and you don’t know if it will happen. It isn’t in what is happening at this moment but in what will come.

What if I’m wrong? How will they react if I don’t get it? What will become of me if I don’t? Review the main verbs of these sentences, and you will see that they are in the future tense. Insecurity displaces us from the present, takes away our axis of life.

The illusion of controlling the future leads us to believe that, if possible, we would live a completely safe life. And that’s where we get to the other great source of insecurity. The first, as we saw, is not having been sufficiently valued and accepted with our own idiosyncrasy.

The second is the non-acceptance of uncertainty as an essential component of life. Life is a succession of uncertainties. Insecurity is therefore inherent in it. Accepting it will make us live safer.

The pillars of confidence

When you know that not everything depends on you, you will recognize that there are factors beyond your decision. Then you will understand that your possibilities have limits. Thus, you will gain freedom and the ability to choose to grow.

By accepting everything that does not depend on you, you can focus on what does concern you, which are their resources and possibilities. When you accept that you can’t do everything, you will always do the best you can.

A confident person isn’t the one who knows everything, but the one who knows what things they ignore and applies what they know. Thus, we can list the pillars on which confidence is built.

• Sincerely explore the inner world to know one’s own resources and accept one’s own limitations.
• Accept who we are and value what we are, rather than aspire to be another, to be an ideal of illusion.
• To assume that, in life, many events are beyond our control. We can neither give assurances about them nor ask for them.
• Focus on those steps that depend on us and apply our available resources to them.
• Include doubt, uncertainty, perplexity, as possible companions of our actions and decisions. All this while knowing that they are part of human emotions and sensations, and without fighting with them.

Conclusion

So, as you can see, it’s not the absence of doubts, fears, and questions that will make a person self-confident. Rather, it’s their ability to act with them, and their satisfaction with the processes rather than with the results. What gives a person confidence is to have been true to their thoughts and feelings, and honest in the use of their resources.